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With rats, the equation is fairly simple: If they eat it, they like it. The more they eat, the more they like (and vice versa). Rat eating behavior does not change according to who is watching or to feelings of guilt or virtuousness. Humans are trickier. Asking people what they like often does not reveal the full truth of what they eat, but neither does measuring what they eat always match up with what they like.
In Zellner's plating study, the same restaurant meal, on different nights, was presented first rather conventionally and then with a bit more flair. People who got the latter treatment actually reported liking the food more. When plates were weighed, however, there was no difference between the “conventional” and “flair” groups in the amount of food consumed.

Zellner, who has spent decades thinking about liking, is herself a case study for the vagaries of it. As we sat down, she informed me that she is allergic to dairy. Does this mean she instinctively does not like it? Not at all. To acquire a “conditioned taste aversion,” a visceral dislike of a food, one must generally vomit after consuming it. The reason for this is an ongoing mystery. As Paul Rozin wondered, “
What is the adaptive value of endowing nausea with a qualitatively different (hedonic) change as opposed to other events, including gut pain?” Perhaps the simple intensity of dislike, the conscious removal of the food
from the stomach itself
, sears itself into memory.

The importance of the nauseous response may even go beyond food: Rozin notes that the “aversive gape”—that scrunching and slight opening of the mouth upon ingesting something gross—has the “
function to promote egress of substances from the mouth.”
This particular face (
and we use more facial muscles when we eat food we do not like) is what we also use to signal all kinds of disgust, from bad smells
to unpleasant images to moral transgressions. Disgust
began
, he suggested, with disliked food: the mouth as gatekeeper, the gape as message.
Instances of disgusting behavior, which leave a “bad taste in the mouth,” may in some ancient or metaphoric sense be akin to an actual bad taste in the mouth that needs to be expelled.

Precisely because Zellner is allergic, she has never eaten enough of a dairy product to get severe nausea. So she dwells in a purgatory of pleasure—pitched somewhere between desire and revulsion. She admitted to not caring for the mouthfeel of many dairy products. “Maybe because I know that it means I have just consumed something that might make me feel bad. I don't know.” To complicate matters, she occasionally “cheats” with cheese, eating tiny shards of especially alluring varieties.

The waiter appeared. “Is this your first time at Del Posto?” It is an innocent question but one that itself is important, as we shall see. As we study the menu, one of the principal liking questions looms. “What determines what you're selecting?” Zellner asked, as I wavered between the “Heritage Pork Trio” with “Ribollita alla Casella and Black Cabbage Stew” and the “Wild Striped Bass” with “Soft Sunchokes, Wilted Romaine & Warm Occelli Butter.” “What I'm choosing, is that liking?” she continues. “It's not liking the taste, because I don't have it in my mouth.” If I had been to this restaurant before and had a particular dish, I might remember liking it. One might argue that liking is entirely based on memory: The single biggest predictor for whether you will like a food is whether you have had it before (more on that in a while).

But let us say it is new to me. Perhaps I like the
idea
of it, because it reminds me of similar choices in the past. “
Choices depend on tastes,” as one economist wrote, “as tastes depend on past choices.” Perhaps it is the way the entrée is described. Language is a seasoning that can make food seem even more palatable. Words like “warm” and “soft” and “heritage” are not idle; they are appetizers for the brain. In his book
The Omnivorous Mind
, the neuroscientist John S. Allen notes that simply hearing an onomatopoetic word like “crispy”—which the chef Mario Batali calls “
innately appealing”—is “
likely to evoke the sense of eating that type of food.”
The more tempting the language, the more strongly one rehearses the act of consumption. The economist Tyler Cowen argues one should resist such blandishments and order the thing that sounds
least
appetizing on a menu. “
An item won't be on
the menu unless there's a good reason for its presence,” he writes. “If it sounds bad, it probably tastes especially good.”

