First Bite: How We Learn to Eat by Bee Wilson

them, particularly in conditions of scarcity. “If you want your children to be less fussy about whatthey eat,” a friend who had fallen on hard times during the recession advised me, “I can recommend poverty.” It’s not really an option to be picky about the staple food of rice if you live in rural China.
    Genes do make a difference—to the foods we like, the way we taste them, and even how much we enjoy eating—but they turn out to be much less significant than the environment in which we learn to eat those foods. Contrary to our deepest beliefs about ourselves and our children, our likes and dislikes—the important ones, anyway, such as whether we eat enough vegetables or how much variety and balance we have in our diets—are much more about nurture than nature. Apart from changing the infants’ food environment, there was another, bigger trick to Davis’s experiment that she did not mention, perhaps because it is so obvious. She radically changed the children’s social experience when eating, removing all extraneous social influence. In place of the hubbub of the family dinner table, the babies had only expressionless nurses who “might not comment” in any way on their choices. The thought of being served in this silent, impassive way is creepy, particularly for the oldest children, who must have been as old as five by the time they left the orphanage. They ate without anyone caring what they ate, without any siblings fighting them for the last slice of pineapple, without any surrounding ideas about cuisine.
    Davis was mistaken if she thought this was the way to discover the true nature of children’s appetites. Though the nutritional outcomes were excellent, it was a not-quite-human way to eat, and one that no child in a real situation will ever replicate. We cannot arrive at the truth about appetite by removing all social influences. Appetite is a profoundly social impulse. To a large extent, our likes and dislikes are a response to the environment we eat in. From our first toothless tastes, we are picking up cues about which foods are desirable, and which are disgusting, which, sadly, are so often the very ones the grown-ups most want us to eat.
     
    The public discussion of eating habits is focused on temptation and the idea of resisting desirable foods. But if we look at eating through the eyes of a child, we see that disgust may be even more powerful than desire in forming our tastes. Our urge to avoid eating somethingthatmakes us feel sick is often at the root of disordered eating, as we swerve away from whole categories of foods that we imagine would make us feel queasy. The most common reason for disgust is nausea: anything eaten just before a bout of stomach bug may be hated for life. Psychologist Paul Rozin, the world’s leading expert on disgust, has argued that a central feature of disgust is “contagion: when a disgusting food touches otherwise acceptable foods, it renders them permanently inedible.” And yet most of the foods that we happen to find disgusting are not toxins but perfectly edible and wholesome foods. Brussels sprouts, for example.
    If there is one food associated with personal dislikes in the Anglo-Saxon world, it is the Brussels sprout. Many people assume they have no choice in this matter—they just can’t stand them. Are they right? In an article singing the praises of Brussels sprouts, the great chef Yotam Ottolenghi noted that there was a “genetic explanation for why people either love or loathe” these little green brassicas. Ottolenghi argued that being a sprout hater was likely a consequence of having a certain gene—TAS2R38—which “makes a protein that reacts with a chemical called PTC to create the sensation of bitterness.” Could this really be true? Is there a molecular basis to our hatred—or otherwise—of green vegetables?
    Some people definitely taste certain flavors more acutely than others. To take one of the stranger examples, up to 30 percent