Sensory Properties of Food

 Sensory properties affect how people perceive food.  Includes: color, appearance, flavor, and texture

Color  Lighting affects food  Physical structure  When onions are cooked, air escapes from the pockets and the plant cells burst. This causes the pockets to fill with liquid. Light reflects off liquids different than it does air.  Enzymatic browning-apples, bananas, potatoes, etc.

Texture  Texture of food is called “mouth feel”  Chewy, rubbery, slimy, sticky, tough, crumbly, etc.

Flavor  Basic tastes:  Sweet  Salty  Sour  Bitter

 When you eat something, the saliva in your mouth helps break down your food. This causes the receptor cells located in your tastes buds to send messages through sensory nerves to your brain. Your brain then tells you what flavors you are tasting.

 Everyone's tastes are different. In fact, your tastes will change as you get older.  When you were a baby, you had taste buds, not only on your tongue, but on the sides and roof of your mouth.  As you get older, your taste buds will become even less sensitive  More likely to eat foods that you thought were too strong as a child.

DID YOU KNOW???  We have almost 10,000 taste buds inside our mouths  Insects have the most highly developed sense of taste. They have taste organs on their feet, antennae, and mouthparts.  Fish can taste with their fins and tail as well as their mouth.  In general, girls have more taste buds than boys.  Taste is the weakest of the five senses.