How Do Foods Taste if you Can’t Smell Them?

By Joshua Thomas

All of us know that some foods taste better than others but what tricks our brains into thinking that some foods taste better than others? Try this simple experiment that shows that there's a lot more to taste than you might think.

Materials Needed:

• A potato
• An apple
• A partner

Do this

1.  Peel the apple and the potato and cut them into bite sized pieces that are equal
2. Put a potato and an apple piece onto a clean flat plate and close your eyes or blindfold yourself.
3. Hold your nose and ask your partner to hand you one of the pieces without telling you which one is being given to you.
4. Taste each piece while holding your nose. Can you tell the difference?

Here’s what happened:
Holding your nose while tasting the potato and apple makes it hard to tell the difference between the two. Your nose and mouth are connected through the same airway which means that you taste and smell foods at the same time. Your sense of taste can recognize salty, sweet, bitter and sour but when you combine this with your sense of smell, you can recognize many other individual “tastes”. Take away your smell (and sight) and you limit your brain’s capacity to tell the difference between certain foods.

Further experiments:
Find other foods that have similar textures and do your own testing to see how well this works with other foods.