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unpleasant images to moral transgressions. Disgust
began
, he suggested, with disliked food: the mouth as gatekeeper, the gape as message.Instances of disgusting behavior, which leave a “bad taste in the mouth,” may in some ancient or metaphoric sense be akin to an actual bad taste in the mouth that needs to be expelled.
    Precisely because Zellner is allergic, she has never eaten enough of a dairy product to get severe nausea. So she dwells in a purgatory of pleasure—pitched somewhere between desire and revulsion. She admitted to not caring for the mouthfeel of many dairy products. “Maybe because I know that it means I have just consumed something that might make me feel bad. I don’t know.” To complicate matters, she occasionally “cheats” with cheese, eating tiny shards of especially alluring varieties.
    The waiter appeared. “Is this your first time at Del Posto?” It is an innocent question but one that itself is important, as we shall see. As we study the menu, one of the principal liking questions looms. “What determines what you’re selecting?” Zellner asked, as I wavered between the “Heritage Pork Trio” with “Ribollita alla Casella and Black Cabbage Stew” and the “Wild Striped Bass” with “Soft Sunchokes, Wilted Romaine & Warm Occelli Butter.” “What I’m choosing, is that liking?” she continues. “It’s not liking the taste, because I don’t have it in my mouth.” If I had been to this restaurant before and had a particular dish, I might remember liking it. One might argue that liking is entirely based on memory: The single biggest predictor for whether you will like a food is whether you have had it before (more on that in a while).
    But let us say it is new to me. Perhaps I like the
idea
of it, because it reminds me of similar choices in the past. “Choices depend on tastes,” as one economist wrote, “as tastes depend on past choices.” Perhaps it is the way the entrée is described. Language is a seasoning that can make food seem even more palatable. Words like “warm” and “soft” and “heritage” are not idle; they are appetizers for the brain. In his book
The Omnivorous Mind
, the neuroscientist John S. Allen notes that simply hearing an onomatopoetic word like “crispy”—which the chef Mario Batali calls “innately appealing”—is “likely to evoke the sense of eating that type of food.”The more tempting the language, the more strongly one rehearses the act of consumption. The economist Tyler Cowen argues one should resist such blandishments and order the thing that sounds
least
appetizing on a menu. “An item won’t be onthe menu unless there’s a good reason for its presence,” he writes. “If it sounds bad, it probably tastes especially good.”
    But it is hard to find anything that does not appetize on this menu. “It all sounds so good,” says Zellner (a curious phrase because we are reading the menu to ourselves). At this point, all we can be sure of what we like is this: We like to choose.The mere fact of having a menu of items from which to choose, research has shown, lifts all our liking for
all
items on that menu.And while the anticipation of our choice excites us, our anticipation of being able to
make
a choice, as brain imaging work has shown, seems to result in more neural activity than simply looking forward to getting something without making a choice.
    If language helps us “pre-eat” the food, something similar goes on as we merely consider the choice. “Prefeeling” is how the psychologists Timothy Wilson and Daniel Gilbert have described it. In their view, we “try out” different future scenarios, taking our hedonic response in the moment as a gauge of how we are going to feel about our choice in the future. Not