Review of Mouthfeel Classification. A New Perspective of Food Perception

Abstract

Currently, the discrimination of taste, smell, texture and flavor is described as following. In theory, taste is suggested to be related to five basic tastes: sweetness, sourness, bitterness, saltiness, and umami, with the gustatory system to mediate the sense of taste via the taste receptors cells (Yarmolinsky et al., 2009) [1]. The sense of smell is related to the detection of odorant components (volatile components) via the olfactory system (Zarzo, 2007) [2]. Szczesniak in the 60’s defined the food texture as “the sensory and functional manifestation of the structural, mechanical and surface properties of food detected through the senses of vision, hearing, touch, and kinesthetics” (Szczesniak, 1963; Szczesniak, 2002) [3, 4]. The term flavor, finally is used to describe the combination of taste and smell sensations together with other sensations involving the olfactory, gustatory, and trigeminal sensations