Okay, smell is infinitely complex but memorable. And odours would exist without people. We encounter smells personally… but passively.

Taste is like active smell. Smell is evaporation into air; taste is evaporation into saliva.

We destroy something by stuffing it in our mouths and categorising its breakdown along five tastes: sweet, salty, bitter, sour, umami. These 5 are drawn from what we need from the object. There’s a kind of focus here, and our reactions to the tastes at that moment tell us whether we need to go all to way to eating, digesting.

Flavour is a combination of taste and smell, with sight thrown in too.

Matt Webb, S&W, posted and presented on 2006-06-01