Taste: Surprising Stories and Science About Why Food Tastes Good (31 page)

Certain kids don’t like vegetables, and they’re not just trying to make your life difficult. It’s not your cooking, either. It has to do with their developing systems’ protective mechanisms. Many vegetables have a bitter taste component,
and rejecting bitter ensures that they won’t poison themselves before they know better. This inborn hatred takes years to dissipate. Sometimes it mellows into a mere dislike of vegetables; sometimes it disappears altogether. This will depend on individual anatomy and genetics, both of which influence taster type. But mostly, it will depend on what children learn from their parents.

Cheese aficionados know that the flavor of a cheese depends on the flavor of the milk that was used to make it. For example, cheese made from cow’s milk savors differently from cheese made from sheep or goat milk. Furthermore, the flavor of the milk depends on the food that the cow (or sheep or goat) ate. I vividly remember eating a piece of cheese in Cologne, Germany, because I had to look down at my plate to make sure that I’d actually eaten cheese and not a vegetable, so strong was the sulfurous, green, vegetal flavor. I thought I tasted notes of cauliflower or broccoli, yet the mouthfeel told me it was cheese. The green, vegetal flavors of the cow’s diet had solidified into a medium-soft cheese. It opened my eyes to the potential complexities of cheese. In the United States, our cheese is made from pasteurized milk and, as with any food, when milk is heated—which is what pasteurization does—the volatile top notes of flavors are flashed off. In Europe, cheese is made from unpasteurized milk, and the resulting range of flavors takes you back to the field, the farm, or the pasture where it originated. You can literally taste the type of grass the cow grazed on.

With this as common knowledge, Monell Chemical Senses Center researcher Julie Mennella wondered whether flavor preferences could also be transferred from human milk to breast-fed babies. She hypothesized that Italian women gave birth to babies who were more tolerant of the flavors in the Italian diet, such as garlic and tomatoes, because their mothers ate these foods when pregnant, and they made their way to the developing babies in utero and after. Similarly, she wondered if Japanese women reared babies who were predisposed to like fish, and so on. Menella recruited pregnant women to participate in an experiment to see if this could be true. She divided the mothers-to-be into three groups. She fed the first group carrot juice during the last trimester of their pregnancies. The second group ate carrots regularly while breast-feeding their newborns, and the third group avoided carrots altogether.

Months later, Mennella brought the babies and their mothers back into the
lab and had the mothers feed their babies plain and carrot-flavored cereal. Sure enough, the babies whose mothers had consumed carrots while pregnant or lactating liked the carrot cereal better than those born of mothers who hadn’t eaten a single carrot while pregnant or nursing. They also made fewer of those adorable newborn
I can’t talk but I’m gonna show you I don’t like
this
faces.

Mennella’s research proved that exposure to flavors as early as in the amniotic fluid and in breast milk can influence babies’ preferences. Her research was done with carrots, a fairly mild food, but imagine the results she might have gotten if she had done the research with garlic or fish. Whatever a pregnant or lactating woman eats, her baby will be exposed to, for better or worse.

I talked with a woman at the Senior Friendship Center in Sarasota, Florida, who grew up hating liver. She was forced to eat it as a child and never developed a liking for it. The first time she got pregnant, she avoided liver like the plague. Even the smell of it made her feel sick. This was also true during her second and third pregnancies. Then something happened after her third child was born: she miraculously started to gain an appreciation for liver. Of course (in what may be a cosmic case of payback), none of her kids would eat liver with her, just as she refused to do with her mother when she was a kid. When she got pregnant the fourth time, she ate liver while carrying the baby and while breast-feeding. Years later she would make liver for herself and her youngest. The only one of her children who had been exposed to liver in utero ended up being the only one who would eat it.

