I love this person!
The Periodic Table of Dessert:
And the even more awesome Flavor Wheels of the World.
Describing tastes has always been a fuzzier proposition, and it’s not because taste has more dimensions than color or pitch. As I say above, that’s a false analogy: vision and hearing have more dimensions than color and pitch! I think taste is fuzzier because we can discriminate lots of tastes — they vary much more than sounds, I’d say.
(Or perhaps sound varies more, but we’re willing to tolerate more slop in describing sounds. There are many brassy honks, but if you imagine something even remotely brassy and honking, then my description was good enough. Whereas people are very picky about flavors.)
Images vary even more, but we are exposed to lots and lots of images, so we have more exemplars to make descriptions from. We give children books full of animal pictures. But it’s perfectly possible to grow up without ever tasting asafoetida, and if you do, what am I going to compare it to? It isn’t like anything but itself.
I can’t even describe, you need to go see it for yourself. I LOVE HEEM. OR HER. LOVE.—Snacktime