Acquired taste

An acquired taste is an appreciation for something unlikely to be enjoyed by a person who has not had substantial exposure to it. It is the opposite of innate taste, which is the appreciation for things that are enjoyable by most persons without prior exposure to them.

For other uses, see Acquired Taste (disambiguation).

Characteristics

In case of food and drink, the difficulty of enjoying the product may be due to a strong odor (such as certain types of cheese, durian, hákarl, black salt, nattō, asafoetida, surströmming, or stinky tofu), taste (as in alcoholic beverages, coffee, Vegemite or Marmite, bitter teas, liquorice/salty liquorice, malt bread, unsweetened chocolate, garnatálg, rakfisk, soused herring, haggis), mouthfeel (such as sashimi and sushi featuring uncooked seafood), appearance, or association (such as eating insects or organ meat).

Examples

The following items can be described as "acquired tastes", often due to combination of both unfamiliarity and intensity of taste. In principle, though, anything for which one can have a taste, can also become an acquired taste. An acquired taste is distinguished by how one comes to have the taste, not what the thing in question is.

  • Aloe vera, a type of plant whose inner pulp is sometimes used in drinks, very common in Japan
  • Blood sausage, sausage made by cooking animal blood with a filler until it is thick enough to congeal when cooled
  • Camel paw, a Chinese delicacy served in the Forbidden City
  • Capers, pickled and salted buds or fruits of the caper shrub.
  • Chamoy, heavily-salted Mexican plum or apricot paste with chili powder
  • Cilantro, (also known as coriander), some people perceive an unpleasant "soapy" taste and/or a rank smell. This is believed to be a result of an enzyme that changes the way they taste coriander leaves (a genetic trait).
  • Clamato, a drink made primarily of reconstituted tomato juice concentrate and reconstituted dried clam broth, with a dash of high fructose corn syrup, and USDA Red 40 to maintain a 'natural' tomato colour
  • Coffee, a bitter beverage prepared from roasted coffee seeds
  • Cow Cod Soup, Jamaican bull penis soup
  • Cow tongue
  • Cup cheese, a Pennsylvania Dutch runny cheese, sharp or mild, having roughly the color and consistency of snot
  • Dark chocolate, processed chocolate that has little or no added sugar or milk, and therefore has a bitter taste.
  • Durian, a pungent southeast Asian fruit
  • Eel, seafood, an Anguilliform
  • Eulachon grease, extracted from eulachon fish
  • Feet, of cow, calf, pig, duck, chicken, camel, goat, etc.
  • Fernet, a particularly strong, grape based, herbal digestif
  • Fish Sauce, a condiment derived from fish that have been allowed to ferment
  • Gull eggs, eaten boiled and popular in Scandinavia and some partes of Scotland and Ireland
  • Haggis, a traditional Scottish dish mainly consisting of minced sheep offal, boiled in a sheep's stomach.
  • Insects, including gubs, ants, grasshoppers, locusts, etc.
  • Jiló, bitter fruit (cooked as a vegetable) popular in Brazil
  • Lobster tomalley, the soft, green substance found in the body cavity of lobsters, that fulfills the functions of both the liver and the pancreas.
  • Mugicha, or barley tea, which is a popular Japanese beverage
  • Edible Mushrooms, a mushroom that can potentially be safely eaten.
  • Olives, fermented or cured fruit of the olive tree, come in different varieties and have a salty, bitter, oily taste.
  • Pu erh, a compressed, aged tea dominated by strong, earthy overtones
  • Rivella, a Swiss carbonated soft drink. It is made from whey, also known as milk plasma.
  • Scrapple, a slab of leftover pork parts.
  • Stink Bean, beans bearing a rather peculiar smell, quite popular in southeast Asia
  • Stinky tofu, a form of fermented tofu, which, as the name suggests, has a strong odor.
  • Sushi, a Japanese food sometimes made with raw fish and sashimi
  • Switchel, an Anglo-caribbean summer drink based on vinegar and molasses, also called Haymaker's Punch
  • Tonic water, carbonated water flavored with quinine, giving the beverage its bitter taste.
  • Tobacco, Smoked, chewed, etc ; some also claim Cannabis is an acquired taste.
  • Unicum, a Hungarian herbal bitter

Acquiring the taste

General acquisition of tastes

The process of acquiring a taste can involve developmental maturation, genetics (of both taste sensitivity and personality), family example, and biochemical reward properties of foods. Infants are born preferring sweet foods and rejecting sour and bitter tastes, and they develop a preference for salt at approximately 4 months. However, vegetables tend to be a favourite as they start to learn to feed themselves. Neophobia (fear of novelty) tends to vary with age in predictable, but not linear, ways. Babies just beginning to eat solid foods generally accept a wide variety of foods, toddlers and young children are relatively neophobic towards food, and older children, adults, and the elderly are often adventurous eaters with wide-ranging tastes.[3]

The general personality trait of novelty-seeking does not necessarily correlate highly with willingness to try new foods. Level of food adventurousness may explain much of the variability of food preferences observed in "supertasters". Supertasters are highly sensitive to bitter, spicy, and pungent flavours, and some avoid them and like to eat only mild, plain foods, but many supertasters who have high food adventurousness enjoy these intense flavors and seek them out.[4] Some chemicals or combinations of chemicals in foods provide both flavor and beneficial or enjoyable effects on the body and mind and may be reinforcing, leading to an acquired taste. A study that investigated the effect of adding caffeine and theobromine (active compounds in chocolate) vs. a placebo to identically-flavored drinks that participants tasted several times, yielded the development of a strong preference for the drink with the compounds.[5]

Intentional acquisition of tastes

Intentionally changing one's preferences can be hard to accomplish. It usually requires a deliberate effort, acting as if one likes something in order to have the responses and feelings that will produce the desired taste. The challenge becomes one of distinguishing authentic or legitimate acquired tastes as a result of deeply considered preference changes from inauthentic ones motivated by status or conformity.[6][7]

See also

References
  1. Absinthe, What is Absinthe? About its Science, Chemistry and Structure
  2. Absinthe, the Potent Green Fairy
  3. Birch, L. L. (1999). "Development of food preferences". Annual Review of Nutrition. 19 (1): 41–62. doi:10.1146/annurev.nutr.19.1.41. PMID 10448516.
  4. Ullrich, N. V.; Touger-Decker, R.; O’Sullivan-Maillet, J.; Tepper, B. J. (2004). "PROP taster status and self-perceived food adventurousness influence food preferences". Journal of the American Dietetic Association. 104 (4): 543–549. doi:10.1016/j.jada.2004.01.011. PMID 15054337.
  5. Smit, H. J.; Blackburn, R. J. (2005). "Reinforcing effects of caffeine and theobromine as found in chocolate". Psychopharmacology. 181 (1): 101–106. doi:10.1007/s00213-005-2209-3. PMID 15772863. S2CID 28790932.
  6. Bovens, L. (1992). "Sour Grapes and Character Planning". The Journal of Philosophy. 89 (2): 57–78. doi:10.2307/2027152. JSTOR 2027152.
  7. Bovens, L. (1995). "The Intentional Acquisition of Mental States". Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. 55 (4): 821–840. doi:10.2307/2108334. JSTOR 2108334.

Further reading
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