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In his book
Strangers to Ourselves
, Timothy Wilson has argued that we are often unaware why we respond to things the way we do; much of this behavior occurs in what he calls the “
adaptive unconscious.” But we labor under a sort of illusion of authenticity, he argues, in which we think we know the reasons for our feelings because, well, they are
our
feelings.
Following his example, how do you feel about the cover of this book? Do you like it? If you had a choice—and book buyers rarely do—which of the two covers did you prefer? Did you stop to think why you might have preferred one over another? Or is your preference only now swimming into view? Now try to imagine how a stranger feels about it. Unless the cover strikes some particular chord in you—perhaps it reminds you of another book you liked, or you are a student of graphic design—your own response to the cover will most likely be generated by a process that is not so different from how you would explain why a stranger likes it (for example, it gets your attention, the colors work together better). You will be making guesses.
*

We are, in effect, strangers to our tastes. It is time we got acquainted. It seems only appropriate to begin with food, “
the archetype of all taste.”

THINKING ABOUT OUR TASTE FOR FOOD

 

Nowhere do we encounter the question of what we like so broadly, so forcefully, so instinctively as in a restaurant meal. Sitting down to eat is not just a ritual of nourishment but a kind of story. Venturing through the “course of a meal,” we encounter a narrative, with its prologues, its climaxes, its slow resolutions. But a meal is also a concentrated exercise in choice and pleasure, longing and regret, the satisfaction of wants and the creation of desires.

And so we begin our journey with the journey of a meal. It is a blustery winter day on the windy western reaches of Manhattan, but inside Del Posto, the Italian restaurant run by Mario Batali and Joe and Lidia Bastianich, the wood-paneled room is warmly lit, a pianist is deep into “Send in the Clowns,” and the red wine is being poured by a waiter with a Continental accent and well-honed charm.

What's not to like?

Very little, really. One does not generally arrive at the white-clothed table of a restaurant accorded four stars by
The New York Times
, only to find a raft of unpalatable swill. The very fact that the food has made
it onto the menu—the menu of a long-established culinary tradition—reflects that it is generally liked. We are not our evolutionary ancestors, forced to graze on the culinary savanna, scrounging for sustenance amid a host of unfamiliar plants and elusive prey, waiting for our bodies to tell us whether we like (or will survive) what we have chosen.

Nevertheless, the old tickle at the back of the brain—
eat this, not that
!—has hardly left us. We are born knowing two things: Sweet is good (caloric energy), bitter is bad (potential toxin). We also come into the world with a curious blend of full-spectrum liking and disliking. We are, on the one hand, omnivores. There is little we could not eat. As Paul Rozin, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania, has helpfully pointed out, we share this “generalist” status “
with such other worthy species as rats and cockroaches.” And yet, like rats, we are intensely “neophobic,” afraid of trying new foods. Being dual omnivores/neophobes has its evolutionary advantages: The latter trait kept us from ingesting the wrong things; the former made sure we had plenty of access to the right things. But neophobia can go too far.
In some experiments, rats, once mildly poisoned by new foods, became so afraid of subsequent new foods that they starved to death.

We actually seem predisposed to be more acutely aware of what we do not like than of what we like.
We are particularly alert to even minor changes in what we
do
like, as if we had an internal alarm for when things go wrong. When I am served, by mistake, diet soda, which I do not like and thus do not drink, my response borders on the visceral:
Danger!
This alarm is most well tuned for the bitter, and we rate “aversive” tastes as being more intense than pleasurable ones. The worm found in the last bite of an otherwise delicious apple will pretty much wipe out the pleasure accumulated from eating the rest of it. Although this may be an occasional drag on our ability to enjoy life, being primed to spot the bad helps us have a life to enjoy.

And so, a few days out of the womb, we are already expressing preferences, picking sugary water over the plain variety, making faces at (some) bitter foods. This is pure survival, eating to live.
We start getting
really
choosy at around age two, when we have figured out (a) we might be sticking around for a while and (b) we have the luxury of choice. The need for raw sustenance explains why for infants nothing can really be too sweet: It is the primordial liking.
Even our desire for
salt, which is so vital to the human endeavor that it informs town names like Salzburg and
those English burghs with “wich” (brine pits were known as “wich houses”) as their suffix, takes a few months to kick in.

