Gustation

The sense of gustation, taste, gives a means of avoiding potentially noxious food-stuffs or selecting for foods that have high energy content. Five tastes are well defined— sour, salty, bitter, sweet, and umami (due to the monosodium glutamate)—on the basis which no cross adaptation takes place among them. Plant alkaloids, a few of which are toxic in high concentrations, are tremendously bitter. A sour taste might signify a food degraded by microbiological action. By the contrast a sweet food has a high content of sugars and therefore a readily available supply of metabolic energy. The sensory experience generated by containing food in the mouth is termed as flavor perception, and relies on numerous sensory modalities. Separately from smell and taste, information about food texture is given by mechanoreceptors and proprioceptors in the mouth and jaw innervated by trigeminal afferents. Flavor perception is significant in triggering or altering autonomic responses to feeding, for illustration, gastric secretion, salivation, and modifications to gastrointestinal motility.