A MATTER OF TASTE!

There are people out there who actually eat durian fruit!

Named the “king of fruits” in some regions, the durian is large and has a thorn-covered rind. The fruit can grow to 12 inches long and 6 in in diameter, and it typically weighs 2 to 7 pounds. Its shape ranges from oblong to round, the color of its husk from green to brown, and its flesh pale yellow to red, depending on the species. I’ve heard the texture described as somewhere between banana and pudding.

But the most distinctive characteristic is the smell! Some people consider the durian to have a pleasantly sweet fragrance. For them, the smell evokes reactions of deep appreciation. Others find the aroma unpleasant, overpowering, even intensely disgusting.

Sign on a subway wall in Singapore

The persistence of its odor, which can linger for hours or even days, has led many public spaces in Southeast Asia, including hotels and civic buildings, to ban the fruit. One cannot carry it on public transportation of any sort, not even motorbike taxis.

Many people, most westerners especially, feel nauseous or gag, at the sight, scent, or taste of durian. As travel writer Richard Sterling said, “Its odor is best described as pig-excrement, turpentine and onions, garnished with a gym sock.” And yet, some people—many people—enjoy durian.

A hotel in Huế, Vietnam, bans durians right along with pets and gambling.

Why Do We Like What We Like?

So how do food preferences come about? There is a great, comprehensive article about this at That Thinking Feeling. Food preferences are determined by lots of factors including:

Japanese snack food is famous for including unexpected flavors.
  • Age
  • Gender
  • Wealth
  • Childhood experience
  • Whether you’re a supertaster
  • How often you’ve been exposed to the food in question
  • Social context (my addition)
  • Emotional factors

Generally speaking, each of our taste-detecting tongue cells ‘specializes’ in one of five flavors: salt, sweet, bitter, sour, or umami. That last is from Japanese and roughly corresponds to ‘savory.’ Contrary to what you were taught in school, no one area of the tongue specializes in anything. Besides the tongue, we have taste buds on the other mouth surfaces and in the throat.

Escargot (snails) are quite popular in France.

Big Bombshell: 90% of what is perceived as taste is actually smell! (This according to Dr. Alan Hirsch of the Smell and Taste Treatment and Research Foundation in Chicago.) But for the purposes of this blog, that isn’t relevant.

Age

Though originally a Scandinavian delicacy, more lutefisk (fish brined in lye) is sold in the US and Canada today.

Babies prefer sweet and salty and reject the other three flavors. If the mother suffered a lot of morning sickness during pregnancy, leading to dehydration, her child will have a stronger preference for salty compared to other babies. Also, babies tend to avoid/reject new or unfamiliar foods. Babies are most open to trying new flavors between the ages of 4 and 7 months.

People ages 20-39 years old eat the most fast food on any given day.

As we grow up, our taste buds become less intense. With age, both taste and smell change.

Taste buds regenerate quickly when we are younger, but over time they don’t reproduce as quickly, or at all. Remaining taste buds shrink as we get older too, resulting in diminished sense of taste. Typically, seniors notice this loss of taste with salty or sweet foods first.

Grilled scorpion and seahorse skewers are a common snack in many Chinese night markets.

After age 60, you may begin to lose the ability to distinguish the taste of sweet, salty, sour, and bitter foods. The sense of smell does not begin to fade until after the age of 70; its decrease exacerbates the loss of taste for those affected.

Older adults tend to consume less energy-dense sweets and fast foods, moving toward more grains, vegetables and fruits. Daily volume of foods and beverages also declines as a function of age.

Gender

Men eat more meat and bread, while women consume more fruit, yogurt, and diet soda. Women also have higher intakes of dietary fiber and lower intakes of fat.

In Korea, bundaegi (silkworm larvae) are traditionally eaten by men, often accompanied by rice wine.

In general, there appears to be greater evidence for picky eating in males than females.

Men consume more fast food than women.

Some research suggests that women respond more to environmental cues regarding food. Women’s brains tend to form stronger associations between the perception of food and pleasure. Food preferences in women’s brains are more likely than men’s to develop in response to social cues and self-perception.

Wealth

The affluent have more access to higher quality, nutrient dense but typically more expensive food while the underprivileged are often forced to choose cheaper, energy dense food options.

Percebes, a variety of Portugese barnacles, are both difficult and dangerous to harvest, making them a very expensive delicacy.

Upper class groups prefer foods that signify exclusivity and access to rare goods; while lower class groups, on the other hand, consume foods that are readily available.

Until the Industrial Revolution, lobster was considered an undesirable food relegated to the poorer classes.

On the flip side, lack of access to healthy foods can affect mental and physical performance at school and at work. This poor performance in turn makes it more difficult for people to improve their income and wealth.

Even when more nutritious foods become available, people raised in low-income households tend to buy cheaper, less nutritious foods they are familiar with. This traces back to food preferences formed in childhood.

Childhood Experience

Parental food habits and feeding strategies are the most dominant determinants of a child’s eating behavior and food preferences. For example, parents make some foods available rather than others.

My personal food recipe for rearing children to become eclectic eaters:

Escamoles (ant eggs) are popular in dishes in Mexico, Guatemala, and Peru.
  • Have children eat with adults, whatever adults eat (with the exception of caffeine and alcohol until age appropriate).
  • Do not demand that a child eat any particular thing. You can’t actually make them eat, and arguments are negative all around.
  • Set clear contingencies: eat everything or no dessert and no snacks before the next meal.
The popularity of Peeps (a marshmallow candy) in the United States mystifies people in other countries.

