Importance Of Taste In Food

Our vision plays an important role in determining what we eat, after all we see our food before we taste it, and we determine what we want to eat by what looks good which varies based on what we are looking at. For instance, some chefs define a delicious looking steak as “The sides should be well browned, the top and bottom caramelized to a dark brown color with good grill marks” and we perceive a ripe and juicy apple as having a strong and consistent redness to it; But would we still perceive that steak being good if it was grey with a green inside? Would the apple still taste as juicy if it was blue instead of red? What would green eggs and ham actually taste like? In other words, how much does the color of our food affect how we perceive what it tastes like? And does color play a just as or more important role in determining the taste of something? The answer to that question is yes. Our vision plays an equally important role in determining the taste of food than our sense of smell or taste and does so by not only using the color of the food to determine its taste but also the color of the foods surroundings.

In order to determine the role of vision in taste it’s important to understand how taste works, or at least how most people believe it works. For a long time, it was commonly thought that taste was determined largely by our sense of taste and by our sense of smell. When we eat something, we break it down by chewing it and mixing it with our saliva. Mixing food with