The Serious Eats blog may not cater directly to restaurateurs, but they often highlight interesting information for the foodies in all of us, and it’s especially useful to know if you are a business person courting said foodies.

So it was through a recent Serious Eats blog post that I found a fascinating “Gourmet” article; it turns out that the “basic tastes” I was taught in school (you know, salty, sweet, bitter, sour) are about as real as the tooth fairy.  One scientist even went so far as to call these age-old ideas “hokum.”  (Whoa.)

The article goes on to discuss the “science of taste” and all of its manifestations: 

“Taste is like a chair with four legs,” explains Acree [a flavor chemist at Cornell University]. “Before, we only had one leg—flavor chemistry. Now we’re building the other three: how a chemical reacts with the receptor; how that receptor communicates with the brain; and how the brain processes that information into behavior.”

You might be familiar with the idea of flavor chemistry from shows like Top Chef or from world-famous chefs like Spain’s Ferran Adrià of El Bulli--who has done a bang-up job of mastering that first “leg” of taste.  But now that science is showing that there’s a lot more to it, I’m curious to see how practical the new knowledge will be in the creation of delicious food.