Free You May Also Like by Tom Vanderbilt Page B

women’s prison in the 1930s, children’s preferences seemed to be informed by whoever was feeding them: “Babies who refused tomato juice were found to be fed by adults who also expressed a dislike for tomato juice.”In a study of preschoolers, a “target” child who preferred one vegetable to another was seated with three classmates who had the opposite preference.By the second day of the study, the target child had already switched preferences. Exposure to people, as much as food itself, influences our liking.
    â€”
    Mysteries still abound in our liking for food. Consider the simple question of why we should suddenly like something that we previously disliked. Very few of us “like” a substance like coffee or beer the first time we drink it, but many of us come to like it. All tastes are, in essence, “acquired tastes.” Or, as Pelchat suggests, “an acquired
liking
is really what we should say.”
    And when we talk about “acquired tastes,” we should really be talking about “acquired flavors,” as Dana Small, an associate fellow in Yale University’s John B. Pierce Laboratory who studies the neuropsychology of eating, suggested to me. We are not born knowing about flavors like coffee; we simply know the drink as bitter and thus bad. “The bitter is there as a sign that there is a potential toxin in whatever you’re sampling,” she said. “You just want to know that; you don’t want to have to learn that.”
    But no one is born liking, or not liking, chicken feet. Those “gatekeeper” taste systems, after all, would not likely know feet from wing. It is all chicken. Before food even gets to us, culture has done that first big sort, sifting out the boundaries of what is acceptable to like. “The French eat horses and frogs but the British eat neither,” notes Jared Diamond.As with any food, the French, during a discrete historical moment, had to be taught to “learn to like” horse as food. But what we like in
taste
, as opposed to flavor, is remarkably similar around the world. As John Prescott writes in
Taste Matters
, “The sweet taste of sucrose in water, is optimally pleasant at around 10–12 percent by weight (approximately the same as is found in many ripe fruits), regardless of whether you are from Japan, Taiwan, or Australia.”
    Flavor conditioning helps us to like or dislike flavors. The benefit of this is, as Small put it, that we can “learn to like the foods that are available to us, and avoid particular foods rather than entire classes of nutrients.” When she was young, she went to a popular sailing event in her hometown of Victoria, British Columbia. With college friends, she partook of one too many drinks of Malibu and 7UP, an unholy andintensely cloying concoction of sweet, coconut-flavored rum and citrusy soda pop. “That was twenty years ago,” she recalled. “I can’t even wear coconut suntan lotion. It makes me ill.”
    Through a complex chain of activity in the brain, she said, we learn “flavor objects”—the “perceptual gestalt” of touch, taste, and smell in everything we eat. “Did this food make me sick? Did this food give me energy? You learn preferences based on the entire flavor object.” The flavor object itself is “created” by a network of neural activity, described as “a distributed circuit including the neural representation of the odor object, unimodal taste cells, unimodal oral somatosensory cells, multimodal cells, and a ‘binding mechanism.’ ” You do not just “taste” a strawberry; you virtually conjure it into being.
    Coffee—the actual substance—becomes no less bitter the hundredth time we drink it than the first time we drank it. But something happens. “It
becomes
coffee,” Small said. “The brain has learned that coffee is not a