What causes things to taste? What is in some foods that aren’t I others that make them taste different?
In: Chemistry
Essentially it’s just the function of the tongue, the tongue has receptors on it that only react to certain configurations of molecules. As everything is made of molecules in different configurations it’s going to trip different receptors. As our food sourcees aren’t all uniform matter, they will be made up of various combinations of matter triggering the different sets of taste receptors.
But then you can ask, “well, why do we have different taste receptors?” Science doesn’t really know why that evolved, they only know how that the ability to taste differences in food lets us detect the content of our food, poison tends to be bitter, evolutionary biologists think this taste sense was advantageous to our survival. Also lets us know what foods are nourishing, the foods that taste best to humans tend to be the most energy dense (not necessarily healthy by our new diet standards).
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