Just for Fun: Emotional Tastes
Up until recently I was well enough acquainted with the five areas of taste on the tongue. Through rumbles of questionable resources and, more reasonably, an episode about taste on the podcast “Unexplanable” I now know that well, there may be more than five, there may be none, there may be countless. The notion has allowed me to combine three loves: 1. the senses, 2. vaguely evolving information, and 3. human emotions.
So we come to this brief, low stakes post on lining up the previously established taste bud sections with the base emotions.
Sweet = Happy: this one is a little cheap. It’s nice, it’s pleasant, of course it’s happy. The tricky bit is that some people don’t prefer sweet things and, more important, some people can go overboard with the sweet and make themselves sick. Instead of retracting from the connection, it reinforces — being happy all of the time may be the direction we’re pushed by self-help books and goody specials, but it’s not truly healthy and, by my personal stance, pretty dull.
Sour = Sad: imagine that time someone dared you to eat a fistful of Warheads, or maybe a hunk of lemon. Or maybe you supped a heavy dose by accident. Either way, think of that facial expression, how your lips and general system seems to fold in on itself. There’s your sadness, your inward collapse based on an internalized external factor. Again, termed by some to be avoided but there can be a healthy preference or at least a need to feel it from time to time to balance out the rest. At least until your tongue chafes to the point of nothing having any type of will to taste.
Spicy = Fear: another time that you can imagine the facial expression, the increased heart rate, the burning you take on when you’ve experienced some heavy duty spice. Some people have a higher tolerance than others (think the fun fair choices of vertical drop or carousel) but there’s always a point that surpasses our ability to satisfactory functioning.
Bitter = Disgust: the emotion that keeps you from poisoning yourself for the sake of a sandwich. Ever bit into a piece of moldy bread and felt that strong communication of “you better spit that out, fool”. That’s an attempt at safety though, as with all of these others, maybe you crave it a bit and maybe a little can bolster your day. No shame in that.
And my natural favorite — Umami = Anger: the mystery item. It’s the taste that is, for most, hardest to define and was ignored for a long while as a genuine item. So here it can be paired with a thing to be avoided, a thing that is a problem because it is a disruption of how we are, supposedly, meant to be leading our lives. But it certainly can be delicious, it can enrich your life, it can spur you to something you never thought you needed.
Of course, now that I’ve written it down the concepts have gone from brief cheek to a desire to dig deeper into the sense of taste and its evolutionary roles, so my weekend is planned.
Thumbnail image courtesy of Switzerland’s Alimentarium: https://www.alimentarium.org/en/knowledge/senses-taste