Liking for sweetness is liking for life itself. As Gary Beauchamp, at the time the director of Philadelphia's Monell Chemical Senses Center—the country's preeminent taste and smell lab—had put it to me in his office one day, “I would say that
all
human pleasure derives from sugar. It's the prototypical thing—a single compound stimulating a very specific set of receptors.” He told me this after first casually proffering a sample from a can of salted army ants (the ingredient label read, “Ants, salt”). Other kinds of substances—like salted ants—may have a more wayward trip upstream, he intimates, but with sugar “that pathway goes directly to the parts of the brain that are involved in emotion and pleasure.”
Even anencephalic babies, born missing parts of the brain that are central to consciousness, respond positively (through what's called a “gustofacial response”) to sweetness.
No one living really dislikes sweetness; they may only like it less than others do.

But few of our gustatory preferences are innate; that lump of sugar, a touch of salt, perhaps the feel of fat as it glides across our tongue, even those are not beyond change. Nor is much of what we do not like. Some people may be more biologically sensitive to certain substances, but often that is not taste per se.
Cilantro, for some, brings out a “soapy” taste, but it has been argued that has to do with genetic variation in
olfactory
receptors. Meanwhile, only half the population, as it fries up pork chops or grills sausage, seems able to detect “boar taint.” This is an unpleasant scent, to humans at least, often described as “off,” evoking “urine,” or, simply, being “pig like.” Boar taint comes from androstenes, a steroid-driven musk that steams off male boars during mating to boost their desirability.
The ability of humans to smell it is genetic, though people can be trained to detect it (for professional, not hobby, purposes).

But there is not a clear line between one's biological sensitivity to substances and one's food likes and dislikes. Beauchamp theorizes this may be some population-wide adaptive mechanism. One group liked a certain plant, and another group liked another; if one plant turned out to lack sufficient nutrition, it would not mean the end of the species.
Just because you find a substance more bitter than someone else, however,
does not mean you are going to like it any less. As one researcher puts it, “
It is striking how little genetics predisposes humans to like or dislike food flavors.”

And yet go to a restaurant, even a well-reviewed exemplar of a beloved cuisine, like Del Posto, and there will be things on the menu that you seem to prefer to others (this may even change from one day to another). The very array of choices that you are presented with—from the opening salvo of “Would you like fizzy or still water?”—speaks to this litany of tastes. But what actually goes on in the mind to make these decisions between seemingly inconsequential choices, of whether one prefers carbonation in one's water? An extra frisson of excitement to hydration? Or the desire for a more languorously silken mouthfeel? How passionate are you in your choice, or is it rather arbitrary? Let us imagine you opt for still. This earns you another choice: “Would you like tap or bottled?” Reasons though you may have for choosing one or the other, it almost certainly has nothing to do with sensory discernment:
Studies show that most of us cannot distinguish the stuff.

As adamant as we are in our likes—“I
love ragù
Bolognese,” one might say—we are even more adamant in our dislikes. “I can't
stand
eggplant,” my wife has said, more than once. If pressed, though, we would find it hard to locate the precise origin of these preferences. Is there some ancient evolutionary fear at work here?
Eggplant, after all, is part of the nightshade family, and its leaves, in high enough doses, can be toxic.
Then again, tomatoes and potatoes are in the same
Solanum
genus, and my wife happily eats those.

She is certainly not alone in finding eggplant off-putting. Its mention in the culinary press often comes cloaked in cheerily conditional phrases like “love it or hate it” and “even if you dislike it,” while one survey of Japanese schoolchildren found it to be the “
most disliked” vegetable. It is probably a texture thing; done wrong, eggplant can feel a bit slimy, a trait we do not always prize. Indeed, texture, or mouthfeel, should not be underestimated: Not only can we literally “taste” texture, but as the food scientist Alina Surmacka Szczesniak has written, “
People like to be in full control of the food placed in their mouth. Stringy, gummy, or slimy food or those with unexpected lumps or hard particles are rejected for fear of gagging or choking.”

But our feelings about food are not often so clearly causal. Poison leaves aside, there is no biological aversion to eggplant itself or to most
other foods. As the psychologist Paul Rozin—famously dubbed the King of Disgust for his work into aversions—once told me, over a meal in Philadelphia of sweet-and-sour shrimp, “Our explanations for why we like and dislike things are pretty lame. We have to invent accounts.”

