Food: The Science of Scrumptious

Why do we loathe lumpy food, pick at our plates, and believe that chocolate will cure all ills? They say there's no accounting for taste, but science is giving it a try.

By Kathleen McGowan, published on September 01, 2003 - last reviewed on May 11, 2009

In the course of her survey, Kauer found a few extremely picky people. (One woman she interviewed, for example, ate little more than canned brains, undercooked French fries and fried eggs. Kauer thinks this intensely fastidious eating is probably related to obsessive-compulsive behavior.) Questioning the pickiest third further, Kauer identified a master list of foods that are almost universally accepted: fried chicken, French fries, chocolate chip cookies, and above all else, Kraft macaroni and cheese. ("People seem to respond to the orange color," she says. "Maybe it's a signal that it's really fake and therefore really safe.") Obviously, these are all classic comfort foods, but more important for the picky person, they are unlikely to have weird or surprising ingredients. "We all know what's in fried chicken, for example, even if we get it from some place we've never been before," she says.

Most of us roll our eyes in irritation at a dining companion who insists on garlic-free pasta or shreds a brownie to pick out the nuts. We should be more tolerant, Kauer says. Food habits are a deep part of identity, closer to religion than to biology. The omnivore who devours durian fruit and fried locusts is just as proud of his neophilia as the choosy eater is of his selectivity. "We don't talk about it, but all of us have very strong feelings about what we eat and don't eat," she says.

Kauer theorizes that fastidious eaters have lost touch with the social context of food. As part of her survey, Kauer asked people to imagine three different scenarios in which they might choose to eat a food they hated: if they'd had nothing to eat for 12 hours, if they'd gone without anything at all for three days, or if poor hosts offered the food and it would be insulting to refuse it. That last scenario—in which rejecting the food would be a social embarrassment rather than a physical hardship—was the most powerful motivator for everyone except the pickiest eaters, who still refused it.

The psychology of pleasure and of food choice has been largely overlooked in the massive scientific effort to combat obesity and other food-related health problems. But as Rozin suggests, what we think about food could turn out to be as important as what we put in our mouths. It's a pleasure principle most of us could learn to live with: Eat up—it's good for you.