Re: Does the surface area of a jollyrancher effect how it tastes?

Taste buds are not the only component involved in perceiving and tasting our food. The texture of food is sensed by our hands, our lips, and inside our mouths. We see what color and shape food is while we are eating it. We have good or bad memories of eating that same type of food earlier in our lives that may effect how we taste that food. We smell our food as we eat it, using our olfactory system. You can test the importance of the olfactory system yourself if you try plugging your nose when you are eating, and try to tell the difference between an onion and an apple. The texture of these two foods can be very similar, and both contain sugars. The major difference is how they smell! Try this at home at your own risk!

Taste buds are found throughout the inside of our mouths. These taste buds contain small molecules called taste receptors. We have five types of taste receptors: sweet, salty, bitter, sour and umami. These receptors are all located all over the tongue, but certain parts of the tongue are more sensitive to certain tastes than others. We also have taste receptors on the soft palate, pharynx, and the upper part of the esophagus. The receptors bind substances from our food, that have dissolved into our saliva, which activate the receptors. Once activated, the receptors send a message to our brain along a nerve so that the brain can interpret what the taste is.

For the individual receptor, this is an all-or-nothing response – there is either a signal sent, or not. But for the taste bud as a whole, made up of many of these individual receptors, there is a range of responses. The more receptors that are activated, the more signals sent to the brain, and the more strongly the taste is perceived. If every single sweet taste receptor in your mouth were activated all at once, your brain would get the message that this must be really sweet!

Now we are at the heart of your question. Can the surface area of a food affect its taste? It comes down to how much your olfactory and taste sensory systems are activated by each piece of food you eat.

Let’s think it out. Take the same amount of candy by volume, but make one in a big cube and the other in 1000 tiny cubes. The large cube has much less surface area per weight than the 1000 tiny cubes. You’ve probably learned this concept in geometry class, but it’s also intuitive if you think about it. If you take the big cube and cut it in half, it has the same total volume, but you’ve just created more surface area by cutting it in half. Now do that again and again until you have a thousand tiny cubes, so a lot more surface area, but you have the same exact volume you started with. Now, all the sugar from each of those 1000 cubes can dissolve into our saliva really fast, go to different parts of your mouth and activate a ton of the sweet taste receptors. Your brain is getting tons of signals that you have something sweet in your mouth. Compare that to the one big cube. The sugars can dissolve into your saliva only from the surface area that is exposed, which is less than the 1000 cubes’ surface area. You can imagine that there might be fewer sweet taste receptors activated at that moment, so your brain gets less of a signal.

One final caveat is that the large cube will be in your mouth longer, since it will take longer for the candy to dissolve into your saliva. So the total number of signals sent to your brain per candy will be the same, but the rate at which they are sent will be different.

Overall, the surface area of food in general is important for how much taste we perceive. That is one reason we chew our food! (Other, more important reasons are to break it down into smaller, more easily swallowed and digestible pieces.) I think we all know this intuitively when we eat jolly ranchers. There are those of us who want to savor the sweet taste for a long time, so we suck on the candy slowly and don’t chew it up. Then, there are those of us who get impatient, and want all that sweet taste right now! So we crunch the candy with our teeth and get the sweet taste all at once, but then it’s over.

Reference:
Neuroscience / edited by Dale Purves -- 2nd ed. 2001 Sinauer Associates, Inc