In the United States, food advertisers face no regulations around marketing food to children. As they grow up, children become increasingly bombarded with social and commercial messaging. The combination of nostalgia with familiarity surrounding foods eaten in childhood encourages people to maintain eating habits developed in childhood, even if those habits are unhealthy.

Supertasters

Picky eaters might be picky because they are supertasters. Whether or not someone is a supertaster depends on the number of taste buds on his or her tongue. One can actually see this by visually inspecting a person’s tongue.

Along with blood pudding and Scotch eggs, haggis is a dish popular in Scotland though viewed rather dubiously by outsiders.

To supertasters, the flavors of foods are much stronger than to average tasters. This often leads to supertasters having very strong likes and dislikes for different foods.

Diners in Italy must cover their casu marzu (cheese with live maggots) while eating in case the maggots wriggle free.

These people have more cell receptors for bitter taste. Supertasters are also more sensitive to sweet, salty and umami tastes, but to a lesser extent.

Research suggests that those on the autism spectrum may be more likely to be supertasters. People with sensory issues, including many pregnant women, may experience food aversions due to a heightened sense of smell before they even taste a food.

Food Exposure

Repeated exposure to the taste of unfamiliar foods is a promising strategy for promoting liking of previously rejected foods.

Ackee, a fruit that is poisonous if harvested too early, is often served with onions and fish in western Africa and Jamaica.

Fewer than 8 exposures may be sufficient for infants and toddlers to increase acceptability of a food. But there may be times when a child never likes a particular food regardless of the number of exposures.

Evidence suggests that children need to be exposed to a food at least 12 times before they start to like it. It can take as many as 15 exposures for a child to get fully comfortable with a new food.

Sociocultural Effects

Even when eating alone, food choice is influenced by social factors because attitudes and habits develop through the interaction with others.

Muktuk (narwhal and whale blubber and skin) is a staple in Inuit diets, providing more vitamin C than oranges.

Sociocultural variables contribute to food selection, eating practices and purchasing behaviors.

Ifinkubala (mopane worms) are a delicacy through much of southern Africa.
  • Ethnicity
  • Religion
  • Reference group
  • Family
  • Education
  • Occupation
  • Marital status
  • Geography
  • Societal trends
  • Messages in the media

Research has shown that we eat more with our friends and family than when we eat alone. The quantity of food increases as the number of fellow diners grows.

Emotional Factors

Sometimes being drunk is the primary emotional factor for being drawn to certain foods.

Researchers have linked irregular eating patterns and negative emotions such as anger, fear and sadness with eating as a distraction, to relax or feel better.

Scientists associate stress with cravings for high fat and high carbohydrate foods particularly among women. Stress related eating is more common in women than men.

Bottom Line: The development of food preferences involves a complex braiding of factors. Preferences develop early and are generally stable but can shift over time.

I think this one is just a joke. I hope it’s a joke.

Body Awareness

 
When writers write human sensations, they typically rely on the basic five: sight (vision), hearing (audition), taste (gustation), smell (olfaction), and touch (somatosensation). Everyone since Aristotle has recognized these. But relying on these is over-simplification.

 

In fact, humans have a multitude of sensors. The ability to detect other stimuli beyond those governed by these most broadly recognized senses also exists, and these sensory modalities include temperature (thermoception), kinesthetic sense (proprioception), pain (nociception), balance (equilibrioception), vibration (mechanoreception), and various internal stimuli (e.g. the different chemoreceptors for detecting salt and carbon dioxideconcentrations in the blood, or sense of hunger and sense of thirst).
What constitutes a sense is a matter of debate, leading to difficulties in defining what exactly a distinct sense is, and where the borders lie between responses to related stimuli. Today, a conservative list of senses numbers 10 and the generally accepted list includes 21. The radical list identifies at least 33.
 
But as writers, we don’t have to worry about exact numbers and labels. We just need to develop a keener body awareness for our characters.
 
 
One of my personal favorites is proprioception, the sense that gives you the ability to tell where your body parts are in relation to other body parts and the environment. Being able to close your eyes and touch your nose is one example—a skill that is impaired when drunk, BTW.
 
I first really though about this sense when I read what John McPhee said about Bill Bradley, back in the day when Bill Bradley was a basketball superstar. McPhee was particularly impressed that Bradley, back to the basket, could look him in the eye, hold a conversation, and toss a basketball over his shoulder and make the shot.
 
 
Bradley: “When you have played basketball for a while, you don’t need to look at the basket when you are in close like this….You develop a sense of where you are.”
 
Any character who is athletic would have a highly developed sense of body awareness. The opposite of Bill Bradley is the character who is forever bumping her/his head, tripping, knocking into things, etc.
 
Choose any sense and have a character who is characterized by an extreme of that sense. For example, tea, wine, or coffee tasters; acrobats; inability to feel pain or temperature; etc.
 
Numerous studies have shown that people do have the ability to detect accurately the passage of time, without counting or anything like that: on average, 18 to 24 year olds could tell when 3 minutes were up within a 3 second margin. And perhaps more interesting, our sense of time slows down with age, so that 60-80 year olds, on average, thought that 3 minutes had passed at around 3 minutes and 40 seconds! Again, this might be more useful for people on either extreme from the average. FYI, people with Parkinson’s or ADD have very poor sense of time passage compared to “normal” people.
numbers in color
Synesthesia is, essentially, when our sensory wires get crossed. Such people hear or taste color, for example. Although some people experience this naturally, it is more common under the influence of hallucinogens.

 

BOTTOM LINE: Do a little reading online about human senses to develop awareness of how these can enhance your writing!