Things To Be Thankful For: The Sense Of Taste

Tuesday 4 October 2011

The Sense Of Taste

Taste (also called smatch or gustation; adjectival form: gustatory) is one of the traditional five senses. It refers to the ability to detect the flavor of substances such as food, certain minerals, and poisons, etc.

Humans receive tastes through sensory organs called taste buds,or gustatory calyculi, concentrated on the upper surface of the tongue.

The sensation of taste can be categorized into five basic tastes: sweetness, bitterness, sourness, saltiness, and umami. The recognition and awareness of umami is a relatively recent development in Western cuisine.MSG produces a strong umami taste.

As taste senses both harmful and beneficial things, all basic tastes are classified as either appetitive or aversive, depending upon the effect the things they sense have on our bodies.

The basic tastes contribute only partially to the sensation and flavor of food in the mouth — other factors include smell, detected by the olfactory epithelium of the nose; texture, detected through a variety of mechano receptors, muscle nerves, etc.; temperature, detected by thermoreceptors, and spiciness or piquance also called Chemesthesis.
(Wiki)
Again it is a gift we too often take for granted. How I love tasty food, be it savoury or sweet-especially as my wife is a great cook! How I would miss a creamy dessert or a fish dinner!
Think what it would be like not to be able to taste fish and chips, steak, eggs fried, boiled or scrambled, tomatoes, bananas, apples, oranges, grapes, pears, plumbs, multi grained bread, custard, vanilla ice cream with chocolate dip, cream donuts, chocolate eclairs, lemon and meringue pie, cheese cake, cheese on toast, mackerel, trout, salmon, toasted soda bread, vanilla milkshake, bounty bars,cheese,nutella etc,etc.

Thank God for the gift of taste!

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Gracias

In his book entitled “Gracias,” Henri Nouwen talks about his experience in Peru and Bolivia, he writes: "The title of this (book) summarizes what I found, learned, and heard. The word that I kept hearing, wherever I went, was: Gracias! It sounded like the refrain from a long ballad of events. Gracias a usted, gracias a Dios, muchas gracias––thank you, thanks be to God, many thanks! I saw thousands of poor and hungry children, I met many young men and women without money, a job, or a decent place to live. I spent long hours with sick, elderly people, and I witnessed more misery and pain than ever before in my life. But, in the midst of it all, that word lifted me again and again to a new realm of seeing and hearing: 'Gracias! Thanks!”

"In many of the families I visited nothing was certain, nothing predictable, nothing totally safe. Maybe there would be food tomorrow, maybe there would be work tomorrow, maybe there would be peace tomorrow. Maybe, maybe not. But whatever is given––money, food, work, a handshake, a smile, a good word, or an embrace––is a reason to rejoice and say gracias. What I claim as a right, my friends in Bolivia and Peru received as a gift; what is obvious to me was a joyful surprise to them; what I take for granted, they celebrate in thanksgiving; what for me goes by unnoticed became for them a new occasion to say thanks.”

"And slowly I learned. I learned what I must have forgotten somewhere in my busy, well-planned, and very "useful" life. I learned that everything that is, is freely given by the God of love. All is grace. Light and water, shelter and food, work and free time, children, parents and grandparents, birth and death––it is all given to us. Why? So that we can say gracias, thanks: thanks to God, thanks to each other, thanks to all and everyone.”