It's hard to find a more subjective and personal experience than your own taste. And yet we often don't know what we really like … Why do we like some dishes and not others?

It's amazing how peculiar things taste to people: rotting eggs (China), baked insects and spiders (Thailand), moldy cheese (France), ducklings (Philippines), newborns of mice (Korea), sheep brains (Scotland) . Poles also shock other nations with the fact that they eat pig's blood with groats (black pudding). So it seems that what we like will be one of the most personal and expressive experiences, that there can be no delusions or distortions here: we know exactly what we want to eat. The reality, however, is much more complicated and very strange delusions are also possible in the taste sensations.

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Why do we not like everything?

The feeling that something is tasty depends on many factors, e.g. on hot days we s alt the dishes more (often unconsciously) because the body loses s alt when we sweat. On hot days, we also prefer cool and low-temperature dishes, such as fruit and salads. In general, we like products containing ingredients that our body lacks (here the body tells us that it needs something), and if we eat something or drink it in excess, we will avoid it for some time - this is how a he althy body works. The most expressive example is the aversion to alcohol that a he althy person feels the day after abusing alcohol.

We also have taste preferences implanted by evolution: we like sweet and fatty things because they contain many calories, and we have inherited the preferences of high-calorie products from the ancestors. Such taste was conducive to survival in the past. Likewise, what disgusts us is in part inheritance from our ape ancestors - our species have learned to avoid anything that puts us at risk of falling ill or contracting them. That is why we look at all body secretions with disgust, avoiding the smell of faeces, urine, rotting and spoiled food, etc.

Our taste is also influenced by the culinary habits of a given community and personal experiences. In our culture, for example in winter, we like to eat soupswarming up the body. Some people use more pepper because they also feel that it is getting warmer.Also, what we learned to eat before the age of 3, we will treat as "normal food."Until the age of 2-3, most children do not feel disgusted yet and eat most of it, what their parents give them.

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The tastes are passed on from generation to generation

In some parts of the world you eat foods that in others are considered strange or horrible. If we have learned to eat something as young children, in old age we will probably eat it without disgust, and the message that it is "normal food" will reach our children. This is how the taste preferences typical of a specific culture are passed on from generation to generation.

The sense of taste can be shaped

All these factors shape our culinary preferences. However, you can tell a man that he tastes what he has never really liked! Here is the evidence. In one experiment, people were asked to complete a "taste questionnaire" - to evaluate the palatability of different foods. Researchers analyzed the results and 'recreated' past cooking experiences, and then reported them to the test subjects. So some people found out that they had been poisoned by eggs as children, and others that they had been poisoned by cucumbers.

In fact, all this information was fabricated, the experimenters wondered whether it is possible to change a person's tastes by convincing him that one day he was consumed with some product. But does such a false memory have the power to alter taste preferences? It turned out that it was - the effect of implanting a made-up belief was a change in the taste preferences of the respondents! Even 4 months after the end of the experiment, people tended to avoid eggs or cucumbers, and yet they did not get poisoned at all (as the researchers knew from other sources). In addition, the respondents assessed the taste of these dishes much worse if they had no other choice and had to really try them (during another experiment).

It seems that the implanted, untrue beliefs about what does not serve us culinary or does not taste good become partially true - we start to avoid certain products and they stop tasty. Fortunately, positive culinary memories can be evoked in a similar way. If the subjects were informed that they loved, for example, asparagus in their childhood, it turned out that some time after the experiment they consumed much more of it than people in the control group who were not implanted with suchbeliefs.

Does this mean that we can change people's taste preferences?This is what the experiments show. Perhaps this is important for parents: if they tell their children that they once poisoned themselves, that a product is hideous for them, the children will probably avoid it as well.

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Aversion to tastes encoded in the subconscious mind

Our personal culinary taste is also influenced by accidental events, e.g. if someone has poisoned himself with sauerkraut, he will look at it with disgust for years, even if he consciously does not remember the event of poisoning. Our body codes the relationships between the taste of food and food poisoning very accurately, quickly and for a long time, and even if this information is not available to our consciousness, it evokes specific emotions (e.g. disgust).

People can be instilled with artificial memories not only about their taste preferences. Condition: they must be stated reliably. Each of us carries such artificial memories in our minds. The brain cannot tell them apart from the real ones.

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