We’ve long known that salty, sweet, sour, bitter – and more recently, umami – are all tastes that our tongues recognise.

But what about our love of crusty bread, or those distracting pasta fantasies that pop up out of nowhere?

It’s an anomaly that led Juyum Lim from Oregon State University to dig a little deeper.

“Sugar tastes great in the short term, but if you’re offered chocolate and bread, you might eat a small amount of the chocolate, but you’d choose the bread in larger amounts, or as a daily staple,” Lim told New Scientist.

Lim and her team gave 22 volunteers a handful of different solutions to describe, and they each named the taste ‘starchy’; the Asian subjects described it as ‘rice-like’, while Caucasians called the taste ‘bread-like’ or ‘pasta-like’.

“Every culture has a major source of complex carbohydrate. The idea that we can’t taste what we’re eating doesn’t make sense,” Lim said.

Even a receptor-blocking compound didn’t stop the volunteers from detecting the tasty starchy goodness in the foods.

The team is now working on identifying the specific receptors on the tongue that detect the taste, so that ‘starchy’ can officially be named our sixth taste, and make our carb-free quests all the more brutal.

Lucky then, that new research from the University of Sydney has linked high-carb diets to a longer life, meaning even more time to wolf pizza. Happy days – or rather – happy, starchy days.