But it is hard to find anything that does not appetize on this menu. “It all sounds so good,” says Zellner (a curious phrase because we are reading the menu to ourselves). At this point, all we can be sure of what we like is this: We like to choose.
The mere fact of having a menu of items from which to choose, research has shown, lifts all our liking for
all
items on that menu.
And while the anticipation of our choice excites us, our anticipation of being able to
make
a choice, as brain imaging work has shown, seems to result in more neural activity than simply looking forward to getting something without making a choice.

If language helps us “pre-eat” the food, something similar goes on as we merely consider the choice. “Prefeeling” is how the psychologists Timothy Wilson and Daniel Gilbert have described it. In their view, we “try out” different future scenarios, taking our hedonic response in the moment as a gauge of how we are going to feel about our choice in the future. Not surprisingly,
thinking
about rewards seems to prompt similar brain activity to actually
experiencing
rewards. Even thinking about the future calls upon memory, however. Amnesiacs often have trouble “prospecting,” or looking ahead, because, as Wilson and Gilbert describe it, “
memories are the building blocks of simulations.” You will not really know if you are going to like something you have never had until you have had it.

Which raises the question: Are you better off ordering your favorite food off a menu or something you have never had? Rozin had suggested to me it might depend on where you want your pleasure to occur: before, during, or after the meal. “The anticipated pleasure is greater if it's your favorite food. You've had it, you're familiar with it, you know what it's like. The
experienced
pleasure is probably going to be higher for your favorite,” he says. “On the other hand, for remembered pleasures, you're much better off ordering a new food. If you order your favorite food, it's not going to be a memory—you've had it already.”

Liking is really about anticipation and memory. Even as you are looking forward to something, you are looking backward to the memory of the last time you enjoyed it. As Pascal once lamented, “
The present is never our end.” The past and the future seem to dominate our thoughts. Perhaps it is the simple fact that the past and the future
last
longer than the present. You can spend weeks waiting for the “meal
of a lifetime,” which will itself last a few hours. We can try to “live for the moment,” but how long is that “moment,” before we are already shuttling it off into our memory, encoding it with the gauzy Instagram filters of our own minds? That so many people photograph their “memorable” meals speaks not only to how fleeting the experience may be but to how photographing it helps actually
make
it memorable, if only in the moment. As the slogan for Field Notes, my favorite notebook brand, goes, “I'm not writing it down to remember it later, I'm writing it down to remember it now.”

Unfortunately, neither memories
nor
anticipation is an entirely reliable guide to how much we will like or liked something.
When people in one study were asked to predict how much they would like a favorite ice cream after eating it every day for a week, what they reported at the end of the week hardly looked like what they predicted. Tastes did change, in various ways, just not reliably. As Rozin notes, “
The correlation between estimated and actual liking is close to zero.”

We also seem to crave more variety at the point of decision than we will actually desire down the road. When I was young, for example, I was obsessed by the Kellogg's variety packs of cereal. Wooed by the sight of the Apple Jacks and Frosted Flakes jostling up against each other, I would clamor for my parents to buy the largest package on offer, a towering block of shrink-wrapped goodness. Having raced through my favorites, however, I would find my liking gradually diminishing, from dizzy Apple Jacks heights to the sad denouement of a few sparse clusters of Special K and All-Bran, which often went unconsumed, dying a slow death in a shroud of plastic. My parents would, of course, have been better off simply buying a few boxes of my favorites, which I would reliably eat every day.

Trying to look backward, to the last remembered experience of a meal—if only to make a new choice—invites its own distortions.
In one experiment, psychologists were able to change how much people liked something (in this case, a “microwavable Heinz Weight Watchers Tomato & Basil Chicken ready meal”)
after
they had eaten it—not, as has been done with rats, by physically manipulating their brains. Instead, researchers simply had subjects “rehearse” the “enjoyable aspects” of the meal. This, the idea goes, made those best moments more “accessible”
in memory, and thus they popped out more easily when people were later thinking about the meal. Voilà! The food not only suddenly seemed better; the subjects wanted to eat more of it. If you want to like a meal you have just eaten more, talk about why you liked it so much.

