The Eight Basic Tastes or Flavors

Last month, I delivered a talk at one of our local libraries - in Whitefish Bay - straying a bit from philosophy into the field of gastronomy (you can watch the video of the talk here).  This isn't an area in which I do all that much work, but in which I've got a considerable, though basically amateur, interest.  The topic that I proposed is one that has exerted a kind of distracting pull upon my research work for some time - a history of basic tastes or flavors of food.

At present,...