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Tastes for all tastes!

Sweet, salty, acid, bitter, and "umami"

The information conveyed by taste is inseparable from emotion and therefore from pleasure. Even a very small baby shows whether or not he likes the tastes offered to him: just look at the way he grimaces or smiles with satisfaction!
Throughout life, from infancy onwards, everyone develops his own criteria, his tastes and the things he dislikes. You (and your children) must learn to respect the differences between other people’s tastes and your own.

Did you know that?
Foods send messages that concern all of our senses and that these messages begin well before we open our mouth.
- By looking at the food, we receive information concerning its form, its appearance, its colour, etc.
- Our nose also facilitates discovery or recognition. Smells speak to us, sometimes even before we have seen anything. Our sense of smell gives us an idea of the taste. Moreover, it isn’t the tongue that transmits what are known as “aromas”, it’s the nose, via the retro-nasal tracts. When a cold blocks your nose, you say you can’t taste your food. In fact, it’s the food’s aroma that you’re not picking up any more. The perceptions of taste (via the tongue) and aroma (via the nose) collectively constitute the flavour of foods.
- By feeling foods, even via a fork, you perceive their texture and their consistency.
- Your hearing enables you to imagine a festival of sounds associated with the tastes; think of the dish that is simmering, the cork that pops, the chips that are spluttering, the crustiness of biscuits, bubbles fizzing, etc. During the meal, around the table: voices, sounds and music are also an integral part of the emotion produced by the taste of foods.

The perception of tastes
Taste sends us the 4 basic flavours: sweet, salty, acid, bitter. These 4 basic flavours are supplemented by the “umami” taste, which is rare in this part of the world but very common in Asia, where glutamate (which conveys this taste) is widely used in cooking.

Taste - Instructions for use:
For further information... This classification simplifies things. In fact, all the flavours together form a sort of rainbow and one gradually passes from one to the other, from nuance to nuance.
The perception of the 5 basic flavours is accompanied by many other stimulations. Some of them, of a chemical nature, often have an adverse effect on children: piquant (raw onion, radishes, pepper), hot (alcohol, chili), astringent (green apple, raw artichoke, quinces), metallic (from oxidised foods), etc.
Actually, taste cannot be taught, since it is first of all a personal freedom and depends on experience, culture (some cultures mix the flavours, in the Asian countries in particular, with sweet-salty dishes for example). Sometimes, there is even strong social symbolism that goes well beyond the positive or negative emotion conveyed by a type of food (in some countries, for example, one bites into a chili upon reaching adulthood).

But it’s possible to help children sharpen their perceptions and enrich and clarify their vocabulary, thus enabling them to take advantage of everything that’s good and become aware of the diversity of foodstuffs.

Recreational games:
Taste, or all collectively taste, food of varying tastes and give a description of what you feel.
Seek out together foods that correspond to particular tastes.
Here are a few ideas:
For further information...
A varied diet is necessarily balanced. By facilitating your child’s access to as wide a range of flavours as possible, you easily succeed in making him “omnivorous” not through obligation (because he must), but through pleasure (because it’s good). Nutritional balance is therefore linked to the “pleasure and fondness” dimension of food. Moreover, it has been proved that food consumed with joy is better assimilated by the organism.

Audrey Aveaux pour « magicmaman.com »

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