As we age, we develop a taste for foods with hints of bitter, especially if they are sweet or fatty, like buttered Brussels sprouts or dark chocolate. That may make physiological sense, Drewnowski hypothesizes. Acrid-tasting foods like broccoli and kale are loaded with cancer-fighting antioxidants. The bitterness is no accident. The anticarcinogenic compounds that taste astringent to us are actually toxins too—poisonous to the insects that chew on the plants. Human efforts to cultivate milder versions of bitter vegetables may be breeding the nutritional value right out of them, Drewnowski observes: "The amount of bitterness in the food supply is a fraction of what it used to be."
Our palates all have the same five types of detectors, the same aversion to bitter and mania for sweet. So why are our individual preferences so different? Mennella, for one, thinks our proclivities are shaped at a very early age. Her experiments show that we probably get our first taste of the world through the amniotic fluid that shelters us and that this prenatal experience carries over into the first year of life. If pregnant women drank carrot juice daily during late pregnancy, Mennella found, their babies at 6 months seemed to like carrot-flavored cereal much more than other 6-month-olds. She and her colleagues at Monell have also shown that nursing babies seem to detect flavors like garlic, ethanol (from alcoholic drinks) and vanilla in their mothers' milk. A baby who has never tasted garlic will suckle longer the first time his or her mother eats it, presumably gathering extra information about this peculiar new flavor. "[Mother's milk] is one of the first ways babies learn," she says.
Breast-fed babies whose mothers eat a wide range of foods are more likely to embrace new foods later on, her research has shown, and infants fed on harsh-tasting formulas remain more tolerant of bitter and sour at age 4 or 5. Mennella thinks this may be a hint as to how individual flavor preferences begin developing. "Our olfactory memories are oldest, most resistant to change," she says. "I think that underlies why certain foods are very much preferred—they are associated with things that occur early in life."
Cravings—intense and specific longings for one particular food—probably also have more do to with culture and childhood than with a biological urge for missing nutrients. In cross-cultural studies spanning three continents, psychologists Scott Parker of the American University in Washington, D.C., Debra Zellner of New Jersey's Montclair State University, American University student Niveen Kamel and Ana Garriga-Trillo of the Spanish national university UNED demolished the dictum that women universally crave chocolate. While women in Egypt, Spain and the United States do tend to crave sweeter foods than men do, the hankering for chocolate varied. Men and women in Spain were equally likely to crave chocolate. Egyptian women, by contrast, couldn't care less about cocoa—only 6 percent named chocolate as their most favored food. Mostly, they craved savory treats like meat-stuffed eggplant or a typical Egyptian broth-based soup.
Attitudes toward eating in general are strongly cultural, and the legendary food psychologist Paul Rozin of the University of Pennsylvania has shown that Americans have a particularly bad attitude toward food. While the French relish their meals and gobble down cheese, sausage and other high-fat delicacies, Americans are consumed with worry and anxiety, fearing fried eggs as death-in-a-skillet and obsessing over fat-free treats. Compared to the Japanese, the French and the Belgians, Rozin found, Americans worry most about food but are least likely to call themselves "healthy eaters." He hypothesizes that losing touch with the hardwired pleasure of eating may itself be bad for our health. In the United States, "one of the most pleasant of human activities has become drenched in worry," he argues.
Family and culture don't account for all our individual variability, though. "The correlation between parents' and their children's food preferences only goes so far," says Rozin. Pickiness, for example, seems to be highly idiosyncratic. In the first comprehensive survey of food pickiness among adults, anthropologist Jane Kauer interviewed nearly 500 adult Americans about their attitudes toward foods, food variety and eating habits. Kauer, who conducted the research as a doctoral student with Rozin, found that mild pickiness is quite widespread—about one-third of her volunteers described themselves as "unusually picky eaters."
It may not be surprising to learn that 60 percent of us like to leave our plates clean or that close to half of us eat just about the same thing for breakfast nearly every day. But stranger habits are also common. Many people refuse to drink while they eat. Others won't eat food that is lumpy or has a filling, like raviolis or egg rolls. Nearly 20 percent of us are repelled by raw tomatoes (something about the gooeyness inside the firmness), and about the same fraction of us simply don't like trying new foods.
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