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.”
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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.
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 looki
ng 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.”
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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.
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