flavor vs. emotion

cultural 

1. pumpkin spice: happy, calm
and so, candy cane and gingerbread: happy childhood memories,
2. flavor is defined as sensory impression of substances expressed by smell, taste, texture and emotion,
3.  we use adjectives associated to favors: sweet, sour, bitter,

psycho-somatic

4. (from ene vainik paper)

connecting sweetness to love and bitterness to anger is a quite abstract kind of decision and not truly related to any bodily sensation or imagination of respective tasting experience. The evaluative dichotomy pleasant vs unpleasant functions as a grounding in our knowledge, which reinforces if not causes us to see emotions and taste similar or analogous to each other. Why to choose the taste of bitter rather than salty or sour to be the opposite of sweet in the domain of emotions seems to rely on the inherent negativity or displeasing quality of how the bitter taste was culturally conceptualized. In a traditional rural economy both salty and sour taste accompanied the processes of food conservation and made sense as the by-products of the survival techniques. The taste of bitter, however, had no such excuse and could be evaluated not only as displeasing but also as “useless” from the viewpoint of survival. 

paper by edmund t. rolls, from oxford neurophysiology dpt. here's the abstract.

There are five types of taste receptor cell, sweet, salt, bitter, sour, and umami (protein taste). There are 1000 olfactory receptor genes each specifying a different type of receptor each for a set of odors. Tastes are primary, unlearned, rewards and punishers, and are important in emotion. Pheromones and some other olfactory stimuli are primary reinforcers, but for many odors the reward value is learned by stimulus–reinforcer association learning. The primary taste cortex in the anterior insula provides separate and combined representations of the taste, temperature, and texture (including fat texture) of food in the mouth independently of hunger and thus of reward value and pleasantness. One synapse on, in the orbito-frontal cortex, these sensory inputs are for some neurons combined by learning with olfactory and visual inputs, and these neurons encode food reward value in that they only respond to food when hungry, and in that activations correlate with subjective pleasantness. Cognitive factors, including word-level descriptions, and attention, modulate the representation of the reward value of taste, odor, and flavor in the orbito-frontal cortex and a region to which it projects, the anterior cingulate cortex. Further, there are individual differences in the representation of the reward value of food in the orbito-frontal cortex. Overeating and obesity are related in many cases to an increased reward value of the sensory inputs produced by foods, and their modulation by cognition and attention that override existing satiety signals.

in other words, emotions, as states elicited by instrumental reinforcers (e.g., a warm pleasant feeling produced by a soft caressing touch), can be seen to provide an evolutionary adaptive value account of why genes, for example, taste receptor genes, code for the reward or punisher value of some stimuli.

paper by shrikant patil addressing pheromones as sex scent signals,

take this with you: reward-punisher, taste receptor genes, evolutionary adaptative behavior,

evolutive

5. primary reinforcers: pheromones, (odors such as ripe fruit, and the smell of rotting food).
6. inter-species odors: odors of individuals may be pleasant because of major histo-compatibility complex genes, (e.g. same tribe, cultural region, etc). people smell like the foods they use. which specify olfactory receptors that signal reward produced be the smell of another individual with different immune system. 
6. The adaptive value is that offspring produced with an individual with a different immune system may have more diverse immune systems, and thereby greater resistance to disease. However,many odors only become reinforcers by a learned, stimulus–reinforcer association.
7. the odor of the cheese brie may be initially unpleasant, but may become pleasant after learned association with its taste and fatty texture (fatty texture is a primary reinforcer because of a high-energy value food).

wine and its rich associations  

                                                      above a eno-vino-pedia chart, very useful