Thursday 8 March 2012

Training for taste

I find it a very interesting experiment that Mark Serrels performed, trying to force himself to like olives by eating one per day during January. Before, he says, his body retched at the taste of olives. Now, after a month, he actually sort of enjoys them on their own, but when you put them in another context (eg salad, pizza), he still doesn't want them. So here's the question: can you force yourself to develop a taste for a food you physically hate by eating it on its own, or might we still need to overcome some mental barriers to push that tolerance into other contexts?

For me, the food to work at would be prawns - disgusting bottom-feeding vermin of the sea who come to your plate complete with heads and eyeballs. I know most of my fellow Australians get a completely different picture when they think "prawn", something more like "delicious bite-sized package of pink-white meat", but for me it's always been more like "poison spider-flesh with a thousand horrible legs". Perhaps I should try to develop a taste for them, and expand my pallette to be truly Australian.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I don't have a taste for much seafood, really.
PPS - But I have recently come to appreciate plain old fish.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Prawns are the cockroach of the ocean.

John said...

Love it. The expression, not the prawns, of course.