Cupcake or okra?
We’re designed to prefer certain foods, and dislike others — this helps keep the species alive. However, we’re designed with a certain amount of flexibility. Throughout our lives, we can learn to change our likes and dislikes.
Bitter foods may be poisonous, slimy ones may contain bacteria, moldy foods may contain poisonous fungi. Not all of them do, but we’re designed to avoid them just in case. Underripe fruits are sour and grainy/mealy — we’re designed to avoid these sensations because ripe fruit provides more energy and underripe fruit can cause digestive problems. When we’re young, our initial reaction to these tastes and mouthfeels is dislike. But if a parent who loves you keeps feeding you foods with one of these properties, with a smile on their face and maybe alongside a food you enjoy, and they enjoy it themselves, you’ll end up liking that food as well. Blue cheese may appear horrible to the uninitiated, but to some people it’s delicious. There’s a cultural element in this — for example, many Asian cultures love bitter foods, the more bitter the better, but give them a smelly cheese and they’re probably going to dislike it.
On the other hand, we’re naturally attracted to sweet and fatty foods. They provide a lot of energy, which is essential in survival situations. Luckily most of us are unlikely to starve — unluckily we still enjoy these foods and mouthfeels, and this makes it harder for use to balance energy consumed and energy expended. So we put on weight.
Sometimes an external factor affects these natural, unconscious thoughts. If you eat a certain food and get sick afterwards, you might unconsciously (or even consciously) think that the food made you sick. It might be totally illogical — something else completely may have made you sick — but you won’t feel able to eat that food ever again.
Many of us grew up with a few familiar foods that we ate time and again. For some people, a dish cooked even slightly differently from how their mom cooked it is just “wrong.” There are endless discussions about what is the “right” chili or barbeque style.
Comfort from familiarity also happens on a national level. Until the 1950s, in most of the West yogurt was a strange food that people wouldn’t even try because it sounded foreign. It took decades to come into general acceptance. We tend to like cuisines we’re familiar with, and it’s not unusual to dislike a food or cuisine because you weren’t exposed to it at an early age.
Most people try to fit into society, and accept the social norms of eating. You’re more likely to like a food if your friends like it. In the West, insects aren’t considered a food at all, and most people think that organ meats are horrible. In some other cultures, these are perfectly normal to eat, and even savored. There are fashions in food — foods in aspic were all the rage in the 1970s, but nowadays many people would turn up their noses at them.
Alternatively, some people may eat or avoid different foods, in order to stand out from a group they want to be different from.
What foods do you just love, or just hate, without any logical reason, apart from “yum” or “yeuch”?
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