- Size of mouth - the bits have to be small enough to fit in our mouth and be chewed easily. This means that the bits should not exceed 30 cubic centimetres.
- Areas of specific taste reception buds- a common incorrect belief (according to Wikipedia - but they do have a reference) is that different areas of the tongue are responsible for different tastes. Therefore this length scale is irrelevant.
- Size of a single taste bud - this is about one millimetre squared (according to Wikipedia - no reference), so there is no use in cutting your salad bits smaller than that.
There is however a fourth length scale set by the minimum size in which two adjecent vegitables could be distinguished by the mind. Cut your salad to smaller bits than the fourth length scale, and the salad taste will be uniform across the tongue. Cut it larger - different vegitables could be distinguished. This is similar to color recognition by the eye. Draw small enough dots of blue and red mixed together - the result will appear as purple. The dot size needed for the mind to distinguish red and blue is larger than the dot size needed for an individual eye receptor to detect the different colors .
Bottom line: don't eat with your eyes.
;-)
