Abstract
When we cook, by meticulously following a recipe, or adding a personal twist to it, we sometimes
care not only to (re-)produce a taste that we can enjoy, but also to give our food a certain aftertaste.
This is not surprising, given that we ordinarily take aftertaste to be an important part of the
gustatory experience as a whole, one which we seek out, and through which we evaluate what we
eat and drink—at least in many cases. What is surprising is that aftertastes, from a psychological
point of view, seem to be analogous to afterimages, and thus have little or no epistemic import. In
this paper we tackle this puzzle, and argue that we are right in treating aftertastes seriously. The
moral is that both from a metaphysical and an epistemic point of view aftertastes should be
categorized differently from afterimages.