In order to raise kids who eat more healthfully later in life, mothers need to eat healthful foods themselves. If mothers want their kids to eat broccoli, they need to eat it themselves when pregnant and nursing. The same holds true for garlic, fish, and just about everything. Eating a varied diet of beneficial foods during pregnancy and lactation is good advice for the mother’s health and for arming a child with a built-in preference for those same healthful foods. Think of eating salmon, cauliflower, and Brussels sprouts while pregnant as giving your developing baby a vaccine to ward off future vegetable rejection.

We know that even days-old humans can detect smells. If you put something pungent under their noses, you’ll definitely get a reaction. Their olfactory systems work from the get-go. But do smells mean anything to newborns, or do
they have to be taught what smells mean? This question generates a lot of interest. As an example, let’s choose a strong smell that almost all adults would classify as offensive: the odor of feces. A baby with a full diaper can play joyfully with zero care that it’s stinking up the room. At what point in the baby’s life does the smell of poop become negative? Does this rejection of fecal smells develop as the child ages? Or does the child learn that the poopy smell is bad by watching the reaction on the faces of his siblings, parents, and friends when he fills his diaper?

Most scientists believe that aroma preferences are learned, not innate. They argue that taste is constant around the globe, because there are only five tastes and these are inherent in a huge array of foods. Wherever a baby is born, his environment will contain bitter poisons that could kill him, and sweet substances that could nourish him.

Yet there isn’t a single volatile aroma that exists in nature that—at a normal level—could kill or nourish an infant. Aroma preferences don’t ensure the survival of an infant. Taste preferences and rejections do. Smells also vary wildly according to geography. It’s unlikely that a baby in Scandinavia will smell corn tortillas cooking on a griddle. And it’s unlikely that a baby in Mexico will smell the rotten fish surströmming. If Mexican babies were born with a preference for—or more likely against—surströmming, they would never even know it because they’d never run across it (or run away from it). This would be extraordinarily wasteful, cluttering our brain with preferences for or rejections of aromas that the vast majority of humans will never experience.

Even though our scent preferences are acquired through our culture, they still have the power to define what we consider delicious or disgusting, to help turn appetites on and off, and to incite emotions. The bottom line is that we learn to like or hate aromas, unlike tastes, which we’re born loving (sweet) or hating (bitter).

If you have a child who won’t eat something, count your blessings. This indicates that he has a healthy fear of the unknown. This is the same fear that will stop your kid from jumping off a roof, taking a ride with a stranger, or petting a wild animal. We are naturally suspicious of things that are new to us, a fear called
neophobia.
At the dinner table, neophobia can be a source of great tension and frustration.

Luckily for the survival of our species, parents usually protect their children from eating spoiled, poisonous, or otherwise harmful food. But once a young child is out from under his parents’ constant mealtime oversight, between the ages of about two and three, neophobia kicks in. Fear of new foods declines with age. Twentysomethings accept more new foods than kids in high school, who accept more new foods than those in junior high school, who accept more new foods than children in elementary school, and so on down to about the age of two. Under the age of two, children will try (but not necessarily eat) just about anything offered to them.

Experts estimate that most children need five to ten exposures to a new food before accepting it. This doesn’t mean they’ll be clamoring for more lima beans after their sixth try, but they’ll be more likely to start to accept the food. Most parents get frustrated after three or four tries. It’s best to let some time elapse between trial tastings of the new food if you’ve got the patience and the desire to get your kids to eat more healthfully. A week or two later, it’s time to try again.

Don’t use dirty tricks to get your kids to eat their lima beans—it will backfire. If you promise your kids a deep-fried, chocolate-dipped goo-goo cake to reward them for doing their homework or chores, you are unconsciously instilling in them a desire for deep-fried, chocolate-dipped, goo-goo cake. If you bribe them to eat their lima beans with the promise of an extra hour of online gaming or a trip to the toy store, you’re stigmatizing beans as bad foods and ensuring that they’ll like those lima beans less. If you want to instill healthy food attitudes, teach your kids that there are no bad foods. Even a deep-fried, chocolate-dipped, goo-goo cake would be a good food to teach them about taste concepts such as “unbalanced sweetness” and “overly fatty mouthfeel.”

