First Bite: How We Learn to Eat. Bee Wilson

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       CHAPTER 1:

       Likes and Dislikes

      Every man carries within him a world, which is composed of all that he has seen and loved, and to which he constantly returns, even when he is travelling through, and seems to be living in, some different world.

      FRANÇOIS-RENÉ DE CHATEAUBRIAND, Travels in Italy, 1828

      ‘He won’t eat anything but cornflakes,’ complained the mother of a boy I used to know. Breakfast, lunch or dinner – always a bowl of cornflakes and milk. Even at other people’s houses, this boy made no concessions. To his mother, his extreme diet was a source of worry and exasperation. To the rest of us, he was a fascinating case study. Secretly, I was slightly in awe of him; my sister and I would never have dared be so fussy. To look at, you wouldn’t know there was anything different about this kid: scruffy blond hair, big grin, neither unduly skinny nor chubby. He was not socially withdrawn or difficult in any other way. Where did it come from, this bizarre cornflake fixation? It just seemed to be part of his personality, something no one could do anything about.

      Whether you are a child or a parent, the question of ‘likes and dislikes’ is one of the great mysteries. Human tastes are astonishingly diverse, and can be mulishly stubborn. Even within the same family, likes vary dramatically from person to person. Some prefer the components of a meal to be served separate and unsullied, with nothing touching; others can only fully enjoy them when the flavours mingle in a pot. There is no such thing as a food that will please everyone. My oldest child – a contrarian – doesn’t like chocolate; my youngest – a conformist – adores it. It’s hard to say how much of this has to do with chocolate actually tasting different to each of them and how much it has to do with the social pay-off you get from being the person who either likes or loathes something so central to the surrounding culture. The one who loves chocolate gets the reward of enjoying something that almost everyone agrees is a treat. And he gets a lot of treats. The one who doesn’t like chocolate gets fewer sweets, but what he does get is the thrill of surprising people with his oddball tastes. He fills the chocolate-shaped void with liquorice.

      Yet my chocolate-hating boy will happily consume pieces of chocolate if they are buried in a cookie or melted in a mug of hot cocoa. One of the many puzzles about likes and dislikes is how they change depending on the context. As the psychologist Paul Rozin says: ‘to say one likes lobster does not mean that one likes it for breakfast or smothered in whipped cream.’¹ Different meals, different times of day and different locations can all make the same food or drink seem either desirable or not. Call it the retsina effect: that resinated white wine that is so refreshing when sipped on a Greek island tastes of paint-stripper back home in the rain. It’s also worth remembering that when we say we like this or that, though we use the same words, we are often not talking about the same thing. You may think you hate ‘mango’ because you have only ever tasted the fibrous, sour-yellow kind. When I say I adore it, I am thinking of a ripe Alphonso mango from India, brimming with orange juice and so fragrant you could bottle it and use it for perfume.

      The foods we eat the most are not always the ones we like the most. In 1996 the psychologist Kent Berridge changed the way that many neuroscientists thought about eating when he introduced a distinction between ‘wanting’ (the motivation to eat something) and ‘liking’ (the pleasure that the food actually gives).² Berridge found that ‘wanting’ or craving was neurally as well as psychologically distinct from ‘liking’. Whereas the zone of the brain that controls our motivation to eat stretches across the entire nucleus accumbens, the sections of the brain that give us pleasure when we eat occupy smaller ‘hotspots’ within this same area. For Berridge, this discovery offers a fruitful way for thinking about some of the ‘disorders of desire’ that bedevil humans. For example, binge eating may – like other addictive behaviours – be associated with ‘excessive wanting without commensurate “liking”’.³ You may feel a potent drive to purchase an extra-large portion of cheesy Nachos even though the pleasure they deliver when you actually consume them is much less potent than you expected. Indeed, binge eaters often report that the foods they crave do not even taste good when they are eating them: the desire is greater than the enjoyment.

      However, several neuroscientists have pointed out in response to Berridge that liking and wanting remain ‘highly entangled’.⁴ Berridge himself admits that there is strong evidence that if you reduce the amount a food is liked, the consequence is that it is also wanted less.⁵ Even if our craved foods do not make us as happy as we hope they will, the reason that we crave them in the first place is because we once loved them.⁶ Like drug addicts, we are chasing a remembered high. Our ‘likes’ thus remain a central motivating force in shaping how and what we eat. To find out more about why we like the foods we do remains a vital question for anyone who is interested in feeding themselves or their family better. If asked to say where tastes come from, I suspect that most of us would say they were determined by individual temperament, which is another way of saying ‘genes’. Being a chocolate lover – or hater – becomes so much part of our self-image that we can’t imagine ourselves any other way. We show that we are adventurous by seeking out the hottest chillis; we prove we are easy-going by telling our host we ‘eat anything’. We confirm that we are naturally conservative by eating patriotic hunks of red meat. Taste is identity. Aged eight, my daughter used to draw pictures of herself and write ‘prawns-peas-mushrooms’ at the top, surrounding herself with the tastes she loved best.

      Because our tastes are such an intimate part of ourselves, it is easy to make the leap to thinking that they must be mostly genetic: СКАЧАТЬ