We can represent colors as an additive combination of red, green, and blue intensities. Can we do the same with flavors using sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and umami?

Question

It seems like a useful way to represent flavors, but maybe there are reasons this approach isn’t valid. If that’s the case, I’d like to know why. With five tastes on some scale as parameters, you could cover an enormous range.

In: Chemistry

Answer 1

Colors are points on a spectrum. But flavors are produced by distinct chemicals. So whereas describing color is like marking a point on a ruler, describing a flavor is more like looking something up in a dictionary.
Talking about the amount of each flavor is still a good descriptive tool, but it is not precise in the same way color is. It is not quantifiable.