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Incredibly, this has nothing to do with the mouth, but with the nose. When we have the flu, we lose our sense of smell. And if you can’t discern an expensive perfume from the smoke of a burnt tire, you can’t taste it either. It’s just that 80% of what we call taste comes from smell, not taste. The confusion happens because we associate the flavor with the taste buds, which are on the tongue. What they actually do is just distinguish five basic tastes: salty, sweet, bitter, sour and umami, a recently discovered taste that corresponds to the taste of glutamate spices of the aji-no-moto type. If the tongue perceives only these five flavors, the sense of smell simply distinguishes 20,000 odors! Therefore, it predominates even when we taste something. Chewing itself makes these aromas more intense, as it releases the smell of various chemical substances in food. “This information from smell interacts with that from taste so that the brain forms the taste of food”, says otorhinolaryngologist Reginaldo Fugita, from the Federal University of São Paulo (Unifesp). Want to test the dominance of smell? When you have the flu, grab a piece of chocolate and a piece of, say, banana. Close your eyes and bite one of the two with your nose closed: you won’t be able to tell which one is in your mouth! If you bite the piece of banana but smell the chocolate, you’ll have the feeling that you’re actually eating the candy – unless you can tell the difference in texture.