Salt as a ‘non-food': to what extent do gustatory perceptions determine non-food vs food choices?

Claude Marcel Hladik (1)

1 EAE - Eco-Anthropologie et Ethnobiologie

Most physiologists believed for several years — and some of them still believe — that taste perception is limited to four or five primary taste perceptions (salty, sweet, sour, bitter, and eventually umami), with the implicit idea that a pure chemical such as sodium chloride does elicit what could be named a ‘pure taste'. However, the hypothesis of a small number of basic tastes does not fit with recent electrophysiological records on primates taste nerves and on the neurones of primary and secondary taste cortex (Rolls, 2004; Scott and Plata-Salamán, 2004). The taste signals transmitted by taste nerve fibres, are complex and involve, in the brain, a combination of various neurones flashing simultaneously, even in the case of the response to a solution of a simple compound such as sodium chloride.

Mots clés: salt perception; evolution of taste perception; primates; human populations

Domaines: Anthropologie biologique

Claude Marcel Hladik. Salt as a ‘non-food': to what extent do gustatory perceptions determine non-food vs food choices?. J. McClancy, J. Henry & H. Macbeth. Berghahn Books, Oxford, pp.121-130, 2007. ⟨hal-00547238⟩