(This is an essay from our April 2013 print quarterly 'Farms, Feasts, Famines'. See more from the issue here.)
"Did you know," I asked my ten-year-old son the other day, "that cats can't taste sweetness?" Acquiring and sharing random bits of scientific trivia is one of the occupational hazards of working for a 'general knowledge' magazine. "Cats," I went on, keen to display my newfound insights on the feline tongue, "have no sweet receptors". This was met with a thoughtful silence, after which my son asked, "Then what do they taste if they eat a jalebi?" This excellent question quickly led to an existential discussion. If you can't taste sweet, then sweetness simply does not exist, or does it? Do our senses act as translators, receiving information about the external world and putting it into a language that we can understand? Or is the external world created by the receptors we are equipped with? If it is the latter, what about all the tastes for which we don't have the right taste buds?
Etymologically, the root of 'taste' goes back to the word tasten from Middle English, which means to examine by touch, to test or to sample. You can see or hear something from a distance, smell it when you are closer, and touch it with your skin. But in order to taste something, you have to bite it, lick it, chew it – basically invite it into your body. According to the author, naturalist and free-ranging polymath Diane Ackerman, taste is our most intimate sense.