The tasting act is both cultural and natural. The natural bit has to do with the make-up of what's on the end of your fork and what happens physiologically when food hits your tongue. We can subject the former to chemical analysis and we can learn about the latter through the findings of modern neurophysiology. The general form of these natural things is stable over time. The cultural bit has to do with expectations and understandings about how things should taste, with frameworks relating taste both to the nature of aliments and to bodily consequences, and with the available vocabularies for talking about them and describing them to others: such things are temporally and culturally variable.
Early modern period; taste; physiology; culture