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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 mostother 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 itin the dark). We even like the way it sounds.Research has shown that amping up just thehigh-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