Guest Speaker Arianna Maffei

“How Taste Preferences Come About”

• Detecting tastes, Papillae, taste buds and TRC (Circumvallate, Foliate, Fungiform)
• Taste buds contain taste receptor cells, each of which expresses a specific taste receptor, and they send taste messages to our brains
• Really interesting to learn that receptor cells are in our cheeks, gums, jaw, roofs of the mouth, throats and stomachs, so we can actually “taste” all the way down!! 
• Our mouths can detect more than classic tastes like sugar and salt. For example, we can taste carbonation, spiciness, and textures. 
• We Identity taste through the gustatory thalamus, and then it organizes our emotion and feelings about that taste through the gustatory cortex

I relate to what Arianna Maffei says about how the taste of food is enhanced when being happy, surrounded by friends/ family, on a sunny day. And sometimes, even when we eat our favorite foods, a bad mood, a rough day, or being lonely can make the familiar food taste so “bland” to us. I find some connections in the studies we have done lately about memory to the significance of taste. After all, it is one of our main senses as humans. I do think our experience with food can decipher how much we enjoy it. It’s not necessarily our taste buds rejecting the taste, but more so our memory that connects the taste to what we know and want. If a certain food is associated in our minds to a specific bad memory, it may not be the taste of it we don’t enjoy but what that food brings us back to in our minds that we stay away from. Same thing with foods that are associated with happy memories, we go back to the foods that we once enjoyed with family, friends, or in a favorite place.