The Five Basic Tastes

On the tongue reside the sensitive sensory receptor cells that tell us what the taste of our food is (sweet, sour, salty, bitter or umami). As simple as this sounds, in practice it is not. While there are five basic tastes, their receptors are very different, and for bitter, as many as twenty-five different ones are known. Also, different tastes can interact with each other but mixing tastes is very different from mixing colours.