Appetite and Taste
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There must be a strong physiological bond / affinity between these two aspects of the senses, such that it seems as though you can't have one without the other.
Because of my two months of illness, I no longer have any appetite, not even for the things I used to love to eat — for example the exquisite carrot cake made by Pastry Pants Bakery in Swarthmore; a scrumptious piece of it has been sitting on my kitchen counter for two weeks. In the past, I would have devoured it upon sight.
Now, about the only thing that attracts my eating attention is feta cheese, especially from the barrel in its brine, which I consume copiously. Everything else I put in my mouth tastes cottony.
I don't even like fresh water any more — sè 澀 ("astringent").
Selected readings
- "Mouthfeel" (4/10/19)
- "The mystery of "mouthfeel'"
Annie Gottlieb said,
May 29, 2026 @ 10:28 pm
– Sheep's milk feta (sometimes with 5% goat) is my main source of protein—I eat it daily, even without "benefit" (s/) of illness. It's just the most delicious thing there is, creamy and salty.
– My late husband, who lived into his 80s, had an acute illness in his late 40s which lasted 2 months before they figured out what it was and could treat it. He had been a labor prisoner in the Donbas as a teen-ager and if there was one thing he LOVED to do, it was eat, but during that period he had no appetite—with one exception. For him, it was pastrami sandwiches. They kept him alive.
Both salty foods. What's that about?
Cheryl Thornett said,
May 29, 2026 @ 11:35 pm
I hope you return to health and the enjoyment of food and drink soon.
I can't tell you the actual cause, but besides the effect of illness on the senses of smell and taste as well as appetite, chemotherapy often has a similar effect, with many people finding only salty foods palatable, and often a specific food at that. In a 'chemo' forum I was once part of, people also complained of food feeling different in the mouth, cottony or greasy being common descriptors as far as I remember. These mouth feels must not have been related to the actual foods as these people often found salty, but greasy potato chips or french fries acceptable.
Philip Taylor said,
May 30, 2026 @ 2:15 am
I had cardiac surgery a couple of years ago (replacement of aortic valve) and the food served in the Spire St Anthony hospital (Cheam, Surry) was absolutely dire — I ate almost nothing. Since then, I too have lost much of my appetite (and therefore two stone in weight), although braised sheeps hearts still go down well …
Thomas Hutcheson said,
May 30, 2026 @ 5:52 am
I once went through a period in which the only thing I wanted to eat was a kind of chocolate covered peanuts. I'll bet it was got microbe related.
JimG said,
May 30, 2026 @ 7:41 am
My condolence to you for your illness.
I delved into LL's prior appearances of mouthfeel, keeping in mind your lack of appetite. I am a gastronome and/or foodie, and last year cared for my dying wife. I conflate mouthfeel and taste as aspects of human attraction to food(s). The mouth senses more than taste, distinguishing heat (temperature and chemical), and oiliness or richness of food, among other aspects.* The texture of food very definitely makes a difference, as does the mouth's sensory reception of it.
My wife responded well to changes in food texture, tenderness or crispness or other sensations, including temperature, as well as tastes. (She had difficulty in swallowing, which complicated things.) I pureed some foods for her that she was accustomed to chewing; Using oils or watery media (broth, milk or cream, juices or fruit "nectar" and pureed fruit or vegetables were helpful.
Try stirring/mashing a bit of carrot cake with milk or orange juice.
Another thought, which might be helpful: Overwhelming and then recalibrating the oral sensory scales might be helpful, perhaps with saltwater, sweetened tea, neat whiskey/rum/brandy/etc rinses.
When brushing teeth and gums, brush and stimulate the entire mouth and palate and the inside of the cheeks where salivary glands are sheltered. Use a stimulating oral rinse, either a strong mint or salty stuff or one with alcohol like Listerine – – Take care not to inflame the mouth and tongue's soft tissues, numbing them or leaving them swollen. Stimulation, physical and sensory, may help you recover your appetite.
* I suspect that, just as areas of the tongue have been identified as locales for sensing taste, other areas of the mouth may someday be found to be associated with mouthfeel. The palate has long been part of the gastronomic vocabulary.
My good wishes to you for recovery of your enjoyment of food. I hope you will continue to take nourishment even while you're not deriving its pleasures.
