My roommate and I eat dinner together all the time and every time she gets a pickle with her meal. I can never understand why because I detest pickles. Why does taste differ from person to person? I have always thought of it as our taste buds being wired differently. That sounds logical but I have also noticed that my tastes have changed over time. Foods I did not like as a child I adore now. Beside the fact that children judge the look of food and not the taste, can taste be acquired and not “programmed” into our liking?

A basic understanding of taste buds is a good starting point for all these questions. After food enters our mouth and begins to be broken down by our teeth and the enzymes in our saliva, the food reaches our “papillae”. The papillae is the group of thousands of bumps that cover your tongue. Each one of these bumps are made up of onion-like structures that contain taste cells folded together. Taste buds are actually designed to tell us whether what we are about to eat is safe or not. But what we use them for regularly is what I am more interested in- our likes and dislikes. However, this determination involves more than just the tastebuds. It involves all five senses– sight, hearing, taste, smell and touch. The sense most closely associated with taste is smell. As we take a bite of something, small amounts of air are forced up the back of our mouths and into our nose. This process is called Retronasal Olfaction. Our brain associates smell with taste and helps us determine if we enjoy the food or not.

Although our brain has a lot to do with it, our preferences are formed over our life time, beginning even before we are born. I wonder if our mother’s preferences influence ours. If my mother ate mango often while she was pregnant with me, will I automatically like mango? Will I like mango more than other fruits? It turns out that it does have an impact. Children are more likely to enjoy a food if their mother ate it while pregnant. This actually goes back to evolution and determining whether our food is safe. The fact that our mothers ate a certain food automatically tells us it is safe to eat which leads us to enjoy it more. I never considered that our  evolution could be such a big part of what we eat. While evolution is a large contributor, our tastes can be affected by the smallest factors such as what plate we are eating on. I asked if our preferences change and the answer is they can change over days or years due to our surroundings and how our five senses react. Taste is a mixture of personal reactions to food in the brain, from our surroundings and even from evolution.