First Bite: How We Learn to Eat (8 page)
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 flavors we once disliked have now miraculously become likable.
In Duncker’s case, sadly, taking what he called a “favorable and adventurous” attitude to food was easier than taking a favorable attitude to life. By the time he was doing his experiment with children and white chocolate, he had been suffering from deteriorating mental health for the best part of a decade. Duncker missed life in Berlin, but knew he could never return while the Nazis were in power. Unlike his tastes in salad, this situation was intractable. In 1938, he emigrated from Britain to the United States to take up a job at Swarthmore College. It was there he committed suicide in 1940, at the age of thirty-seven.
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Names have been changed to protect privacy.
Every culture seems
to have certain challenging vegetables that children find hard to love at first bite. And at second. And third. In Brazil, it is okra (the sliminess). In France, it may be turnips (the bitterness). In lots of countries, it is beets (the purpleness).
There are plenty of reasons to find beets off-putting. There’s the curious taste, reminiscent of earth and blood (the culprit is a chemical compound called
geosmin
). Also the texture, which in its cooked form is neither crunchy nor soft, but fleshy. Most of all, there is the shocking color that bleeds inescapably over everything on your plate.
Yet among sophisticated adult eaters, beets are often a special favorite. It thus offers a case study in how we can learn new tastes. It’s not just that people learn to tolerate beets; they switch from dislike to adoration. Since the 1990s, beets have been a beloved item on restaurant menus, often paired with goat cheese. Adult beet lovers enjoy the very qualities that children find so awful: the earthy taste and meaty texture and, most of all, the bright crimson pigment, which can dye a whole pan of risotto a joyous pink.
Between the beet haters and the lovers, there is a gulf. Some of it can be explained—as with many other dislikes—by the form in which we first encounter the outlandish purple vegetable. Childhood memories of vinegary pickled beets do not help. When someone learns to love beets, it is often because they have been given a taste of these roots in a new and more appealing form when eating out: a fresh and vibrant beet and orange salad, say, or a tasty deep-fried beet chip.
Regardless of cooking method, however, there does seem to be something in strong vegetable flavors such as beetroot that people take longer to hit it off with. In one study, seven- and eight-year-old children from the Netherlands were given tastes of pure beet juice every day for fourteen days, the kind of “exposure” that in theory should lead to liking. But at the end of the fortnight, they continued to find the taste “too intense.”
Maybe it is the sense of achievement in having conquered an aversion that makes adult beet fans flaunt their enjoyment so overtly. Foodies trumpet their love of the hated vegetables of childhood: cauliflower and Brussels sprouts join beets as dinner-party favorites. But beet-eaters are not just showing off. It is possible to reach the point where these complex, bitter flavors deliver more pleasure than the simple blandness of mashed potato.
The psychologist E. P. Köster has shown that one of the beneficial things that happens when children are exposed through “sensory education” to a wider range of flavors is that they start to love complexity and be bored by simplicity. Given time and enough attempts, we actively seek out those foods—like beets—whose charm is not at first obvious.
The women have a lot to talk about;
they remember their homes,
and dinners they made.
Eva Schulzova
, age twelve,
from a poem written in the
Terezin concentration camp
W
hen Abi Millard was four, her mother, Dawn, started
to notice that she was acting strangely at mealtimes. Abi seldom seemed hungry, and she often put her fork down after a bite or two. Though generally happy and well behaved, Abi was, in Dawn’s words, “a nightmare” when the family went out to eat with friends, “messing around and not eating her dinner.” They took her to the doctor, who diagnosed congenital anosmia: an inability to smell, which also means an inability to taste food properly, given that almost all of what we call “taste” is really flavor perception through the nose.
To consider anosmia is to see how central food memories are, both to the way we learn to eat and to the way we relate to the world. When I met her, Abi Millard was nine. In most respects she is a self-assured, happy girl. She likes swimming and Tae Kwon Do. She lives with her mum and dad in a rural village and goes to the local primary school. Yet her experience of life is different from most. Without the ability to smell or perceive
flavor, Abi experiences food more or less as pure texture. Blindfolded, she can’t tell the difference between hummus and strawberry yogurt. Salad leaves tickle her throat and tomatoes are slimy, though she will eat broccoli and carrots and peas. She has few of the drives that motivate most people to seek out certain beloved foods, because she lacks the memories that would make her expect them to be rewarding. Dawn says Abi lacks any real enjoyment in food—except for one time when they were out at a restaurant, and Abi, eating a gammon (ham) steak, said it was “lovely,” perhaps because it was intensely salty. (Abi can detect strong concentrations of salt or sugar on her tongue, but without any of the flavor nuances.) Dawn worries that when Abi is grown up, she may forget to eat. The condition is also isolating: when Abi’s friends at school talk about favorite meals, it’s hard for her to join in. She has no idea what a batch of warm vanilla shortbread smells like, or chocolate, or garlic. She has no memory of the taste of her own mother’s cooking.
