I was searching for the distinction between “savory” and “umami” and apparently savory encompasses a variety of tastes. I agree that it does but wouldn’t those be tastes that exist in addition to umami and the other four tastes?
Also I know the nose can recognize many more different chemicals and that it plays a role in taste perception, but I’m pretty sure there’s more than five types of taste when I eat even without a sense of smell. This is IMO the kind of question that should be obvious but isn’t answered.
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Taste is 80-90% smell. As you said you can smell a lot more than the 5 flavors your can taste with your mouth. This is why a stuffy nose can cause issues with taste. If you can’t smell, you really can’t taste.
It’s the combinations.
Take colors for example. With 3 base colors (red, green and blue) on a screen you can make 16,777,216 different colors.
The sense of smell is more closely tied in with taste than you realise. There is some evidence for taste buds for other flavours beyond the five recognised, well, for fat at least. But a drastic increase to explain the subtle flavours we can taste without involving the nose seems unlikely.
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Tastes aren’t binary – something isn’t just salty or not salty – there is an array of intensity to each taste from a little salty, to mildly, or extremely and everything in-between. This gives you near infinite combination of different tastes and their intensities when matched together.
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When you chew and swallow food, volatile molecules enter your nose from the back, via your throat. This means you end up smelling your food as you eat it, and interestingly some smells are interpreted differently depending on whether they are detected *retronasally*, i.e. entering the nose from the back, or *orthonasally*, i.e. through the front (*retro* literally means “backward” – *ortho* does not mean anything to do with front or forward, but rather something like “correct” or “normal”, as in the way we normally associate with smell).
This retronasal smell contributes a lot to your perception of flavor, and explains why the diversity of flavors we can perceive is so great.
The 5 tastes aren’t really the flavors you taste, they are more like senses that cause the body to have different reactions. Flavors primarily come from the sense of smell. However, your brain will interpret flavors differently depending on which tastes are sensed. And the many flavors are due to the few thousand flavor compounds and their varying proportions in the food.
I highly recommend the book Flavor: The Science of Our Most Neglected Sense
[https://www.nasw.org/member_article/bob-holmes-flavor](https://www.nasw.org/member_article/bob-holmes-flavor)
It’s a fascinating book about how flavor works (as others have said, smell, particularly vomeronasal — back of the throat — is a big part of it), including the nutrition (umami gets us important nitrogen-bearing compounds, salt gets us sodium), and evolution of senses (cats can’t taste sweet). It’s not just kids who love ulltra-sour things, chimpanzees adore lemons.
Just to give an example of what I mean: I could hold my nose and while closing my eyes I could tell the difference between cantaloupe and melon, but the difference wouldn’t alone be in terms of one being more bitter or sweet or salty than the other (or multiple of any of those things–I could add more sugar or salt or whatever and it would fundamentally still taste like a melon).
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