You should try foods you dislike over and over again
Photo courtesy of Benton Leroy Moore

Today, a short post on something very simple: trying foods you dislike a second or third time. This came to me a week or so ago when I got my CSA box. In it were cherries. I’ve never liked cherries. I always liked cherry flavoring. Hated cherries. So when I first saw the cherries in there, I thought, “I suppose Brian [a friend in the CSA with me] will be getting a bag of cherries.” Then I reconsidered and tried one. Well, to Brian’s dismay, I loved them, so he only got his rightful half of the bag we received.

But it made me think. I could have went with my first instinct and just passed them along, knowing that I hate them anyway. Instead, I popped one in my mouth and thoroughly enjoyed it. Strawberries were another food that I never really enjoyed until about 2 years ago. Strawberry flavoring was good. Strawberries, not so much. It was something about the texture. Now I eat strawberries with abandon.

Olives are another food that I couldn’t eat before. Too pungent. Now I can sit and eat olives straight from the jar. What’s the reason for these three (among many) changes in taste?

Why Does It Happen?
One theory, which up until a few hours was the one I’d heard and believed, is that our taste buds are refreshed every seven years. It turns out that’s an old wives’ tale, likely made up by a mother trying to get her kids to eat a bit of broccoli or some lima beans. Another urban legend is that the tongue is mapped into regions that taste sweet, salty, bitter, sour, and umami. Putting salt on the tip of your tongue should be enough to prove that wrong.

Of course, there’s another, more realistic, possibility than that my taste buds magically changed. I finally quit assaulting my taste buds with overly sweet and overly salty foods and learned to appreciate the natural flavors and textures of foods. There was certainly an adjustment period when I first cleaned up my diet. I found foods rather bland and boring, but kept eating them for the sake of eating the right stuff. I think my palate has finally acclimated itself to real foods.

One final theory: the more foods you try, the more your taste buds get used to enjoying new foods. My diet is so much broader now than it was even a year or two ago. Maybe working the taste buds makes them “stronger”.

So the real question is, do the taste buds actually change what they’re tasting or does our cognitive interpretation of that taste change? Hmm…perplexing, though in the end, it’s an irrelevant question. One thing is for sure. The sense of taste dulls as you age, whether due to a dulling of the taste buds or a dulling of the sense of smell.

How Do You Know When It’s Time To Try Something Again?
It’s always time to try something again. The absolute worst case scenario is that your mouth will revolt again and you’ll spit it out. I have heard a theory that parents should have their child try a particular food eight times on different occasions (and not eight days in a row) before accepting “I don’t like that.”

The same rule should hold for adults. You never know if you just didn’t like the way it was prepared, the way it was presented, something else in the meal that left a bad taste in your mouth, or perhaps your tastes were just off that day. So try it again a week later. If you steamed the broccoli you (or your kids) hated last time, try it stir-fried or raw.

So the whole point of this post is to say, “Keep trying things!” You never know what incredibly healthful foods you’ll rediscover from your past that you now enjoy.

What foods do you eat now that you hated a decade or less ago? How did you learn to like them?


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