The Essence of Gastronomy

The Essence of Gastronomy: Understanding the Flavor of Foods and Beverages presents a new comprehensive and unifying theory on flavor, which answers ancient questions and offers new opportunities for solving food-related issues. It presents gastronomy as a holistic concept, focusing not only on the food and its composition but also on the human who eats it. This book defines gastronomy as the science of flavor and tasting, where flavor is a broadly interpreted objective characteristic that refers to product quality, and tasting is defined as the human perception of flavor registered by all the human senses.

Understanding tasting and flavor and how humans react to it is not merely hedonistic. It relates to larger societal issues such as nourishing the elderly and the food children eat at school, and it offers a practical advantage to the hospitality industry of comprehending why customers enjoy their food and beverages. The book presents gastronomy as a discip