At Del Posto, I finally made my choice. This might be the key to liking: the fact that I have chosen it. Where before I might have considered the choices equally valid, the one I have chosen is bathed in a new glow. Already the pork seems better than when it was just one of a number of enticing-sounding entrées. There are a couple of things going on. First, since Leon Festinger's 1957 theory of “cognitive dissonance,” psychologists have argued that we try to avoid any post-decision choice malaise (
What if I really wanted the fish?
) by increasing our liking for what we have chosen (
Oh, this pasta is divine!
) and boosting our disliking for the unpicked alternative, a kind of built-in system to avoid perpetually experiencing
buyer's remorse. This is not always successful: Many is the time I have looked at a companion's choice in a restaurant and said, “You won.” Buyer's remorse, it has been argued, happens because we buy something in an “affective” frame of mind (
I really want this
) and reflect back in a more “cognitive” state (
What was I thinking?
).

As much as preferences influence choices, choices influence preferences.
Even amnesiacs who could not remember making the choice seemed to like what they had chosen more.
The same effect, interestingly, has been shown in non-amnesiacs, who might temporarily have forgotten their choices.
Even when people were making purely
hypothetical
choices of vacation destinations, the neuroscientist Tali Sharot and colleagues found, there seemed to be more robust brain activity in subjects when they thought about what they had “chosen” versus what they had “rejected.” In other words, they were already feeling better about the destination they picked and “deflating” that which they had not.
In a follow-up study, the team had subjects pick “subliminally” presented vacation destinations. In fact, all they ever “saw” were nonsense phrases. When they next saw their “choice”—a randomly presented location they had actually not seen before—they rated it higher than the alternative they had “rejected.” We seem to have a preference that we prefer our preferences.

You might argue that they were tricked. But consider what may really be going on when you hear the phrase “What would you like?” when asked to select among some range of options. What we are really
being asked is, “What do you choose?” The liking often comes afterward.
Some even suggest that we are already beginning the “reappraisal process” as we choose—as opposed to rationalizing ex post facto.

When I finally make my pick, something else is probably happening: I think more people would want to pick what I have chosen than actually do. This is the well-known “false consensus effect.” In a study done at the University of Michigan, subjects were asked to rate various combinations of sundae flavors. When students were asked how many other people they thought shared their opinion, more people thought others would agree than disagree, particularly if they
liked
the flavors. I have my own ice cream example of this. My father-in-law, for years, has been offering me ice cream whenever we have pie at family gatherings, despite my loudly proclaimed aversion to pie à la mode. I have come to think that this is less about his forgetting my preference than his simply reasoning the following: I like pie with ice cream, so Tom probably does too. What's not to like?

At Del Posto, the waiter, doing double duty as sommelier, has asked us about the wine list. I mentioned the Friulian red, a 2004 Antico Broilo. He did not, of course, simply say, “It's good,” or “You'll like it.” I will talk about experts like sommeliers later. For now, let us simply hear what he had to say. “It's a bit fuller in body, some notes of pepper; it pairs well with the pork,” he said. “It shows the geography of the place, because you've got the Dolomites, and so on the palate you have this minerality coming out. It's the same latitude as the Bordeaux region, so you have all this herbal quality as well, a little mint, a little sage.” We ordered the Friulian red.

As I took a sip, another fact about liking came into play: What you like something
as
influences how much you like it. Is it a good wine? Is it a good red wine? Is it a good wine from the
refosco
grape? Is it a good red wine from Friulia? Is it good for the price? Experts, as we shall see, are able to more finely delineate categories than nonexperts. This categorization, says Zellner, works in several ways. Once you have had a really good wine, she says, “you can't go back. You wind up comparing all these lesser things to it.” If a bottle of Château Margaux 1990 is your ideal benchmark for red wine, your liking of most other red wines will probably decrease.