A new basic taste joins sweet, salty, sour, bitter and umami

Yes, is this just a baseless headline? From the articles descriptions and from the abstract of the linked paper here

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-41637-4

I would have thought this is about how tasting sour works not about a completely new taste.

If the same receptor can distinguish between 2 distinct tastes I would consider it a different basic taste. In my experience ammonium chloride does not taste sourat all, so this might be the case. The article does not mention that though.

Yeah it does to me at least. When people try to describe umami without being self-referential, they’ll say “meaty” which in my mind, really does stand separately from the rest of the other tastes. I don’t really have a good sense of a unique taste from salty liquorice in the same way I do something “meaty”.

I love it. It's my favourite type of sweet but it's quite hard to find in the UK (not that I go to great lengths to find such things).

I find it funny that in British English we would call such a thing a "sweet" even though it's not actually very sweet (which is why I like it). Sweet is roughly equivalent to candy in American English, but with a notable exception: chocolate is not considered a sweet but falls instead into the broader category of confectionery.

Salmiak was sold as a powder in a tube as candy in The Netherlands ( at least in 70s and 80s ).

>It's a popular taste in gummy-like candies

It's also the "salt" in salted licorice.

>but it's an acquired taste

Yes, because it's objectively unpleasant (if it tasted good there would naturally be no need to acquire a taste for it). Of course, that's not to say it's pointless to add it- provided it's done properly you can add a salty flavor to places it can't normally be (chocolate covered black licorice being one of those places)- but it's also a taste that imposes a relatively small n where (enjoyment gained from eating n+1 pieces) < (enjoyment gained from eating n pieces) compared to candy that's actually designed to taste good.

They are singled out because there are identifiable receptors for them on your tongue. Strawberry is distinct from honey because of your olfactory sense, which is separate.

It's the same as rods and cones in the eye. You don't just see by magic, there are few specific and finite sensors, which you process into a combined perception.

When you see a chair or a lake, no matter how different those things are, the sensory mechanism is the same and quite limited in a way.

It's also like language, or arabic numerals. You can express any number or any idea, to infinity, but they are all composed out of a tiny alphabet of only 10 digits or 26 letters.

And it's not some desire to reduce or deconstruct anything, because anyone just hates calling a strawberry a strawberry for some reason. It's simply what actually IS. Our perception of the taste of strawberry, and everything else, IS composed of only a few "base tastes". You don't have a whole sensor cell just for strawberries, and an infinite number of others for the infinite number of other things. You have a few senor types which are general purpose, and can compose a perception for strawberry, or anything else, even if strawberries were invented today and none of your evolutionary history never encountered a strawberry before.