It is extremely rare to have, like Abi, anosmia from birth. What is far more common is to develop anosmia later in life, often after a head injury (though it may also be caused by sinusitis, nasal polyps, dementia, chemotherapy, stroke, liver disease, or sometimes for no clear reason at all). At a conference organized by the anosmia support group Fifth Sense in the spring of 2014, anosmia sufferers spoke of how doctors were often dismissive of their condition: “Be thankful you’re not deaf ” was a common refrain. But it’s hard to be thankful for a malady that separates you from the food memories that define so much of who you believe yourself to be. One woman at the conference, who had been in a cycling accident, talked about how her marriage had broken down after she became anosmic. Her relationship could not survive her inability to share her husband’s continuing pleasure in food. Before the accident, they had both loved throwing dinner parties, and her husband couldn’t understand that elaborate cooking now did nothing for her. Every meal was a cruel reminder of what she had lost. The predicament of those who are born with anosmia is that they can’t share the pleasurable food memories that the rest of us have. The predicament of those who develop anosmia later in life is that they have the memories, but no means to access them. They are cut off from their own past.
It was a bright spring day in San Francisco in 2011 when Marlena Spieler, a food writer with more than twenty cookbooks to her name, was knocked down by a car at a crossing. Both of her arms were broken and she suffered a concussion. As the initial excruciating pain gradually lessened, Marlena—a sunny optimist with Marilyn-platinum hair—noticed another injury, which to her was far worse than the broken limbs. The head trauma had damaged the nerve connecting to her olfactory bulb—the part of the brain that interprets flavor—and she could no longer enjoy food. Coffee had been one of Marlena’s great pleasures since she was very young. Now it was tasteless. “Cinnamon drops, a childhood favorite, were bitter, horrible,” she wrote in the
New York Times
. “Tamales were as bland as porridge. Bananas tasted like parsnips and smelled like nail polish remover.” As for chocolate, it was “like dirt.”
I got to know Marlena in 2002 on a press trip to Parma, Italy, organized by the consortium of producers of Prosciutto di Parma. For three days we ate ribbons of pink salty ham at every meal, and Marlena, with great California ebullience, talked about the foods she loved the most. These were long—very long—conversations. She spoke of artichokes and lemons, earthy dried mint and pungent truffles, bread and cheese, and how she would rather be in Italy than anywhere else in the world. She ate with a dainty slowness, as if trying to extract the essence from each bite.
After the accident, she could still perceive the heat of pungent spices such as mustard, Aleppo pepper, or cinnamon, because her trigeminal nerve, the part of the body that tingles when you eat hot food, was not damaged. But without the flavor to offset it, the tingling sensation was offensive. Her beloved cinnamon felt abrasive. Meanwhile, she developed new cravings—for intensely sweet desserts and for fish. When I first knew Marlena, she was indifferent to desserts and hostile to fish. Now, suddenly, she had yearnings for smoked mackerel and anchovies. She also developed a very sweet tooth. A scientist working on flavor and the brain told her that this might be because she could no longer detect the qualities in fish and sweets that had previously disgusted her. They only seemed desirable because she couldn’t recognize the ways they had once repelled her.
People sometimes speak of anosmia as “loss of taste,” but damage to the taste buds themselves is actually very rare. More than 90 percent
of
cases of taste-related disorders involve a weakening or loss of the sense of smell. The taste buds in our mouths only supply a fraction of the complex pleasures that we enjoy as “flavor.” The rest is perceived via our noses, through something called
retronasal olfaction
. We smell coffee by breathing in—is any scent better than a warm bag of freshly ground beans? But we taste a cup of coffee by smelling it
backward
, or retronasally. The hundreds of chemical compounds that go together to make up the flavor of a particular blend and roast of coffee travel to the backs of our mouths and sneak through the nasopharyngeal passage into the nasal cavity. As we sip and swallow, we are not conscious that the splendid flavors—the nuttiness of the roast, the notes of cherry and peach—are created in the nose, not the mouth. This spectrum of retronasal joy is lost to anosmia sufferers. All they have left is the harsh and basic tongue-notes of sweet, sour, bitter, and salty. Like Abi Millard enjoying a salty gammon steak, anosmia sufferers often seek out extremely salty or sweet foods to compensate for the loss of flavor.
Anosmia is a surprisingly common problem—as many as 2 million people in the United States have some form of smell or taste disorder. It is not a trivial disability. The ability to pick out the jasmine aroma in a cup of espresso, or to spot the difference between grapefruit and pomelo, might seem of little importance to anyone except food writers. But medicine and neuroscience are now starting to recognize that anosmia can be an extremely traumatic condition, and not just because of the danger in emergencies of not detecting the smell of smoke or gas. Sufferers often end up depressed and malnourished. Without flavor, the motivation to eat is lost. When nothing can be smelled, there is a yearning for familiar tastes that can never be satisfied. Christmas goes by without the background aroma of turkey or spice; summers are no longer marked by the perfume of strawberries and cut grass. Sufferers often describe it as a deep loss. Duncan Boak, the founder of Fifth Sense, who became anosmic after a head injury, said that he feels as if he were looking at life through a pane of glass.