Food neophobia is protective, but these days we rarely encounter (or need to eat) potentially dangerous foods. Unless you’re eating blowfish sushi or high meat,
¹⁶
you’re unlikely to come across much poisonous or spoiled food in your current environment. Yet food neophobia exists for one very real reason: In developed nations people are afraid of new foods because they think such foods are going to taste bad.

People are more likely to eat something new if they are in the right state of mind. One state that you want to steer clear of is arousal—or, in other words, activity and excitement. If you want your kids to try something new, don’t serve it to them at a party or at holiday time. New foods—like most new things in general—are inherently stimulating, so the combination of a novel food and a novel situation can push some kids over the edge. On the other hand, adults seek out new foods as a form of stimulation and entertainment, and some television shows make a huge fuss when the host eats something new for the first time. This is the wrong type of environment to enable the eater to enjoy a new food, says Patricia Pliner, who studies eating behavior at the University of Toronto, but it comes back to individual preferences. Some people are thrill seekers when it comes to food and some are not.

If you want people to accept something new, give them a lot of positive information about it, which helps match their expectations to the reality of what they’re going to eat. The first time I was presented with foie gras, for example, I was horrified, because I despise the flavor and texture of liver. If someone had told me that seared quickly, salted perfectly, and served with toast points, it tasted like my Grandma Ruth’s roast chicken gravy—fatty, salty, chickeny, and loaded with umami—I would have been more likely to try it. Telling people that pomegranate juice was healthful certainly made them drink more of it than they did before they had that information.

Repeated exposure to a food helps adults and children accept it. I used to hate everything about canned tuna fish. Then I took on a tuna project at work. Having to taste canned tuna over and over and over instilled in me a level of familiarity with the product that the smell had kept me from developing. It took me about a year of intermittent tastings to gain appreciation for and discrimination between types of tuna. This allowed me to discover albacore tuna that’s packed fresh in oil—a completely different sensory experience: savory, complex, unctuous, and absolutely satisfying for a healthful meal. Much of the canned tuna sold in the United States is cooked first, then cut or flaked off the bones and put into cans, where it undergoes a second cooking. If you want the best-tasting tuna, look for the fresh-packed kind that is cooked only once. This means it’s packed raw before being cooked in the canning process. As you can see, with repeated exposure I became quite the tuna connoisseur.

In a familiar situation, people are also more likely to try new foods. Imagine someone asking you if you’d like to try a new kind of meat called
nutria.
If you were at your best friend’s house, you’d be more likely to give it a try than if you
were in the break room at work where that guy from accounting told you he’d shot it over the weekend and offered you a bite of his nutria sandwich.

One of the best ways to get someone to try a new food is to employ the concept of
flavor principles
. In the early 1980s, Elisabeth Rozin wrote about the “recurrent flavor combinations and cooking techniques” that give an ethnic food its characteristic signature. For example, Chinese food usually contains ginger, garlic, and scallions. It is often stir-fried or steamed. These recurring flavor principles and cooking techniques make Chinese cuisine different from Japanese and Italian. Rozin believed that flavor principles were useful for introducing new foods within a culture. For example, if you wanted someone who was raised in China to eat a new type of meat, such as nutria, you could stir-fry it with ginger, garlic, and scallions to make it more tempting because the preparation and flavors would be familiar.

Patricia Pliner tested this theory in 1999 at the University of Toronto. Her team offered taste testers a novel food (such as
parval
, an Indian vegetable, or
gathiya
, an Indian snack chip) either plain or with a familiar sauce. When the novel food was paired with a familiar sauce, people were more likely to try it. When you are trying to get your children to eat a novel food, sometimes all they need is a condiment (ranch dressing or ketchup) served alongside it. Better yet would be to cook it in your family’s own flavor principle. In my household that would mean brushing it with fresh extra virgin olive oil, grilling it over high heat, then seasoning it liberally with sea salt and a generous squeeze of juice from fresh lemon wedges. In fact, I’ll bet I could get Roger to eat nutria if I prepared it this way.