If there's only 4 tastes why do all the foods taste different?

>>8813688

they don't really

>>8813688
There are no 4 "fundamental" tastes that can be used to synthesize all other tastes. Even including umami, there are still other sensations that you can't synthesize such as metallicness or astringency. Also, other senses like vision, scent, and temperature play in role in how your brain tells you how food tastes

You also cannot synthesize all colors with 3 fundamental colors.

>>8813688
>Forgetting Umami as the fifth taste

you smell the food too, brainlet.

Also texture and state of mind.
Even if there is only two different tasteable qualities, the combinations of possible magnitudes of these yields plenty different tastes.
Miscibility affects the release rate of aromatic substances. Giving way for more variation.

Because different quantities/ratios of flavour in different food

>>8813715
>umami
Thought that was some made up thing from that cooking anime

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If there's only 3 cone cell types why do all the colors look different?

In the field of complex numbers, you have 1, -1, i and -i, and infinitely many combinations of these.

>>8813707
>Also, other senses like vision, scent, and temperature play in role in how your brain tells you how food tastes
>scent
This. If you've ever had a sinusitis with some spare inflammation and fever, it completely wrecks your sense of taste. It literally does not matter what you eat, everything tastes the same.

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>>8814259
no, there is only i^n

>>8813688
Chem trails/

>>8814259
>using collinear vectors in a basis
shiggly diggly

>>8814096
>Thought
...that is where you went wrong.

>>8814096
Wrong, it's a taste associated with meat products. The receptors are sensitive to glutamate because meat contains a lot of proteins containing a lot of glutamate.

It's used particularly often in Asian cuisine.

>>8813707
Correct, although iirc although there are 5 basic flavor types there are more than 5 receptors (multiple isoforms/multiple proteins that bind to different substrates).

A quick wikipedia search told me we have 43 different TAS2R genes which encode bitter receptors.

There's also the matter of combined tastes (tasting multiple things at once, which happens with pretty much anything you eat) which adds complexity.

>>8813688
Taste receptors heterodimerize and certain things will not be able to stimulate these heterodimers and vice versa.

Olfaction also plays a role in taste.

/middleschooler/

>>8813688
There are 5 basic tastes and there are lots of other things that add to flavour but aren't really "taste" in of themselves. All different factors have different levels and combine into one another to create distinct flavour.

I actually incorporated all of these things into a language I'm building, so you can indicate taste very specifically or even broadly, if you want.

Basic:
Salty, sour, sweet, bitter and savoury (potentially better term is "unami" but incorporating unnecessary foreign words into another language is retaded).

Sensations:
Spiciness, coolness (think minty), numbness, astringency (dry and tart; think red wine or tea), metallicness (ever tasted blood?), calcium (chalky taste/sensation), fattiness, heartiness (also called 'mouthfulness'), temperature and starchiness.

There are probably a lot more "sensations", that we've yet to research in-depth. There are other factors like aftertaste too.

Smell also plays a big part in flavour, as well.

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>>8813688
>wew mane, there are only 3 colors, how do we get all the hues and shiet

>>8813688
most "tastes" are actually "smells", specific fruits get taste from dozens of esters, alcohols and similar volatile compounds
you can't mix 5 tastes to make taste of menthol, for example

smell has like 1000+ kinds of various specific compound detecting cells and these are connected directly to back side of the mouth

taste buds themselves are sets of very rudimentary chemical detectors
>sour = pH under 7
>low molecular sugars (I guess specific OH- or O= group on a small cyclic molecule) = sweet
>amino acids (glutamic in particular) = umami
>special groups (common on phytotoxins) = bitter
>Cl- ions=salty (other ions work too, but not quite as much)