Environmental Factors

While your taster status may help explain why you hate grapefruit juice or love chili peppers, your ancestors aren't responsible for all your food habits. You may start out with more or fewer taste buds than your neighbor, but many other factors play a large role in determining what foods you like and dislike. These include:

• An innate human preference for sweets, which crosses all cultures. Experts theorize that this preference may have evolved to help ensure survival—nature's way of encouraging us to eat foods high in calories.
• Other sensory factors, including smell and flavor, that make food appealing.
• A natural hesitancy toward unfamiliar foods. Evidence indicates that the more children and adults are exposed to foods, the more likely they are to accept them. For young children, it may take as many as 10 exposures.
• Psychological associations, such as liking a particular food because the smell reminds you of pleasurable memories or developing a dislike for a food you ate before getting sick.
• Social and cultural conditioning. Animal studies support theories that food choices are influenced by traditions and expectations. When untrained rats are introduced into a colony of rats that has been conditioned to avoid a particular food, the untrained rats adopt the colony's preferences.
• Convenience. In surveys, people report that ease of preparation influences whether they like certain foods.
• Personality. Studies show that sensation seekers are more likely to try spicy and unknown foods while more conservative personality types are less willing to try new foods.