Terry wrote on Fri, 12 Feb 2010 13:28:14 -0600:

>> In article >,
>> Doug Freyburger > wrote:
>>
>>> Sweet is also both a taste and an
>>> item.
>>
>> Not quite. Table salt is NaCl. Sweet has quite a range
>> from strawberries to ice cream to table sugar and more. You
>> couldn't put together a tube of sweet any more than you could
>> put together a tube of sour.

> Some time ago a flavor chemist spoke at one of our monthly
> chemistry meetings. According to her, sweet/sour/salt/bitter
> are tastes---what the tastebuds respond to---while everything
> else is a flavor. The nose is the organ that distinguishes
> flavors.

> Close your eyes, pinch your nose shut with the fingers, have
> someone pop a jellybean in your mouth. Try to determine the
> flavor. It's awfully hard (dunno if I'd say 'impossible' but
> we all tried it and no one in the room could tell the flavor
> of their jellybean).

> I don't know where she stood on umami...

If it was some time ago, your chemist might not have accepted, as most
do these days, that umami is a *sense*. There is evidence accumulating
for a sixth *taste*, that of fat.

--

James Silverton
Potomac, Maryland

Email, with obvious alterations: not.jim.silverton.at.verizon.not