Peter B. Golden said,
May 30, 2026 @ 9:25 am
My best wishes for a speedy and full recovery.
François Lang said,
May 30, 2026 @ 11:17 am
Victor, I hope you recover soon from your illness and are able to return to normal eating. Be well!
FML
Stephen Goranson said,
May 30, 2026 @ 12:37 pm
I am not a doctor, nor do I play one on TV, but,
water, like it or not, water.
KevinM said,
May 30, 2026 @ 3:06 pm
Best wishes for a speedy recovery. This, by the way, may be the explanation for hospital food.
Chips Mackinolty said,
May 30, 2026 @ 7:00 pm
Get well soon, illness is a bloody nuisance.
Most times … as part of immunotherapy I'm getting loaded with steroids which has made everything I eat fabulous … and never enough of it!!
M. Paul Shore said,
May 30, 2026 @ 7:33 pm
It sounds as if at this point your dietary choices are a feta ccompli.
But seriously, folks, about two years ago I went through a period of reduced taste-sensation and reduced appetite because of some medical treatments I was receiving, and one way I dealt with that was to put hot-sauce on virtually every non-sweet thing I ate. It worked well, except that I was consuming so much hot-sauce that my tongue and other mouth tissues experienced a near-constant residual burn. I then dialed back my consumption because I was worried that I might be injuring myself in some way.
One perhaps excessively obvious suggestion: I wonder whether the carrot cake should go into the freezer. I’d think it might mold if it stays out too long.
Philip Taylor said,
May 31, 2026 @ 2:24 am
Is "to mo[u]ld" a standard verb in American English, MPS ? In Britain we would normally wrote "to go mouldy" (thus "I’d think it might start to go mouldy", in your context.
Michael Carasik said,
May 31, 2026 @ 3:02 am
Best wishes from Jerusalem for a רפואה שלמה as speedily as possible. I will mention your name in the prayers tomorrow morning.
David Marjanović said,
May 31, 2026 @ 3:26 am
Salty is an actual taste as opposed to a smell; you don't lose it when for example COVID destroys your sense of smell.
It's supposed to be a metaphorical closing HTML tag, not an American abbreviation: </s> for "the sarcasm ends here".
M. Paul Shore said,
May 31, 2026 @ 5:58 am
Philip Taylor: I see in the OED 1st Ed. (which is the edition I happen to have conveniently at hand right now) that the verb “to mo(u)ld” meaning “to grow mo(u)ldy” goes back to at least 1530; additional citations are given for each of the three subsequent centuries. I see no indication that that meaning is particularly American.
Jerry Packard said,
May 31, 2026 @ 4:35 pm
It might be of passing interest to point out that the Chinese words for Appetite and Taste have in common the morpheme 味 wei4 ‘flavor’.
Appetite = 味口 wei4kou3 flavor-mouth
Taste = 味道 – wei4dao4 flavor-way
Victor Mair said,
June 1, 2026 @ 6:15 am
One of my very favorite things in life is huíwèi 回味 ("savor", lit., "return the flavor').
Chas Belov said,
May 31, 2026 @ 5:37 pm
As a fellow foodie, I sent major condolences on your affliction. This is my most feared random after-effect of COVID – not saying yours was COVID – and I can only imagine how miserable it is for you. Hoping you get well soon.
Chas Belov said,
May 31, 2026 @ 5:51 pm
@JimG: I recently read of a study that worked with patients of long COVID having taste loss. They provided the patients with special over-flavored chewing gum in an attempt to retrain their taste buds.
Quoting from Threat Model, May 21, 2026, by Violet Blue:
Here is the article, it case it's any help to Professor Mair and others. Noting it's an early study:
Chewing gum restores dad’s taste and smell years after Covid
Chas Belov said,
May 31, 2026 @ 5:51 pm
*send
Chas Belov said,
May 31, 2026 @ 5:55 pm
And noting, for Language Log purposes, that this is a common typo for me where I swap voiced and unvoiced consonants – "d" typed as "t" in this case. Not sure whether it's unidirectional or bidirectional for me. I also have some other habitual typos but this is the most interesting one for me.
Chau said,
June 2, 2026 @ 10:07 am
@Jerry Packard: “…the Chinese words for Appetite and Taste have in common the morpheme 味 wei4 ‘flavor’;” @Victor Mair: “One of my very favorite things in life is huíwèi 回味 ("savor", lit., "return the flavor'.”
You touched on a very interesting Sinitic word 味 MSM wèi / Tw bī / Sino-Jp mi / Sino-Kor mi / Sino-Viet vị. [The i in Sino-Viet vị has a diacritic dot underneath, which has disappeared after uploading.]
Because in Sinitic 味 is used in expressions for both ‘smell’ and ‘taste’, so I asked AI, “Is flavor related to smell or taste?” This is what it said to me (references omitted):
______
“Flavor is the overall sensory experience of food, and it is directly related to both smell and taste. In fact, the two senses work together to create what you perceive as flavor.
•Taste (Gustation): Refers strictly to the five basic sensations detected by receptors on your tongue: sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and umami.
•Smell (Olfaction): The most critical component of flavor. As you chew, aroma molecules travel from the food in your mouth up into your nasal passages (known as retronasal olfaction).
Your brain merges these two inputs—along with texture and temperature—to create the perception of a food's flavor. If you want to test this, pinch your nose while eating a flavored jelly bean; you will only taste sweetness or tartness until you release your nose and the aroma completes the flavor profile.”
______
However, in my study of West-to-East lexical transmission, I find that 味 most likely is related to the English word smell. Its Middle English forms are, quoting Oxford Dict. Eng. Etym., p. 838, “smelle, also smülle, smille, pointing to OE *smiellan, smyllan, of which no cogns. are known.” OED writes that it is "no doubt of Old English origin, but not recorded, and not represented in any of the cognate languages."
My guess is that its original form, Old English or earlier, may have been brought to Asia and given rise to the group of pronunciations for 味 listed above. The sound changes involved in the loaning processes probably go like this: *smiell- / *smyll- > (de-cluster of the initial sm-) *miell- /*myll- > *mi- > 味 Sino-Jp み mi / Sino-Kor 미 mi > (denasalized) Tw bī / Sino-Viet vị.
There are some supports for the transmission.
(1) The character 味 is a phono-semantic compound with 未 as the phonophore. And 未 is known to carry the nasal m- sound. For examples, Cantonese for 食飽未？ is sik6 baau2 mei6? [Jyutping] “Are you full yet?” The Japanese word for ‘future’ is mirai 未來 (also Korean 미래 milae) which I believe is related to Ancient Greek μέλλων / μέλλον ‘future’ (derivation omitted).
(2) The Vietnamese word for ‘smell, scent’ is mùi which can be easily related to *miell- /*myll-, the declustered form of OE *smiell- / *smyll- ‘smell’.
(3) The Sinitic word for ‘girl, younger sister, maid’ is MSM mèi / Tw mōe, moai, bē, bōe. Its written character 妹 is another 未-based phono-semantic compound. This word may be related to Old Norse mær (nom.) / mey (acc.) ‘maid, girl, virgin’.
From this brief discussion of 味 'flavor', we may deduce that in Asian views the smell is a major determinant of flavor.
Philip Taylor said,
June 2, 2026 @ 12:41 pm
"Sino-Viet vị. [The i in Sino-Viet vị has a diacritic dot underneath, which has disappeared after uploading.]" — Clearly visible here, Chau.
M. Paul Shore said,
June 4, 2026 @ 5:55 am
Regarding Chau’s speculations about a possible Indo-European source for Mandarin wèi 味 and numerous related morphemes in a whole chain or cluster of other East Asian languages: Maybe I’m just being old-school about this, but I find it hard to believe, in the absence of genuinely strong supporting evidence, that all those languages could have been so lexically and/or semantically impoverished that they would have felt the need to borrow a foreign word to express such basic concepts as smell or taste. Especially when the possible sources would have been at least somewhat geographically remote, and not necessarily of the highest prestige from the East Asian point of view. Of course I realize that English has borrowed a number of such terms from Latin and French, but those were vocabulary-borrowing relationships significantly different from the ones existing between Sinitic and Indo-European.
Could someone with expertise in Sinitic etymology weigh in briefly on this? I say “briefly” because I’m not convinced that writing and reading about these speculations is worth a whole lot of anyone’s time.