Part of what is missing for the anosmia sufferer is the safe place of childhood, a place to which the rest of us can return whenever we eat the foods we have always loved. A couple of years after the accident, Marlena Spieler found that glimmers of her former responsiveness to flavor were
returning. Depending on the level of damage to the brain, some anosmia sufferers do recover. Marlena slowly trained herself to love chocolate again, starting with the blandest milk chocolate and working up to 70 percent cocoa solid dark chocolate. Occasionally, her morning coffee gave her pleasure rather than just blankness. We met for lunch at an Italian restaurant and she seemed to be doing well, exclaiming over the blood-orange slices in our cocktails and nibbling on a deep-fried sage leaf. But even as her flavor perception was improving, she continued to feel unsettled. It wasn’t just that food tasted bad. It was that—she told me—she no longer felt quite “like Marlena.” As she explained to the BBC Radio 4 Food Programme, our sense of taste is something that anchors us to the person we have always known ourselves to be: “Your world has a certain taste. Your mother makes something a certain way. You’re used to certain flavours in your life and if you take that away, you start saying, ‘Who am I?’”
Memory is the single most powerful driving force in how we
learn to eat; it shapes all of our yearnings. Sometimes the memories are very short-term ones—for instance, whether or not we’ve just eaten. In one study, when a profoundly amnesiac patient was offered another meal only minutes after he had completed the first, he willingly took it. Minutes after that one, he ate a third meal. Only when a fourth meal was offered did he refuse, telling the experimenters that his “stomach was a little tight.” This suggests that having a conscious memory of our last meal matters as much as hunger in determining how much we eat.
For most of us, though, the food memories that really matter go much further back. You may not be able to remember what you had for lunch last Tuesday, but I bet you can recall the habitual meals of childhood, the breakfast you were given for a weekend treat, and the way bread tasted in your house. These are the memories that still have emotional force years or even decades later.
Such memories, conscious or unconscious, are what drive us to seek out the old habitual foods—particularly packaged foods—even if, judged objectively, they do not really taste nice or do our bodies any good. Experiments have been done with rats and mice where the animals were
given dopamine blockers, drugs that interfere with the part of the brain that governs reward. These drugs take away much of the chemical reward of eating food. Yet the dopamine blockers do not extinguish the rodents’ food-seeking behavior, at least not straightaway. At first, the animals continue to press the lever (or run through the alleyway, or whatever the task might be) and eat the pellets, even though the dopamine blocker means that the food no longer offers the same gratification. Next, they carry on pressing the lever to earn the pellets, but do not eat them. Finally they stop pressing the lever, indicating that at last their desire for the pellets has gone away. The interesting thing is that it takes so long for the desire to fade. As the neuroscientist Roy A. Wise has observed, it is only when “the memory of the reward is degraded through experience that the desire is lost.” The craving for the pellets is more a function of memory than of how they taste. Memory propels human food urges in much the same way. As we traverse the supermarket aisles in a trance-like state, we are like rats in an alleyway, steered to this or that food by memories of rewards long gone.
One of the reasons that we do not usually think of our tastes as learned is that most of the learning tends to happen in the very early years of life—and then it stops. For those of us who believe in personal development, it is depressing to learn that a person’s food “likes” at age two generally predict their tastes at twenty. In 2005, researchers in Turkey interviewed nearly seven hundred undergraduate students and their mothers. The mothers were asked about their children’s eating habits when they were two, and the students were asked about how they ate at the time of the experiment. There was a remarkable continuity between past and present. The students who were “picky eaters” as children still described themselves as picky eaters. The ones whose mothers recalled that they always ate too much still did so. And the three people in the study who “never” ate vegetables as children still had no vegetables in their diet. So much for putting aside childish things.
When we talk of memory and food, we generally assume that nostalgia is a phenomenon that occurs late in life—as when Marcel Proust was transported to his youth by a madeleine dipped in lime-blossom tea. But food-memory is there from the start. Even babies have nostalgia! It’s a large part of how we learn to eat. The foods parents give to babies provide
them with powerful memories that trigger lasting responses to certain flavors. This process begins before birth. We are all born with echoes of our mother’s diet, which means that no one is a totally blank slate when it comes to flavor. We arrive predisposed to respond to certain foods by our experiences in utero.
It’s hard to know what newborns think about taste, since we can’t exactly ask them. Or rather, they can’t exactly answer. But in 1974, the Israeli doctor Jacob Steiner realized that babies’ reactions to the basic tastes of sweet, sour, salty, and bitter could be gauged by their facial expressions, which are vivid and mobile, even in the first week. Steiner took babies just a few hours old and offered them a range of tastes on a cotton swab, filming their facial expressions. When given salt, which you’d think might make them cry, the babies, surprisingly, showed little reaction, continuing to look expressionless (a liking for salt only emerges later, around four months). But all of the other basic mouth-tastes produced strong reactions. The sour swab made the babies pucker their lips. Bitterness provoked an expression of abject distress and an open mouth, as if trying to spit or vomit it out. As for the sweet swab, Steiner found that it produced a dreamy look of “relaxation” with an “eager licking of the upper lip” and even a “slight smile”—and this at an age when babies are not supposed to be capable of smiling. Such is the power of sugar.