I def have taste preferences e.g. I like grapefruit better than orange juice. Another example is Sriracha tastes great to me as it's spicy but not too spicy. Too spicy and I just can't taste anything.

In other words, I have the same 5 basic tongue tastes that you do e.g. salt, sweet, bitter, sour and "umami". Flavor is usually taste + smell and that's the part I'm missing.

If you are more interested, I wrote a Twitter thread about all of this here: https://x.com/alexpotato/status/1559865770515087360

Yeah-- no kidding. When I was anosmic with COVID I couldn't eat much of anything. Food was just terrible. I still remember the soulless paste that was peanut butter. (Ugh. It was so bad...)