Olfaction Fashion: Fancy Perfumes (or Colognes if you're into that sort of thing)
1) I'd say for the most part that map (see below) is correct. I'm not sure about bitter being in the back of my tongue, but it's kind of a tricky taste to locate. Sometimes I would mix up sour and salter, but sweet is right on the tip.
2) Plugging my nose while eating is actually kind of frustrating. Immediately I want to unplug it, but when I don't and I eat food it tastes much more dull. Sometimes, if the food isn't very strong tasting, like with some of the oats I ate, I can hardly taste anything. I can only feel the mushy substance in my mouth. But I could still taste the apple I ate. The texture is very recognizable as an apple's, and this may have thrown me off, but I'm pretty sure I could still taste it.
3) The five tastes commonly accepted are bitter, sour, salty, sweet, and savory Umami. Mmmm, Umami. Some of the more questionable tastes on our tongue are calcium and fatty. Mmmm, fatty.
The innate "wisdom of the body" is an interesting concept which means to convey that naturally the body tells the brain which foods to eat. For example, when I was a little tike I only wanted candy and ketchup and sugar water and all that junk. So your body goes after the sugars. Bitter things, which are potentially poisonous, are signified to the brain as no good, so naturally you don't eat this. Pretty clever, Mr. Tongue.
The reason some people can triumph over their inherent dislike for bitter broccoli could be for some reasons. One is that your environment can affect it. Perhaps your mother always fed you broccoli from a young age, and you could just chow down on that stuff. But then again, some people have never liked it and never will, like George H. W. Bush. Then there's the explanation of genetics. They got some mice to like sweet stuff less, which is pretty convincing. Always those experiments with mice.
4) Vision and Olfaction are pretty similar in that they both have specific receptors for certain types of light. Vision has three types of cones, and light that we see is a combination of those three. There are a lot of different smell receptors, but still there is probably some sort of smell spectrum out there. Different combos make different smells, like that smell of packaging foam when you put your nose right up to it and take a big whiff. That's the stuff.
5) Here's how smelling works: Odors are flying everywhere through the air. Then, the manage to fly up your nose. These odors are like tiny robots flying around on jet packs. They know what they must do. They are programmed to press certain buttons, and each one knows just the right sequence. The buttons are connected to a huge computer translator machine. So they soar up and an insane amount of them press these buttons. These buttons are like the alphabet of our smell. Or more accurately, our smellphabet. So after these have been pressed, that supercomputer I mentioned (our brain) can figure out the rest. And it says "Oh, you mean parmesan cheese? Yes of course, that distinct scent. Good choice."
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| Exactly how it works. |
The Green Beans
So I had hypothesized that using salt kept the beans greener and improved the flavor. I was not sure as to what other reasons could have existed. It's a natural preservative, so that could play into it, but the experiment would probably take days. Here's what I found out:
We cooked beans with salted water and unsalted water, and our experiment says that you can't taste the difference. I personally tasted samples, and when they told me the results I had gotten 50% correct (or if you're a pessimist, 50% incorrect). The same results came with my partner who also tested the beans. We tried four times, and only twice got it right. This is slightly better than guessing, because guessing would have been 33.3% correct, but given our innacuracy I'd say you can't tell the difference. To keep it a fair test we cooked both beans with the same amounts of water and in the same sizes and quantities with no lid. We let them cook for the same time. Perhaps the length cooked would affect the results, but we didn't isolate that variable in our experiment.
For the second test we used two different types of salt: "regular" (Morton) and sea salt. The results were obvious for the testers. The sea salt was much salteier to both testers. It was so salty that it even caused their faces to cringe a little. The colors were about the same, but the flavors were certainly different.
The next test was to see if beans cooked with the lid on turned yellower. As we discovered, the testers could only pick out 50% of the lidded beans. So really they were only guessing. The beans did look the same, and we can conclude that lids don't affect the color of the beans.
The penultimate test was to compare the effect of salt vs. salt + baking soda vs. salt + vinegar. The results were clear, as this photo illustrates.
Starting at the top-left and going clockwise: Just salt; Salt and Vinegar; Salt and Baking Soda
So that's how that whole deal works. Just salt turns out ordinary, vinegar and salt gives you brownies, and salt and baking soda gives you these bright green vegetables with murky green water.
The last test was to see the how much walt increased the boiling point of water. As it turns out, not much. Here are the results:
0g - 102 C
1.5g - 102.5 C
3g - 103 C
4.5g - 103.5 C
6.0g - 104 C
Not a very big difference in the grand scheme of things. And there you have it.
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