What makes great food so enjoyable?

What makes food taste good? Speaking with Chris Smith was Charles Spence, experimental psychologist (there’s a clue) from the University of Oxford…

Charles - So the exact number of basic tastes that we can pick up in the tongue and in the oral cavity isn't quite known, but there are four or five at least that everyone agrees on, and those would be sweet, sour, salty, bitter and the proteinaceous taste of umami is a mysterious fifth taste from the East. And those are designed to enable us to decide which foods are safe to eat, that it may be nutritious, and which ones to avoid because they may be poisonous. And we're all born liking sweet tasting foods because of the calories they may contain. All newborns of humans, rats and chimpanzees are born sticking their tongue out and down, trying to eject anything that tastes bitter because that's a fairly good sign - of course not perfect - that what we've put in our mouth might be poisonous. Salt, we like more or less depending on our need state, to get the minerals, and then sourness and acidity people aren't quite sure what that's doing.

Chris - So if I wanted to design a food or cook something, which is going to really tantalise my taste buds and attract me for all the right reasons, what sorts of flavours or tastes should I go for? How should I try to make that food appealing so I want to eat it?

Charles - So while in a way our taste buds are at the ultimate arbiter of what is safe or perhaps not safe to eat, I think most of what we think of as taste or as the flavour of food really comes from our nose, from the orthonasal sniffing - when we sniff, like the Bisto kids, the aromas of foods out there cooking on the stove or in the store or elsewhere. And then the retronasal sense of smell, whenever we chew and swallow food or drink, it's going to pulse a volatile, rich scent pushed out of the back of the nose. And that is really where most of the pleasure of food comes from. That's where things like the nutty, the meaty, the floral, the herbal, the fruity, all those things that we might enjoy and savour in food are really being delivered by the nose, not by the tongue or the mouth. They only give a sweet, bitter, salty, sour, umami sense. So I'd be really trying to think of a food that has a really appealing aroma.

Chris - What about the visual as well?

Charles - I think that's absolutely key too. We've long said that we eat first with our eyes and all of the research shows that our brains very rapidly will process a scene, figure out if there's anything worth eating out there. And in particular, if it's highly energy dense, our brains will attempt to follow, keep track of that in case we can eat it a little bit later.