And yet where else but with food is liking and disliking so elemental? Our choices in food are directly related to our immediate or long-term well-being. Not to mention we are actually putting something in our mouths. “Since putting external things into the body can be thought of as a highly personal and risky act,” Rozin has written, “the special emotion associated with ingestion is understandable.” And then there is the simple fact that we eat so often.
The Cornell University researcher Brian Wansink has estimated we make two hundred food decisions a day. We decide what to eat more than we decide what to wear or what to read or where to go on vacation—and what is a holiday but a whole new set of eating choices?

Not that eating is always driven by some unadulterated quest for pleasure. As Danielle Reed, a researcher at Monell, had suggested to me, there is more than one kind of food liking. There is liking in which you give someone food in a lab and ask her how much she likes it. This is relatively simple, more so than asking
why
she likes it. There is liking on the level of a person going into a store, and does she choose this or that? This is a bit more complicated. “And then there's what people habitually eat,” Reed said. “As you can imagine, that's not a direct reflection of how much you like it.” She gestured to some food carts across the street, visible through her office window. “I had God-knows-what something nasty for lunch. It's not what I
like;
it's just what happened to be convenient.” It is sometimes difficult to distinguish between actual liking and simply choosing among the least disliked alternatives. An “interesting question,” she suggested, and one that I will return to later in the book, is, how much do people differ in how much they respond to their own liking? For some, liking may be the key driver; others may lean more on other criteria.

Something besides sheer frequency makes liking so crucial in food: the idea that we bring all of our senses—and a whole lot more—to what we eat. Synesthetes aside, we do not like the sound of paintings or the smell of music. When you like something you eat, however, you are typically liking not only the way it tastes but also the way it smells, the way it feels, the way it looks (
we like the same food less when we eat it
in the dark). We even like the way it sounds.
Research has shown that amping up just the
high-frequency “crispiness” sounds of potato chips makes them seem crispier—and presumably more liked.

It can often be a bit hard to tell what is actually driving our liking:
People have, for example, reported deeper-colored fruit juice—up to a point—as tasting better than lighter, but similarly flavored, varieties. On the other hand, toying with one of the “sensory inputs” can radically change things.
When trained panelists cannot see the milk they are drinking, they suddenly find it hard to determine its fat content (as they lose the vital visual cue of “whiteness”).
Flipping the switch on a special light in the course of one meal—so that a steak was suddenly bathed in a bluish tint—was enough, according to one marketing study, to virtually induce nausea.

We call our liking for all kinds of things—music, fashion, art—our “taste.” It is interesting (and not accidental) that this word for our more general predilections coincides with our sense of taste. Carolyn Korsmeyer, a professor of philosophy at the University of Buffalo, notes that traditionally the notion of “bodily pleasure” did not discriminate between these two sorts of taste. The way we enjoyed art and music was not so dissimilar from the way we enjoyed food.

That began to change, at least to philosophers, in the eighteenth century. Gustatory taste (that “low,” “physical” pleasure, which actually entails ingesting something) did not fit neatly into the philosopher Immanuel Kant's influential notion of “disinterested pleasure”—of coolly analyzing “free beauty” at a physical and intellectual remove—in terms of judging aesthetic quality. As Korsmeyer writes in
Making Sense of Taste: Food and Philosophy
, “
In virtually all analyses of the senses in Western philosophy the distance between object and perceiver has been seen as a cognitive, moral, and aesthetic advantage.” We look at paintings or watch movies without being
in
them, or them in us. But how could you ever divorce liking food from its host of “bodily sensations”? Ever since, taste, in terms of what we eat, has been judged as primal and instinctive, as well as hopelessly private and relative. “The all-important problem of Taste,” writes Korsmeyer, “was not conceived to pertain to sensory taste.”

It was bearing this heavy philosophical and scientific load that I sat down to lunch at Del Posto, joined by Debra Zellner, a professor of psychology at Montclair State University, who for several decades has studied the intersection of food and “positive affect,” as they say in the field. A onetime student of Paul Rozin's—a disciple of disgust, if you will—in her work on liking, she has watched rats as they lapped at dripping tubes, and, more salubriously, she has conducted experiments with the Culinary Institute of America on how “plating” can influence how much food we eat.