That’s the inspiration behind Flavor: Making It and Faking It, a brand new exhibition at the Museum of Food and Drink in Brooklyn, NY. It’s an interactive experience loaded with info on the history of artificial flavors and the science of natural ones, peppered with smelling and tasting stations to test your sensory prowess. And on my recent visit to the museum, I quickly learned that flavor is a hell of a lot more complicated than most of us realize. Here are seven fascinating takeaways from the exhibit:

  1. All flavors—even natural ones—are made of chemicals. In recent years, the word “chemical” has picked up a scare factor that it doesn’t deserve. All the compounds that give foods their natural flavor are chemicals, and despite their scary names, they’re totally harmless. Maple tastes like maple because of methyl cyclopentenolone. Cinnamon contains cinnamaldehyde. Coconut is loaded with gamma-hexalactone. They’re all words that would make you think twice if you saw them on an ingredient list—but they’re 100% natural.
  2. You can’t taste without your nose. Our noses have receptors for the smells that give food flavor—and they’re so accurate that they can detect nuances in aromas that differ only by one atom. In fact, roughly 75% of your taste experience comes from smelling, since all your tastebuds can do is detect the presence of sweet, salty, sour, or bitter flavors. If you were to lose your sense of smell, eating food would be like seeing the world in only primary colors, the exhibit explains. (This, by the way, is why food tastes so bland when you’re stuffed up with a cold.) MORE: 20 Outrageous Food Combos We Can’t Believe People Are Eating (But Kind Of Want to Try)
  3. “Natural flavors” can be mysterious and dubious. When you see “natural flavors” on an ingredient list, there’s no way to tell what that actually means—companies aren’t required to give much more detail than those two little words. The official legal definition states that natural flavors must be derived only from things like vegetables, fruits, meats, herbs, and dairy products. But the interpretation of that definition gets a little slippery: For example, the exhibit describes a new type of imitation vanilla that’s created as a by-product when genetically modified yeast eats sugar. Since it’s not derived from synthetic chemicals, it’s considered natural by law. But some companies, like Häagen-Dazs, have refused to use it.
  4. Coffee tastes better with rotten eggs. When you smell sulfur on its own, you probably want to gag. But when you combine that skunky scent with the aroma of bitter coffee, suddenly you’ve got a smell that’s totally pleasant. Sulfur is actually present in even the tastiest cup of coffee—in fact, many delicious foods and drinks contain small amounts of aromas that are disgusting when isolated. It’s the combination of hundreds of different aromatic chemicals (even the gross ones) that really make a flavor complete.
  5. Cheese and vomit are closely related. If sulfur in coffee sounds disgusting, brace yourself for this one: Cheese shares a crucial aromatic chemical with vomit. It’s called butyric acid—see if you can detect it next time you unwrap a wedge of Parmesan. Or the next time you upchuck. Whatever happens first. MORE: Is Bitter the New Umami?
  6. Umami is trendy now, but it’s more than 100 years old. Way back in the day, science recognized only four main flavors: bitter, salty, sweet, and sour. Then along came umami, the meaty fifth flavor first identified by a Japanese chemist while he sipped seaweed soup in 1908. (Fun fact: “Umami” is Japanese for “deliciousness.”) Just a year later, he had developed a shakeable form of monosodium glutamate (MSG)—basically a powdered form of that umami flavor. And today, we’ve identified umami in dozens of foods, including tomatoes, mushrooms, miso, even Doritos.
  7. Science has never found a link between MSG and adverse health effects. How did MSG get such a bad reputation? It all started when a scientist named Robert Ho Man Kowk published a letter in the New England Journal of Medicine, saying that he felt terrible after eating Chinese food and blaming MSG for his symptoms. Despite the fact that no scientific research has backed up these original claims, people still continue to shun MSG. Want to learn more about flavor or the limited-time exhibit at the Museum of Food and Drink? Get all the info right here.