Everyone knows about the primary tastes of salty, sweet, sour, and bitter, and, since 2009, umami (savoury), but there is growing evidence for a 6th addition to this list; starch.
Oregon State University scientist, Professor Juyun Lim, argues that all cultures rely on some complex carbohydrate, and so surely people must be able to taste them. The love of many for ‘comfort foods’ which are high in starch, such as pastry, pasta, chips and crisps also indicates that there must be a reason for our carbohydrate cravings.
Lim believes she has presented the first evidence which suggests that people can taste starch as its own flavour. She gave various carbohydrate solutions to volunteers, and discovered that they identified starchy tastes in the solutions which contained long or short chains of carbohydrate molecules.
She said, “Asians would say it was rice-like, while Caucasians described it as bread-like or pasta-like. It’s like eating flour.”
Previously, scientists have argued that carbohydrase enzymes in saliva break down the molecules into sugar, and this is what we taste. However, even when volunteers were given a compound to block this enzyme and the ‘sweet’ receptors on the tongue, they were still able to taste the starch.
However, Lim has yet to find starch receptors on the tongue, and it will require a lot more evidence before the scientific community universally acknowledges this particular taste.
The evidence for ‘starchy’ as a primary taste suggests that human taste is more complex than previously thought, and other preliminary evidence has suggested that people can taste fatty acids, and also ‘kokuni’, which lends another layer of richness to foods.
