It’s common knowledge that apples and potatoes taste the same with your nose plugged. Or is it just hokum? The importance of the sense of smell in informing our taste is a subject that fascinates biologists.
Most high school biology texts include an experiment designed to test just how important our sense of smell is in how we taste things. The experiment involves peeling and cutting up apples, potatoes, onions, and/or celery into bite sized pieces and then blind-folding people and having them taste the pieces at random with their nose plugged so they cannot smell.
And the fascinating result? Nobody can tell the difference between apples, potatoes, or onions when their nose is plugged! Isn’t that amazing?
It would be if it were true, but, if you experiment with at least ten people you will find that only a few have any trouble quickly telling an apple from a potato.
And the onion? They are going to be pissed at you for tricking them into munching on a piece of raw onion. The couple of people here and there, if you find any, who have trouble, well, you have to ask yourself the next obvious question: What if you tried it with them blindfolded but their nose unplugged? See, some people have very bad palates.
I tried this experiment without the onions. I left out the onions because I already knew that, despite what some people have claimed, the texture is not similar at all to apples and potatoes, and most people can pick out the texture difference between those as well.
The result was that ALL FIVE of my subjects, who were friends thinking I had become even weirder than usual, readily identified the apples and potatoes.
I know that five is not a large number of subjects, but in this case we only need one person to disprove the claim. On the other hand, you’d need many, many more to prove it if people routinely were unable to tell the difference. But that is not what happened.
Now these were not just any apples, mind you, they were honey-crisp apples, which may just be the best tasting apples for eating that ever existed. I guess I could have gone with a bland-tasting apple. But, that is called stacking the deck.
Apples have much more taste than raw potatoes. This experiment is often done in grade school science class on children, whose sense of taste is less developed. As adults, we are harder to fool.
Does Your Sense of Smell Control 90% Of Your Sense of Taste?
Of course, the sense of smell does influence the sense of taste. But when you read things like “Your sense of smell controls 90% of your sense of taste,” this is pure fabrication. You may also read that “aroma comprises 75% of your perception of flavor.” Don’t buy it.
No matter what source you check, you’ll get a different number. That is because the numbers are made up by scientists wanting to sound “proofy.”
Whether they are deluding themselves while deceiving us is sometimes hard to tell. Those who want to convince us that the sense of smell is more important than taste must have never smelled Limburger cheese.
To me, as to others, the smell of this soft, white cheese is reminiscent of stinky feet: it is pungent and revolting! Yet, if you taste it, you might find that the flavor is better than the smell.
So, either some people think that stinky unwashed feet have a good flavor, or, there is a bit more going on and smell isn’t such an overriding arbiter of our sense of taste. Or is it flavor? I’ll get to that. When it comes to perceiving apples from potatoes with my nose plugged and my eyes blinded, I have no problem. An apple is an apple and a potato is a potato.
But the apple indeed tastes more bland without smell. And the more bites I take with my nose plugged, the blander it becomes. Likewise, I’ve plugged my nose while eating spicy Thai food, and it tasted quite bland in comparison to the taste with my nose open. But I’m not going to mistake it for Italian.
Usually, the importance of smell is completely exaggerated and there is no way to put such a precise number on anything having to do with taste. So, any figures about how much of this or that controls your taste are usually completely made up.
Even statements such as “the majority” of what you taste is controlled by smell, have no basis in fact because we simply do not understand well enough how the brain processes flavor.
Moreover, ALL the senses are involved in our perception of food. For instance, if a potato chip sounds crispy when you eat it, you may very well think it tastes better than a chip that sounds less crispy. And, in fact, a chip that falls short on the crunch factor, as far as the noise it makes, may be perceived as tasting stale, even if it is actually quite fresh.
Notice that I said flavor and not taste. There is the detection of flavors and there is “taste” and these are not necessarily the same thing. Taste and flavor are very individual and subjective experiences. It is impossible to assign such precise statistics to something derived through subjective experience.
Imagine how studies to determine the importance of the sense of smell would have to be carried out. Experimental subjects would have to “rate” the taste or flavor of something in some way.
How salty is the food on a scale of one to ten? How much more bland is the food on a scale of one to ten? Just looking at salt, you can imagine that the ratings of the subjects would be quite variable, as different people are more or less sensitive to salt.
And look at what we mean when we say salty. Plain salt, right out of the shaker, is salty. That is because it is highly concentrated when we taste it that way.
But a food that has just the right amount of salt (for us) will not be deemed to taste salty but to taste good. Only when too much salt is added do we declare it salty.
And how much salt is too much varies among individuals. As you get older, you may tend to want more salt. With that, let’s go into the sense of taste a bit and learn the difference between taste and flavor.
