The Eight Basic Tastes or Flavors

Last month, I delivered a talk at one of our local libraries - in Whitefish Bay - straying a bit from philosophy into the field of gastronomy (you can watch the video of the talk here).  This isn't an area in which I do all that much work, but in which I've got a considerable, though basically amateur, interest.  The topic that I proposed is one that has exerted a kind of distracting pull upon my research work for some time - a history of basic tastes or flavors of food.

At present, and for roughly the last century and a half, most people here in the West tend to think that there are four main flavors - sometimes five, counting the umami flavor, what we might call an intellectual import from Japanese researchers.  There are, to be sure, food researchers here in the West who do discuss and research other basic tastes or flavors - but the additional gustatory qualities they rightly bring to light are typically regarded as recent additions to an otherwise all-too-simply palette of the palate.

Talk about additional flavors beyond the four or five typically acknowledged and taught about here in the West, and a common first response from other people is to reference the basic tastes distinguished in other culinary traditions of great civilizations of the East - in Indian or Chinese cooking, for example.  And yet, here in the West, there is also a millennia-old tradition of thinking in terms of significantly more than four flavors, one that tends to be overlooked.  It reaches an early apex and touchstone in several passages from Aristotle's works, in which he sets out for us the eight basic flavors.