First Bite: How We Learn to Eat. Bee Wilson

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СКАЧАТЬ they should like the very foods that will do them the most harm.

      Karl Duncker’s 1930s experiments on children’s likes and dislikes are much less well known than Clara Davis and her feeding orphanage. But they offer just as great an insight into how our tastes are formed, almost in spite of ourselves, by forces we are only dimly aware of. While Davis was interested in what tastes look like stripped of the normal social influences, Duncker wanted to pinpoint how those influences actually work.

      In 1936 Duncker (born in Leipzig in 1903) was a promising young Gestalt psychologist exiled from Nazi Germany – where his parents were prominent communists – to Britain where he continued his work. One of his great philosophical interests was pleasure and what causes it. His definition of the pleasure of anticipation was a child who ‘has been told that he is soon to have a piece of candy … glowing all over with happiness’. In one of his papers, Duncker asked why eating a fine juicy beefsteak could cause such delight; he decided that it wasn’t just that it took away the pain of hunger. It was the sensory enjoyment of biting into it, and the feeling it gave that ‘life is grand’.⁶⁵

      On arrival in Britain, Duncker set himself the task of investigating the role of social suggestion in forming food preferences. Given that likes and dislikes varied to an ‘astounding degree’ among different cultures, he realized that there must be a process of social influence at work. His mission was to unravel the psychological processes by which likes were formed.

      Duncker’s experiments involved children from Somers Town nursery school in London NW1, which was then a poor district of London.⁶⁶ The first experiment was a simple one. Boys and girls aged between two and five were asked to make a food selection from carrots, bananas, nuts, apples, bread and grapes. What Duncker found was that children were far more likely to select the same foods as one another if they made their choice in the presence of other children, than if they were alone. For children younger than twenty-seven months there was a wonderful ‘social indifference’: ‘when they had fixed their minds upon the food, nothing else seemed to exist.’ Above that age, however, there was a marked tendency to copy the likes of other children, especially if the child who selected first was just a little older. There was one pair of girls where one was an extroverted five and the other a shy four. Before choosing her food, ‘B would always send some furtive glances over to A as if for reassurance’.

      We’ve all seen this kind of peer influence at work. If you offer a snack to a group of young girls, they will often tie themselves in knots second-guessing what the others will go for before making up their own mind. You don’t want to be a lone wolf eating popcorn when everyone else has opted for toast. Duncker’s findings about social suggestion when eating have since been confirmed by at least sixty-nine separate experiments.⁶⁷ This is a very robust phenomenon. Depending on the influence of those who share our meals, we may eat faster or slower; we choose different foods; we manage larger or smaller portions.

      Duncker’s second experiment was more dramatic. He took two substances. One was a white chocolate powder flavoured with lemon – a very luxurious commodity in 1930s Britain and ‘decidedly pleasant’. The other was valerian sugar coloured brown, valerian being a herbal root traditionally used as a sedative: a very bitter and medicinal flavour that Duncker called ‘rather unpleasant’. He then asked the nursery teacher to read the children a story about a hero, Micky, a little field mouse, who hates one food – ‘hemlock’ – and loves another – ‘maple sugar’. When Micky discovers maple sugar in a tree, he realizes he has never ‘tasted such good stuff before’. But the hemlock bark is ‘sour and disgusting’.

      After the story, the children were then asked to taste some actual ‘hemlock’ – which was really the delicious white chocolate powder; and ‘maple sugar’ – which was really the unpleasant valerian sugar. The deception did not exactly work. Many of the children recognized that the ‘hemlock’ was really chocolate. Yet when asked to choose which substance they preferred, 67 per cent of them opted for the nasty-tasting ‘maple sugar’ because of the positive associations in the story (only 13 per cent chose it in a control group with no story).

      Can our likes and dislikes really be so easily influenced? Apparently so. Duncker’s experiment shows that a simple story is enough to make children forget – for a time – that they like chocolate. For Duncker himself, having witnessed Hitler’s rise to power, it was no surprise that human beings are suggestible in their ‘likes’ or that social forces can make them suppress their natural impulses. At the time Karl Duncker was doing his peaceful experiments with children and chocolate, his younger brother Wolfgang was living a precarious life in exile in Moscow; he was arrested during the Great Purges of 1938 and died in the Gulag. Duncker himself had lost his academic position in Berlin in 1935 for having once been married to a Jewish woman.⁶⁸ ‘If educated adults,’ wrote Karl Duncker, ‘can be made to discard their ingrained preferences because the leader has contrary ones, why should children prove [harder to influence] – even in such a vital domain as food?’⁶⁹

      Given his background, Duncker had a strong sense of how those with power manipulate the powerless. To him, a child being manipulated to change their ingrained food likes was in a similar position to the population of Nazi Germany.

      Duncker’s findings are deeply worrying. If just one story about a not very inspiring mouse hero could make children change their likes to such a degree, what are the effects of a daily barrage of advertising stories, in which godlike athletes are shown drinking sugary beverages and the least nutritious cereals are those with the cutest characters on the box? ‘Don’t trust that tiger! He’s a bad tiger!’ I used to tell my son as we walked down the cereal aisle.

      What can any one of us do in the face of such social pressure? Duncker offered himself up as an example of how individuals could train themselves to new likes, despite their social prejudices and circumstances, through a kind of ‘inner reorganisation’. When he arrived in Cambridge from Germany, Duncker was appalled by the prevalence of something called ‘salad cream’: a sharp condiment beloved in the British Isles that has the texture of mayonnaise but the acrid taste of spirit vinegar. Like many mass-market foods, it has a devoted following among those reared on it, but to Duncker, who wasn’t prepared for the taste, salad cream came as quite a shock.

      Suffice it to tell just one personal experience. When I first came to England, I was made to understand that raw green salad leaves could be made into ‘salad’ with the aid of a bottled substance of yellowish color, called salad dressing. It looked like mayonnaise; I expected mayonnaise – and I dare say I was deeply disappointed. No, I did not like it. But as I did not like raw leaves either, I was therefore prompted to adopt the most favorable and adventurous attitude. I tried again, and I still remember the day when suddenly I discovered that this was not an unpleasant variant of mayonnaise but a kind of mustard which was not unpleasant at all. Thus by accentuating the mustard potentiality and suppressing the non-mayonnaise aspect, I came to like it.⁷⁰

      Like Lucy Cooke, Duncker knew that there is huge scope for changing our likes and dislikes: not all of them, for sure, but enough to make the difference between a good diet and a bad one. Whether you are a PROP taster or not; autistic or not; neophobic or not; fussy or not; a foreigner or not; genes are never the final reason why you like the particular range of foods you do. When a boy likes nothing but cornflakes, it says less about him than it does about the world he lives in.

      It would help if we stopped seeing our personal likes as such a deep and meaningful part of our essence. There are many things about ourselves we cannot change, but the majority of food likes do not fall into this category. Our tastes are learned in the context of immense social influences, whether from our family, our friends, or the cheery font on a bottle of soda. Yet it’s still possible, as Duncker showed, to carve out new tastes for ourselves. We can put the impressionable nature of our likes to good use. If we expose ourselves enough times to enough different foods, we may find, like Duncker, that the flavours we once disliked СКАЧАТЬ