This site looks at the science behind food and cooking. Learn about what happens when you eat sugar, bake bread, cook an egg, or pickle foods. Find out how muscle turns to meat, what makes meat tender, and what gives meat its flavor. Take tours of breads and spices of the world. Explore your sense of taste and smell.

Few people are aware of how crucial the sense of smell is to identifying foods, or the adaptive value of being able to identify a food as being familiar and therefore safe to eat. In this lesson and activity, students conduct an experiment to determine whether or not the sense of smell is important to being able to recognize foods by taste. The teacher leads a discussion that allows students to explore why it might be adaptive for humans and other animals to be able to identify nutritious versus noxious foods. This is followed by a demonstration in which a volunteer tastes and identifies a familiar food, and then attempts to taste and identify a different familiar food while holding his or her nose and closing his or her eyes. Then, the class develops a hypothesis and a means to obtain quantitative results for an experiment to determine whether students can identify foods when the sense of smell has been eliminated.

Culture, Embodiment, and the Senses will provide an historical and cross-cultural analysis of the politics of sensory experience. The subject will address western philosophical debates about mind, brain, emotion, and the body and the historical value placed upon sight, reason, and rationality, versus smell, taste, and touch as acceptable modes of knowing and knowledge production. We will assess cultural traditions that challenge scientific interpretations of experience arising from western philosophical and physiological models. The class will examine how sensory experience lies beyond the realm of individual physiological or psychological responses and occurs within a culturally elaborated field of social relations. Finally, we will debate how discourse about the senses is a product of particular modes of knowledge production that are themselves contested fields of power relations.

" What is the history of popular reading in the Western world? How does widespread access to print relate to distinctions between highbrow and lowbrow culture, between good taste and bad judgment, and between men and women readers? This course will introduce students to the broad history of popular reading and to controversies about taste and gender that have characterized its development. Our grounding in historical material will help make sense of our main focus: recent developments in the theory and practice of reading, including fan-fiction, Oprah's book club, comics, hypertext, mass-market romance fiction, mega-chain bookstores, and reader response theory."

"This course provides an introduction to important philosophical questions about the mind, specifically those that are intimately connected with contemporary psychology and neuroscience. Are our concepts innate, or are they acquired by experience? (And what does it even mean to call a concept 'innate'?) Are 'mental images' pictures in the head? Is color in the mind or in the world? Is the mind nothing more than the brain? Can there be a science of consciousness? The course will include guest lectures by Professors."

Sensation and perception are the processes by which we absorb information from environmental stimuli and convert it into data that our brains and bodies use to modify behavior. This course begins with sensation, the physical process by which we use our sense organs to respond to the environmental stimuli around us. Perception refers to our interpretation of stimuli. In this course, the student will identify the ways in which these processes can fail, the biology of both the hearing system and the visual system, and how the other senses (smell, taste, and touch) affect perception. Upon successful completion of this course, students will be able to: describe the sensory systems; distinguish between sensation and perception; explain how sensory and perceptual processes shape our experience of 'reality;' explain the basic principles of classical psychophysics; explain how sensation and perception relate to cognition; explain how human sensory systems respond to energy in the physical environment (i.e. light waves, air pressure, chemical molecules, etc.), transforming it into a perceptual experience that the brain can understand (i.e. sight, sound, smell, etc.); compare and contrast the major theoretical perspectives on sensation and perception, including direct perception, indirect perception, and the information processing perspective; compare and contrast the five sensory systems in terms of their sensory/anatomical set-up and perceptual organization; explain the roles of evolution, development, society, prior knowledge, and inference in our perceptual judgments and our conscious experiences; identify and define the leading terms, concepts, theoretical perspectives, empirical findings, and historical trends in the study of sensation and perception; compare and contrast psychological principles, theories, and methods as they pertain to sensory and neurological systems; critically read, understand, and evaluate scientific literature, understand and use scientific and technical vocabulary, and synthesize information from multiple sources. (Psychology 306)

How do the senses work? How do physical stimuli get transformed into signals in the nervous system? How does the brain use those signals to determine what's out there in the world? All the senses are discussed; vision is covered most extensively, with topics including the perception of color, motion, form, and depth.

This video segment explores the sense of taste in humans -- why we have it, and what happens when we lose it. Footage from NOVA: "Mystery of the Senses: Taste."

Students conduct an experiment to determine whether or not the sense of smell is important to being able to recognize foods by taste. They do this by attempting to identify several different foods that have similar textures. For some of the attempts, the students hold their noses and close their eyes, while for others they only close their eyes. After they have conducted the experiment, they create a bar graph showing the number of correct and incorrect identifications for the two different experimental conditions tested.