Ageusia is the term for loss of taste.

Traumatic damage to the olfactory nerve can cause of lack of smell but you would also need to damage the tongue for the taste.

You won’t do it from eating regular foods, but trying to eat a large enough firecracker might do the trick. It could take out both the tongue and the nerve.

Don’t do that though. It would probably blow the jaw off and make you blind as well.

If you eat something too hot without properly letting it cool, you’ll burn your tongue and won’t taste anything for days

oh yeah, you can totally change your sense of taste of sweet and salty

remove either of these for several weeks and then slowly bring them back and you will find you are far more sensitive to them than previously.

the addiction to high level sweet taste is why dieting is so hard for so many and why sugar substitutes are targetted as an option.

We used to occasionally have to put our kids on “sugar fast” when they ate too much sweet stuff because they then couldn’t taste sweet in lightly sweet stuff. So their palate needed to be recalibrated. I’ve had to do the same with salt before.

And I am desensitized to spicy things but like that because I can appreciate more foods that way, or more of the ones I tend to like. But surely it’s a form of damage.

What are you over here wanting to eat?

There’s a specific chemical extract from some berry that makes EVERYTHING taste like Splenda. You can bite into a lemon and it will taste sweet. Lasts a few minutes, fun novelty

Smoking will make you less sensitive to taste. Still too early to tell on vapes.

Strong mint can absolutely knock out other flavors for a time.

I also knew a guy who had cancer (thyroid? Don’t quote me on that,) that the treatment knocked out his sense of taste. Everything except flour.