ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that at particular historical moments only did taste matter, but that it was important to everyday life and the choices individuals made, based on what was available, reshaped human bodies as well as cultures and societies. Anthropologists have been writing for decades about how food and culture are intertwined which, at some level, is also about the taste of foods. The sensory aspects of these foods rarely come into play, although the existence of particular taste or flavor preferences is a recurring subtext in many of these studies. Popular understandings of taste suggest that there are four basic tastes consisting of sweet, sour, salty, and bitter. For more than a century, millions of American children took for granted that the tongue is segregated into taste zones with sweet at the tip of their tongue; sour on the sides; salty mid-tongue; and bitter at the back.
