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white-clothed table of a restaurant accorded four stars by
The New York Times
, only to find a raft of unpalatable swill. The very fact that the food has madeit onto the menu—the menu of a long-established culinary tradition—reflects that it is generally liked. We are not our evolutionary ancestors, forced to graze on the culinary savanna, scrounging for sustenance amid a host of unfamiliar plants and elusive prey, waiting for our bodies to tell us whether we like (or will survive) what we have chosen.
    Nevertheless, the old tickle at the back of the brain—
eat this, not that
!—has hardly left us. We are born knowing two things: Sweet is good (caloric energy), bitter is bad (potential toxin). We also come into the world with a curious blend of full-spectrum liking and disliking. We are, on the one hand, omnivores. There is little we could not eat. As Paul Rozin, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania, has helpfully pointed out, we share this “generalist” status “with such other worthy species as rats and cockroaches.” And yet, like rats, we are intensely “neophobic,” afraid of trying new foods. Being dual omnivores/neophobes has its evolutionary advantages: The latter trait kept us from ingesting the wrong things; the former made sure we had plenty of access to the right things. But neophobia can go too far.In some experiments, rats, once mildly poisoned by new foods, became so afraid of subsequent new foods that they starved to death.
    We actually seem predisposed to be more acutely aware of what we do not like than of what we like.We are particularly alert to even minor changes in what we
do
like, as if we had an internal alarm for when things go wrong. When I am served, by mistake, diet soda, which I do not like and thus do not drink, my response borders on the visceral:
Danger!
This alarm is most well tuned for the bitter, and we rate “aversive” tastes as being more intense than pleasurable ones. The worm found in the last bite of an otherwise delicious apple will pretty much wipe out the pleasure accumulated from eating the rest of it. Although this may be an occasional drag on our ability to enjoy life, being primed to spot the bad helps us have a life to enjoy.
    And so, a few days out of the womb, we are already expressing preferences, picking sugary water over the plain variety, making faces at (some) bitter foods. This is pure survival, eating to live.We start getting
really
choosy at around age two, when we have figured out (a) we might be sticking around for a while and (b) we have the luxury of choice. The need for raw sustenance explains why for infants nothing can really be too sweet: It is the primordial liking.Even our desire forsalt, which is so vital to the human endeavor that it informs town names like Salzburg andthose English burghs with “wich” (brine pits were known as “wich houses”) as their suffix, takes a few months to kick in.
    Liking for sweetness is liking for life itself. As Gary Beauchamp, at the time the director of Philadelphia’s Monell Chemical Senses Center—the country’s preeminent taste and smell lab—had put it to me in his office one day, “I would say that
all
human pleasure derives from sugar. It’s the prototypical thing—a single compound stimulating a very specific set of receptors.” He told me this after first casually proffering a sample from a can of salted army ants (the ingredient label read, “Ants, salt”). Other kinds of substances—like salted ants—may have a more wayward trip upstream, he intimates, but with sugar “that pathway goes directly to the parts of the brain that are involved in emotion and pleasure.”Even anencephalic babies, born missing parts of the brain that are central to consciousness, respond positively (through what’s called a “gustofacial response”) to sweetness.No one living really dislikes