Read Online First Bite: How We Learn to Eat by Bee Wilson - Free Book Online

acceptance of vegetables—with fewer dislikes—than taster children in the same healthy environment. The interesting—and troubling—thing was what happened to the children in the unhealthy food environment. Here, the likes and dislikes of tasters and nontasters were not very different. The big difference was in the BMI of the children. In the unhealthy environment, the nontaster childrenhad higher BMIs than any of the other groups studied. Their average BMI score was over 1.6, which counts as obese.
    What matters most for determining whether your tastes will be healthy ones is not whether you have a sprout-hating gene, but how your genetic predispositions interact with your food environment. Once environment is taken into account, being a nontaster poses bigger health risks in our current state of plenty and junk than being a supertaster. Several studies have now found that nontasters—adults as well as children—are the ones who tend to have higher BMIs. The theory is that nontasters—since they do not experience certain flavors with the same intensity—are more responsive to the influences around them, for good or ill. They learn their likes more easily than supertasters. In a healthy food environment, they will easily acquire healthy tastes. When offered vegetables, they are less likely than supertasters to dismiss them as too bitter. But if they learn to love the wrong foods, the nontasters can find themselves—like those New York children—obese by the age of six.
    So, no, you can’t blame your dislike of sprouts simply on having a faulty gene. If everyone’s first nibble of sprouts was of Ottolenghi’s own sprouts with caramelized garlic and lemon peel, charred in a hot pan until sweetly blackened at the edges, maybe they would be the most popular of all the vegetables. Perhaps your parents were sprout-haters and—without meaning to—turned you against them. Or perhaps they forced them on you too vehemently. I know someone—a PROP supertaster, as it happens—who says she can never enjoy Brussels sprouts—though she has no quarrel with broccoli—because of memories of Christmas Day, when she was compelled by her parents to cut each hated sprout into quarters, and swallow them unchewed, like bitter pills. Maybe you never actually tasted sprouts because you “knew” you wouldn’t like them, because in our society the child who loves sprouts is considered a little odd. When the food writer Michele Humes arrived in the United States from Hong Kong, it took her a while to get her head around the concept that “ children weren’t supposed to like vegetables .”
    Likes and dislikes cannot be reduced to molecules and genes. This is bad news for the more sensationalist health pages, which thrive off headlines like “Revealed: The Obesity Gene.” For the rest of us, it is—potentially—excellent information. It means that our food habits are not final and fixed, but adaptable and open, if only we will give ourselves half a chance. We did not come into the world disliking bitter greens; we were taught to dislike them by our environment. Taste may be identity, but it is not destiny. The hope—and admittedly, it’s a slim one at present for the children whose dislikes are vegetables and whose likes are all junk—is that while we are stuck with our genes, the environment is something that can change.
     
    The main way we learn to like foods is simply by trying them. The term “mere exposure” was coined by Robert Zajonc in 1968. Zajonc’s thesis was that affection is triggered by familiarity; and that disliking, conversely, is fear of the novel. Some of Zajonc’s early experiments involved showing subjects complex shapes for very short periods of time. When the subjects were later asked to choose their favorite shapes from a lineup, there was a marked preference for the shapes they had already encountered. Zajonc has suggested that there are similar forces at work when we favor Brie over Camembert.