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Taste is the most important, complicated, and intriguing sense. Congenital and acquired taste skills helps us to evaluate maturity, nutritional value, and safety of food. Sapictive, olfactory, tactile, temperature, and visual receptors contribute to taste sense. The taste system evaluates the five basic qualities of food - sweetness, saltiness, sourness, bitterness, umami, and accessory fattiness. The olfactory system detects volatile food odorants that retrogradely reach the olfactory receptors and forms complex olfactory images, for example, orange or putrid smells (tastes). Both systems are important to adequately determine the quality of food. Extraoral receptors for bitter and sweet tastes regulate the body's defense systems, affect hormone production, appetite, and other processes. Temperature receptors evaluate other aspects of food safety. Heat receptors react to certain substances (capsaicin) with burning sensations, cold receptors react to some substances (menthol) with cooling sensation. And, of course, tactile receptors allow us to feel the structure of food. Visually we evaluate food maturity. The ability to distinguish tastes determines organism survival. Subcortical structures and various parts of the cerebral cortex (centers of novelty, learning, and the reward) process signals of taste, olfactory and visceral reception. Vertebrate nervous system allows them to immediately link new taste with visceral toxic effects after ingestion of toxic food. One intake of harmful food is enough to form a disgust reaction. The rejection of bitter food and the preference for sweet are hereditary qualities of the organism. But also taste preferences are formed during life and are associated with family and cultural traditions. Often, southern peoples use hot substances as spices, while northern peoples eat stroganina, a partially fermented product. So, on closer examination, our taste perception of the world is more complex than the perception of sweet, salty, sour, bitter, umami.