Taste Aversion and Fireball

 I feel like everyone has that one liquor that they avoid like the plague because of one really bad night. You know that one night where you took one to several shots too many. You wake up the next day to immediately pray to Jesus through the big porcelain telephone that you’ll never drink again only to double back like a week to a month later. That’s fireball for me. To this day, I cannot take a whiff of the cinnamon whiskey without being whisked away to the backseat of my dad’s jeep swearing I had a “stomach bug” as I intermittently shared last night’s dinner with a paper bag that was keeping it together just as well as I was (poorly). What I just colorfully described is an example of taste aversion, the dislike of food due to the association with nausea. Now this association extends beyond getting off your trolley. You may have gotten food poisoning from some bad shrimp, and now you swear off the delicious sea insects solely on the one bad experience. Maybe you caught a whiff of durian, a fruit I’ve never eaten and never will because it smells like a well-used jockstrap. Regardless, all these feelings can be described under the blanket term of taste aversion.

Preference for food

Ever since I could remember, my parents have criticized my terribly picky eating habits. This class has opened my eyes to a new understanding of where I developed my pallet. As the class illustrated, an individual's preferences for certain foods come from both innate and conditioned backgrounds. With that being said, my parents do not have the right to disapprove of my food preferences, since their lack of exposure to a variety of foods limited my interest in it. This is a conditioned concept discussed, known as the mere exposure effect. A person given food repeatedly will naturally increase their interest in that food. Growing up, my parents did not open me up to any spicy foods, and now as a result,  I will not go near anything spicy. Additionally, on the topic of food, I was extremely shocked by the video discussing the bottomless food bowl. I could not believe that people truly eat an average of 73% more soup when they have a bottomless bowl. I decided to look into the topics of food consumption in regard to the mind, I found a new type of motivation for eating certain foods. There is a great video that describes the way food interacts with brain functioning: