Poem: "Rainforest Delicacies"

Why yes, I was. I wanted to make something a bit different, though; and the prompt focused on differences between looks and tastes, not smells and tastes.

I will not be trying durian. My sense of smell and taste are united.

>> My sense of smell and taste are united.

So are most people's, but apparently most who taste durian really like it. I've never encountered it, only read about it, and I don't know if I'd have the nerve to try it. <<

Based on my observations and research, for most people the senses of smell and taste are closely related in that disabling smell also takes out a majority of taste. They're both chemical-reading senses, but with different receptors, neural wiring, and interpretation.

For me, I can taste things without putting them in my mouth. This seems to be a very rare trait, but it's not unique; I've heard of other people who could do it. Often this is an asset; I can taste-test while cooking without needing to use a spoon unless I just want to. With noxious odors, it's a nuisance. I figure the most likely explanation is that my neural wiring is more enmeshed; or I might have different receptors, or the same ones differently arranged. The end result is far greater sensitivity in ways that make other people go, "Here, smell this, has it gone bad?" And I can tell from my office when it's time to get up and pay attention to the spaghetti sauce in the crockpot.

>> Much of what we call taste is part of smell, in the olfactory nerves (nodes?). The tongue has… I was taught "only four", but in recent decades science has added umami to salt, sour, bitter, and sweet. (But I expect you know all that.) <<

Yes, I've always been aware of far more than four. Sometimes it's hard to tell the difference between "I'm not altogether human and therefore different" vs. "This is the same but humans don't know themselves well enough to describe it that way."

>> When I inhale through my mouth, arching my tongue to expose the sides of the root to the airflow, I taste a taste there that I'm not aware of in any other circumstance. I've known this since I was a kid. It seems to be in the area that the diagrams show as sour, but it doesn't seem sour to me– maybe just because things like pickles or sour milk have so many other stimuli. <<

I use a variety of scenting techniques that include:
* mouth open, back of tongue raised, inhaling through nose
* mouth slightly open, tongue sealed to roof, inhaling through nose
* mouth slightly open, tip of tongue behind teeth, inhaling through mouth
* and I still flehmen like a stallion

If I'm trying to detect a faint odor, or refine my perception of one, I usually switch through several modes because the "reception" is often clearer on a particular channel. So I suspect that I have different things going on in different places. Another thing I do is re-scenting on the exhale, essentially dragging the same air sample back and forth over the sensory zones.

It's not hard to spot my nonhuman body language when I'm scenting, but it's a mishmash of different species; chimera effect.

>> And while looking around just now, in this conversation, I found that there are lots more "taste" components than I was aware of. <<

A few of those were new to me, but many of them are ones I've tracked long since. For me there's a different quality to hot and cold flavors beyond the pure nerve action. I have found the vocabulary of perfumery to be exceptionally useful in describing flavors. The English taste vocabulary is just nowhere near good enough. Since the lab science is still finding new things, I've just decided that they don't have a full undertanding of the taste/smell field yet, and I should use whatever activities and vocabulary will suit the job at hand. I take a very empirical approach to science.

I tell when cream of wheat is done because the sound of the bubbles changes. This is apparently a standard part of cooking for the vision-impaired, learning to tell things by ear.