First Bite: How We Learn to Eat Read Online Free PDF Page B

or be scented with star anise in China. Slightly surprisingly, not everyone recognizes it as the ideal food for newborns. Let’s go back to my first sentence about us all starting life drinking milk. It isn’t quite true. There are remote rural cultures where the people believe that babies will be harmed by colostrum, the rich yellowish milk that mothers produce in the first few days after birth. Parents may give babies honey or sweet almond oil for the first three days instead, because they fear—wrongly—that this early milk is too “strong” for a tiny baby to digest; these far-off communities do not know that giving honey to a baby creates a risk of infant botulism.
    b Strangely, in humans, unlike in rats, obesity seems to be associated with reduced rather than heightened dopamine release, suggesting, once more, the complexity of our pleasure responses.

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    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
    H e 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 to 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 He was not socially withdrawn or difficult in any other way.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, andthey 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 flavors 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 payoff 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 licorice.
    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.” 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’s 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