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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.”
    â€”
    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 smellsto