Can You Taste It?
How important is smell to food recognition?Copyright U.S. National Park Service
Few people are aware of how crucial the sense of smell is to identifying foods, or the adaptive value of being able to identify a food as being familiar and therefore safe to eat. In this lesson and associated activity, students conduct an experiment to determine whether or not the sense of smell is important to being able to recognize foods by taste. In an opening discussion, students explore why it might be adaptive for humans and other animals to be able to identify nutritious versus noxious foods. This is followed by a demonstration in which a volunteer tastes and identifies a familiar food, and then attempts to taste and identify a different familiar food while holding his or her nose and closing his or her eyes. Then, the class develops a hypothesis and a means to obtain quantitative results for an experiment to determine whether students can identify foods when the sense of smell has been eliminated.
Food engineers use information about how people sense taste to develop artificial flavors that taste more like the real flavors they are designed to mimic. You might call some chemical engineers flavor engineers!
After this lesson, students should be able to explain why it is adaptive for an animal to be able to use its senses to identify foods as being either nutritious or noxious.