Neural responses to taste administration are highly dynamic—single-neuron responses reflect first taste presence, then taste identity, and then taste palatability (an experience-dependent variable that is intimately tied to consumption/rejection decisions), all within the first second following administration. Our ensemble analysis reveals the firing-rate transitions between these response “epochs� to be precipitous, near-instantaneous, and coherent across populations of simultaneously-recorded cortical neural ensembles; the sequence of attractor-like population states is highly reliable, but the timing of any particular transition varies from trial to trial. Furthermore, the onset of the late, palatability-related state provides a high-quality prediction of decision-related behavior (the latency of which also varies widely from trial to trial). Together, our data reveal a dynamical characterization of the taste system in action.