You May Also Like Read Online Free Page B

sweetness; they may only like it less than others do.
    But few of our gustatory preferences are innate; that lump of sugar, a touch of salt, perhaps the feel of fat as it glides across our tongue, even those are not beyond change. Nor is much of what we do not like. Some people may be more biologically sensitive to certain substances, but often that is not taste per se.Cilantro, for some, brings out a “soapy” taste, but it has been argued that has to do with genetic variation in
olfactory
receptors. Meanwhile, only half the population, as it fries up pork chops or grills sausage, seems able to detect “boar taint.” This is an unpleasant scent, to humans at least, often described as “off,” evoking “urine,” or, simply, being “pig like.” Boar taint comes from androstenes, a steroid-driven musk that steams off male boars during mating to boost their desirability.The ability of humans to smell it is genetic, though people can be trained to detect it (for professional, not hobby, purposes).
    But there is not a clear line between one’s biological sensitivity to substances and one’s food likes and dislikes. Beauchamp theorizes this may be some population-wide adaptive mechanism. One group liked a certain plant, and another group liked another; if one plant turned out to lack sufficient nutrition, it would not mean the end of the species.Just because you find a substance more bitter than someone else, however,does not mean you are going to like it any less. As one researcher puts it, “It is striking how little genetics predisposes humans to like or dislike food flavors.”
    And yet go to a restaurant, even a well-reviewed exemplar of a beloved cuisine, like Del Posto, and there will be things on the menu that you seem to prefer to others (this may even change from one day to another). The very array of choices that you are presented with—from the opening salvo of “Would you like fizzy or still water?”—speaks to this litany of tastes. But what actually goes on in the mind to make these decisions between seemingly inconsequential choices, of whether one prefers carbonation in one’s water? An extra frisson of excitement to hydration? Or the desire for a more languorously silken mouthfeel? How passionate are you in your choice, or is it rather arbitrary? Let us imagine you opt for still. This earns you another choice: “Would you like tap or bottled?” Reasons though you may have for choosing one or the other, it almost certainly has nothing to do with sensory discernment:Studies show that most of us cannot distinguish the stuff.
    As adamant as we are in our likes—“I
love ragù
Bolognese,” one might say—we are even more adamant in our dislikes. “I can’t
stand
eggplant,” my wife has said, more than once. If pressed, though, we would find it hard to locate the precise origin of these preferences. Is there some ancient evolutionary fear at work here?Eggplant, after all, is part of the nightshade family, and its leaves, in high enough doses, can be toxic.Then again, tomatoes and potatoes are in the same
Solanum
genus, and my wife happily eats those.
    She is certainly not alone in finding eggplant off-putting. Its mention in the culinary press often comes cloaked in cheerily conditional phrases like “love it or hate it” and “even if you dislike it,” while one survey of Japanese schoolchildren found it to be the “most disliked” vegetable. It is probably a texture thing; done wrong, eggplant can feel a bit slimy, a trait we do not always prize. Indeed, texture, or mouthfeel, should not be underestimated: Not only can we literally “taste” texture, but as the food scientist Alina Surmacka Szczesniak has written, “People like to be in full control of the food placed in their mouth. Stringy, gummy, or slimy food or those with unexpected lumps or hard particles are