Lesson 3 The World of Tastes
Love This? Hate That? Polarizing Foods
Is there any food you don’t like, while many others just can’t stop loving it?
For Isabella, such food is cilantro, the green leaves common in the cuisines of Thailand, Mexico, Morocco, and many other countries.
Even though her family is from Thailand, Isabella loves meeting other people who don’t like cilantro since they don’t make her feel so odd or weird.
Cilantro is one of those polarizing foods with lots of fans and haters, which often include mushrooms, olives, and blue cheese, among others.
“Love it” or “hate it” is pretty clear for these foods, but there could be many reasons behind the preference.
Let us talk about three of them.
Biology
First of all, we need to be clear about the role of the tongue.
The information our tongues send to our brains is very simple.
We generally like sweetness and hate bitterness, and the biological reasons for that are deeply rooted in our brains.
For one, babies like sweet tastes, not bitter ones, since bitterness can indicate poison.
Not liking bitter things is, in a sense, a natural defense mechanism.
Due to genetic differences, some people may be more sensitive than others to bitterness.
Interestingly, how sensitive you are to bitterness doesn’t always relate to whether or not you like a certain type of food.
For example, the fact that someone thinks celery is more bitter than other people find it does not necessarily mean the person can’t grow to like it.
Likewise, even if you find it to be less bitter than others do, you may still hate it.
The information our tongues convey does not, however, paint a full picture of the world of tastes.
There are also flavors, a wider spectrum of sensations we get from food.
To appreciate flavors such as chocolate, vanilla, blue cheese, and cilantro, we need not just our tongues, but more importantly our noses.
As we chew food, its smells make their way to the back of our noses from inside our mouths, enabling us to distinguish between many flavors.
Some scientists discovered that individuals with a certain gene are more sensitive to the smell of cilantro.
These people are likely to say it has a soapy flavor.
Personal Experiences
Can we learn to like a food we’ve long disliked?
“Your biology is not your destiny.
When you’re open to different foods, you learn to like what you eat,”
answers Julie Mennella, a researcher from the Monell Chemical Senses Center.
She says that kids are particularly adaptable when it comes to learning to like new foods.
Research has shown that after tasting a food eight or ten times, children will become more accepting of it.
Similarly, even people who hate cilantro may be able to learn to tolerate it or even like it.
Over time and through exposure, they can build up tolerance to cilantro, by adding a small amount in a curry, for example.
While preferences can be changed, usually after a few trials, significant experiences with foods — especially those you had when you were young—can have a lasting effect.
Suppose you are hospitalized.
Confined to a bed, you get served miyeokguk too many times.
Then, you could avoid the food for a long time.
In contrast, associations with good memories can make you like some foods.
For example, you might love sujeonggwa simply because of a warm, happy memory of your grandmother making it.
Culture
Food preferences vary across cultures, too.
Every culture may have something that is considered disagreeable in other cultures.
Durian fruit from Southeast Asia or American sweet potato pie topped with marshmallows may seem distasteful to people not familiar with them.
In fact, food preferences in different parts of the world have a lot to do with what is available or essential:
for instance, beans in Mexico, okra in India, and fermented shark in Iceland.
Of course, we cannot predict food preferences solely on the basis of a person’s cultural background, as Isabella’s case showed with cilantro.
It is not surprising that our food preferences are as varied as the foods we eat.
Some of the preferences are biological, and some are learned.
Given this, is it any wonder that all sorts of foods have both fans and haters?
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