Flavors - What You Taste Isn't What You See

My friends and I went to have a drink one day, and I picked up the taste that was more than what met the eye. Actually, everyone of us have had to taste something that meets the tonue but not the eye. Whe I had the drink and it moves across my papillae, I was forced to ask if the drink had certain ingredients. This is because when you taste something, special receptors in the tastebud (Papillae) binds with the componds of the food or drink. When I had the drink, it tasted like pumpkin and also had the smell that travelled through my nose where more receptors gave me that pumpkin interpretation.

When I asked the mixologist (a person wh mixes drinks) if there was pumpkin in the drink, she categorically said no. So this meant that the Cinammon, clove, and nutmeg spice flavor I was tasting weren't actually there but this meant that the brain thought I was having these things and this is as a result of flavoring and in this case, synthetic flavoring.

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When we consume foods and drinks, a lot of them contain flavors which are either natural flavor or synthetic. If you want to be sure of what type of flavor you are consuming, you can check the pack of whatever edible you are consuming, you should be able to find it there (this is if the law in your country mandates manufacturers to do so). With flavorists, we are able to give flavor to anything we want, giving them whatever taste we want, and at a cheap rate compared to using the main deal.

Flavors have to do with chemicals either natural or artificial. When you hear the word chemical, do not always let your brain go toward H2SO4 because asides from the harmful acid that you know and use to classify all chemicals as bad, there are chemicals found everywhere in food, from the fruits we eat, to the junks we consume at eateries, in fact evevything in the universe is made of chemicals.

Pxhere

Natural flavor can come from substances like tree barks, yeast, meat and so on mainly living things but not all living things fall under natural flavor because bacteria do not fall under this. After explaining natural flavor, you tcan now understand that artificial flavors are flavors that aren't from living things and do not fall under natural flavor.

Artificial compounds can have natural flavor tastes and smell, like Isoamyl Acetate which can be recognized as banana flavor, Vanillin which gives the vanilla flavor in icecream and if you wanted to taste the natural one, that can be gotten from vanilla bean. If you want to get vanillin from the natural substance itself, it means you would be spending a ton of money and this is why it only makes up about 0.2% of the total vanilla flavor used. If we wanted our food to have the grape taste, we will add Methyl Anthranilate, if we want to have the Umami taste in food, we add Monosodium Glutamate Crystals (MSG).

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While some compounds are simple, other flavor compounds are complex such as the taste of Pizza. In other for this not to be a problem, flavorist have the flavor packs which has a combination of compounds, and it is this flavor packs that some companies use to give their own taste to food. Some people complain about having sensitivity to certain artificial flavors like Monosodium Glutamate Crystals (MSG) and scientists have been researching this as well as other flavor.

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Reference

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https://www.clinicalcorrelations.org/2014/04/30
https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/how-taste-perceived-brain
https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2014/11/19/365213805
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6677894/
https://health.howstuffworks.com/mental-health/human-nature/perception/taste.htm
https://www.acs.org/education/chemmatters/past-issues
https://www.thetimesherald.com/story/life/2014/10/04
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture
https://science.howstuffworks.com/question391.htm