ORION MAGAZINE: The Autumn 2026 issue, ‘Tongues: Adventures in the Science of Taste’, ventures into the outer reaches of flavor. Each story is keyed to a different feature of taste in the human and more-than-human worlds, a palette that includes carnivory, sourness, sweetness, bitterness, and fermentation. Contributors parse the flavors of breast milk, spiderwebs, and stinky cheeses. They explore the cultural history of foods forged in adverse conditions like famine and oppression. Taken together, In Tongues offers a vivid, sensory buffet of how we experience the world through our tongues.

A Taste for Meat

How carnivorous plants trouble the order of things. By Lacy M. Johnson

Sour Fruit

The marginalization of a flavor mirrors the logic of extraction. By Sharanya Deepak

Heart of Bitterness

A journey to the center of the flavor—and the feeling. By Maria Pinto

Yeast Mode

For food scientist and fermenter David Zilber, taste is the fundamental question of organismic existence. By Jaya Saxena and David Zilber