Read First Bite: How We Learn to Eat for Free Online

the fibrous, sour, yellow kind. When I say I adore it, I am thinking of a ripe Alphonso mango from India, brimming with orange juice and so fragrant you could bottle it and use it for perfume.
    The foods we eat the most are not always the ones we like the most. In 1996, the psychologist Kent Berridge changed the way many neuroscientists thought about eating when he introduced a distinction between “wanting” (the motivation to eat something) and “liking” (the pleasurethe food actually gives). Berridge found that “wanting” or craving was neurally as well as psychologically distinct from “liking.” Whereas the zone of the brain that controls our motivation to eat stretches across the entire nucleus accumbens , the sections of the brain that give us pleasure when we eat occupy smaller “hotspots” within this same area. For Berridge, this discovery offers a fruitful way for thinking about some of the “disorders of desire” that bedevil humans. For example, binge eating may—like other addictive behaviors—be associated with “excessive wanting without commensurate ‘liking.’” You may feel a potent drive to purchase an extra-large portion of cheesy nachos, even though the pleasure they deliver when you actually consume them is much less potent than you expected. Indeed, binge eaters often report that the foods they crave do not even taste good when they are eating them: the desire is greater than the enjoyment.
    However, several neuroscientists have pointed out in response to Berridge that liking and wanting remain “highly entangled.” Berridge himself admits that there is strong evidence that if you reduce the amount a food is liked, the consequence is that it is also wanted less. Even if our craved foods do not make us as happy as we hope they will, the reason that we crave them in the first place is that we once loved them. Like drug addicts, we are chasing a remembered high. Our “likes” thus remain a central motivating force in shaping how and what we eat. Why we like the foods we do remains a vital question for anyone who is interested in feeding themselves or their family better. If asked to say where tastes come from, I suspect that most of us would say they were determined by individual temperament, which is another way of saying “genes.” Being a chocolate lover—or hater—becomes so much a part of our self-image that we can’t imagine ourselves any other way. We show that we are adventurous by seeking out the hottest chilis; we prove we are easygoing by telling our host we “eat anything.” We confirm that we are naturally conservative by eating patriotic hunks of red meat. Taste is identity. Aged eight, my daughter used to draw pictures of herself and write “prawns-peas-mushrooms” at the top, surrounding herself with the tastes she loved best.
    Because our tastes are such an intimate part of our selves, it is easy to make the leap to thinking that they must be mostly genetic: something you just have to accept as your lot in life. Parents often tell children that their particular passions place them on this or that side of the family—you got your fussiness from your grandfather!—as if you were destined from birth to eat a certain way. Sometimes it is uncanny how a suspicion of celery or a deep hunger for blackberries replicates from parent to child. When we notice these familial patterns, it confirms us in our view that food preferences must be inherited through our genes.
    When I’ve described the argument of this book to people I meet, sometimes they get a little angry. “I disagree that we learn how to eat,” they say. “You’d never get me to like sultanas/squid/salami (delete as appropriate).” Anyway, they say, “What about genes?”
    It’s fine by me if you don’t like sultanas. And I’m certainly not denying that there is a genetic component in our relationship with food. We are not born as blank slates. Some people have a heightened genetic sensitivity