ART-724-Sensory science : Partners in flavour.
Our perception of food draws on a combination of taste, smell, feel, sight and sound. The way we experience food is not limited to the mouth — odour, vision, hearing and even touch can radically change the taste of food or affect food preference. And it all starts before birth. Amniotic fluid, the baby's first food, contains glucose, fructose, fatty acids and amino acids, and newborns are born preferring the sweet taste of mother's milk to other flavours. Since the 1970s, researchers have known that the introduction of sweet solutions into the amniotic fluid causes the fetus to swallow more frequently, whereas...