How many different tastes do you think are there? There are so many different kinds of food that it seems obvious that there are many, many tastes. Take fruits: how different is the taste of cherries from that of apples, pears, peaches, grapes, melons, or strawberries? Or think about treats: are all cakes alike? Candies, gingerbread, cookies, toffee, biscuits, doughnuts, buns, chocolate bars: are they all just sweet? Do they taste only like sugar? Surely not.
Judging from personal experience, you probably think that there are many tastes, perhaps as many as there are different foods. But surprisingly, scientists have found that there are only five tastes: sweet, bitter, sour, salty, and umami (meaty or brothy). The complicated tastes of the foods we eat are due in part to the fact that we cannot easily separate smell from taste and, in addition to five tastes, there are hundreds of different odors perceived by the brain. The brain can interpret the combination of smell and taste signals as lots of different kinds of tastes.

License information: nan
MPAA: G
Go to source: https://kids.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/frym.2017.00044