Taste & Smell combo= Flavor
What most people refer to as “taste” when describing their experience of food is usually a combination of taste, from stimulation of the receptors on the tongue, and smell, from stimulation of the receptors in the nose. Flavor is the overall impression that we experience from the combination of oral and nasal stimulation.
Taste sensations can be described in terms of 4 basic tastes: salty, sour, bitter and sweet. People differ in the ability to detect certain tastes, such as bitterness, because they have different densities of taste buds. Taste buds are made up of taste cells which are filled with receptors that are specialized to respond to different chemicals. In order to taste food, each receptor has to change the energy it receives from the environment, like the energy in food, and turn it into an electrical signal in the nervous system.