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It's pretty hard to imagine someone drooling over most of these pictures. But chances are each of them has at least one fan. Taste can be very, very subjective.

"The sense of taste is a sensory system like the eye," Ilene Bernstein, Ph.D., a professor of psychology at the University of Washington, explained. "The tongue is sensitive to different tastes -- sweet, sour, bitter, or salty. Taste as a sense is the perception of a combination of these chemical signals on the tongue."

While it may sound simple, taste involves so much more than these four categories that we learned about in grade school. From genes, to environment, to a fifth taste referred to as umami, experts say there are a lot of factors that determine whether or not we like what we're biting into.

Taste is a combination of how food smells, looks, and sounds. When we eat celery, for example, it has to crunch. When we drink espresso, we expect a certain aroma. Plus, how a person perceives taste also has to do with nature and nurture.

"Taste is a product of our genes and our environment," Leslie J. Stein, Ph.D., from the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia, said. "Our food preferences are determined by multiple factors, including genes, experience, and age."

Genes play their part by giving a person a predetermined preference and our environment is a factor in learning new tastes.