Taste aversion is when someone avoids a food that they had a negative experience with. It is considered a learned association because it follows an experience. In extreme cases, if the person eats the food that caused negative symptoms again, they might feel mimicked illness sensations. In other cases, they may just avoid eating the food again. Taste aversion can be used as a survival instinct for some species where they are avoiding toxic foods that may cause death with prolonged exposure. In lecture we talked about an example where wolves were fed sheep infused with a substance to make them sick. After that, the wolves avoided the living sheep because they were afraid of getting sick again. When it comes to humans, we have a wide knowledge of what foods are deathly poisonous to us, but we can still have negative reactions towards certain foods.
In my own life, I now avoid a particular restaurant because of a negative experience following eating there. I had an experience with what I believe to be food poisoning from a seafood restaurant. After eating sushi there, I went home feeling fine. Later that night I started to feel queasy and was throwing up all night and into the next day. After a few days I was feeling perfectly fine again, and I had no additional symptoms that would suggest another form of sickness such as the flu. Although I have eaten sushi since then, I have avoided that restaurant because it reminds me of getting sick. I am not sure if that food was the source of my sickness, but because the sickness came the night after eating the sushi, my brain believed it came from that meal. I have yet to try the sushi again, so I am unsure if I would have mimicked illness sensations, but the thought of eating the sushi makes me think negatively about it.
References:
Chambers, K. C. (2018). Conditioned taste aversions. World Journal of Otorhinolaryngology – Head and Neck Surgery, 4(1), 92–100. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wjorl.2018.02.003