Free You May Also Like by Tom Vanderbilt Page A

with its attendant nausea, grew to dislike that flavor (more than the familiar flavors they liked). With liking for all foods diminished, patients were in little mood for novelty.One way to avoid the treatment from negatively interfering with normal appetites, interestingly, was to provide a new “scapegoat” flavor—like Life Savers candy—during patients’ normal meals. The scapegoat flavor, rather than the usual foods, absorbed the brunt of disliking. This plays into our tendency to want to like familiar foods and to dislike the novel.
    In Pelchat’s study, sponsored by a tea company wanting to see if Americans could acquire a taste for unsweetened teas, people even grew to like the tea more that did not have the glucose hit. Why? Simply because they were drinking it more than once. In 1968, the psychologist Robert B. Zajonc, in a profoundly influential paper, termed what he called the “mere exposure” effect: “Mere repeated exposure of the individual to a stimulus is sufficient condition for the enhancement of his attitude toward it.” He was not actually talking about food, but exposure has come to be a central idea in food liking.In one typical study, children as young as two sampled a collection of unfamiliar fruits and cheeses for twenty-six days in a row. When they were later given a choice between random pairs of the food objects they had tried, they chose the ones they had had more often—even when they had spat those out initially.
    Try it, the old Alka-Seltzer ad (cheekily) promised, you’ll like it. Parents do not usually have the patience of researchers (nor can they resort to gastric tubes).They often abandon efforts to give their children new foods after three or four tries.In an English study, one groupwas asked to repeatedly eat spinach, not a huge delicacy in England. Another group was asked to eat peas, which are more liked. People began to like spinach a bit more, particularly those who disliked it at first. But liking for peas started high and stayed high.People liked peas because they were already used to liking peas.
    Exposure speaks to the idea that we like what we know. But to know it means we first have to eat it, even if we dislike it.In one study, people began to like an initially disliked low-salt soup after having it just a few times (the soup was not labeled “low salt,” because this in itself could be enough to negatively sway liking).In another experiment, people ate canned ratatouille servings with successively higher levels of chili added. The hotter the burn, the more they grew to like it. George Orwell, in his 1946 essay “A Nice Cup of Tea,” predicted this kind of taste adaptation: “Some people would answer that they don’t like tea in itself, that they only drink it in order to be warmed and stimulated, and they need sugar to take the taste away. To those misguided people I would say: Try drinking tea without sugar for, say, a fortnight and it is very unlikely that you will ever want to ruin your tea by sweetening it again.”
    Liking is learning: This truism runs from entire cultures down to the individual. The exposure effects begin even before we are born. Like carrot juice as an infant?Chances are your mother did. The odors and tastes were all around you, in the atmosphere of amniotic fluid that was your earliest dining experience.Trained sensory panelists can even tell which women have consumed garlic pills based on the scent of their amniotic fluid alone.Out of the womb, we strain toward the things we prefer (that is, the familiar) and make “aversive gapes” at the things we dislike.Making faces is part of the social experience of liking and, especially, disliking: We send cues about what we are eating and look for information about what others are eating.
    Simply seeing other people eating something seems to promote liking. In a classic study looking at the feeding of children in a