Up to eighty percent of taste comes not from our taste uds, but from our sense of smell, Taste buds allow us to identify bitter, salty, sweet, and sour flavors. But we depend the smell of foods to give us most of our sense of flavor. without smelling the aroma of a food, it is difficult to tinguish one flavor from another(ncidentally, this is why d loses its flavor when you have a stuffed-up nose)