Acquired taste

For other uses, see Acquired Taste (disambiguation).

An acquired taste is an appreciation for something unlikely to be enjoyed by a person who has not had substantial exposure to it. It is the opposite of innate taste, which is the appreciation for things that are enjoyable by most people without prior exposure to them.

Characteristics

In case of food and drink, the difficulty of enjoying the product may be due to a strong or unpleasant odor, taste, mouthfeel (such as sashimi and sushi featuring uncooked seafood), appearance, or association (such as eating insects or organ meat).

Acquisition

General

The process of acquiring a taste can involve developmental maturation, genetics (of both taste sensitivity and personality), family example, and biochemical reward properties of foods. Infants are born preferring sweet foods and rejecting sour and bitter tastes, and they develop a preference for salt at approximately 4 months. However, vegetables tend to be a favourite as they start to learn to feed themselves. Neophobia (fear of novelty) tends to vary with age in predictable, but not linear, ways. Babies just beginning to eat solid foods generally accept a wide variety of foods, toddlers and young children are relatively neophobic towards food, and older children, adults, and the elderly are often adventurous eaters with wide-ranging tastes.

The general personality trait of novelty-seeking does not necessarily correlate highly with willingness to try new foods. Level of food adventurousness may explain much of the variability of food preferences observed in "supertasters". Supertasters are highly sensitive to bitter, spicy, and pungent flavours, and some avoid them and like to eat only mild, plain foods, but many supertasters who have high food adventurousness enjoy these intense flavors and seek them out. Some chemicals or combinations of chemicals in foods provide both flavor and beneficial or enjoyable effects on the body and mind and may be reinforcing, leading to an acquired taste. A study that investigated the effect of adding caffeine and theobromine (active compounds in chocolate) vs. a placebo to identically flavored drinks that participants tasted several times, yielded the development of a strong preference for the drink with the compounds.

Intentional

Intentionally changing one's preferences can be hard to accomplish. It usually requires a deliberate effort, acting as if one likes something in order to have the responses and feelings that will produce the desired taste. The challenge becomes one of distinguishing authentic or legitimate acquired tastes as a result of deeply considered preference changes from inauthentic ones motivated by status or conformity.

Examples

The following items can be described as "acquired tastes", often due to combination of both unfamiliarity and intensity of taste. In principle, though, anything for which one can have a taste, can also become an acquired taste. An acquired taste is distinguished by how one comes to have the taste, not what the thing in question is.

• Absinthe, a strong herbal spirit, often with pronounced anise and bitter (wormwood) flavors
• Achar, South Asian pickles
• Aloe vera, a type of plant whose inner pulp is sometimes used in drinks, very common in China and Japan
• Anchovies, small fish cured in brine, known for their intensely strong salty flavor, often used as a pizza topping
• Andouillette, a French tripe sausage
• Artichoke, a flower-like vegetable commonly pickled in olive oil
• Asafoetida, the resin of carrots
• Balut, a boiled, fertilized duck egg
• Bäsk, a Swedish bitter wormwood spirit typically drunk as snaps
• Beef tongue, tongue of a cow
• Beer, especially strong ales and stouts
• Beondegi, deep fried, steamed or boiled silkworm pupae, popular in Korean cuisine and commonly sold as street food
• Betamax, congealed cakes of chicken/duck blood sold as a street food in the Philippines
• Bitter melon, an extremely bitter fruit similar to cucumber
• Bitters, an alcohol flavoured with bitter plant extracts, used as an additive in cocktails or as a medicinal substance to promote appetite or digestion.
• Blood sausage, sausage made by cooking pork/mutton blood with a filler until it is thick enough to congeal when cooled
• Brussels sprout, a vegetable
• Bosintang, a Korean meal with dog meat
• Boza, a fermented corn drink of Turkish origin, also popular on the Balkans
• Bully beef, salted processed beef
• Calamari, cooked squid commonly breaded and deep-fried
• Campari, a bitter Italian aperitif
• Cannabis, the trichomes of the Cannabaceae plants
• Capers, pickled and salted buds or fruits of the caper shrub.
• Casu martzu, a Sardinian cheese containing live insect larvae
• Cauliflower, a vegetable
• Caviar, a prized delicacy consisting of salted roe (fish eggs) from sturgeon
• Century egg, a specially preserved Chinese egg
• Chamoy, heavily salted Mexican plum or apricot paste with chili powder
• Strongly-flavored cheeses, such as blue cheese, Gamalost, goat cheese, or Limburger
• Chili pepper, the common source of "hot" spices.
• Chitterlings (commonly referred to as "chitlins"), boiled or stewed pig intestines
• Coriander (also known as cilantro); some people perceive an unpleasant "soapy" taste and/or a rank smell. This is believed to be a result of an enzyme that changes its taste (a genetic trait).
• Clamato, a drink made primarily of reconstituted tomato juice concentrate and reconstituted dried clam broth, with a dash of high-fructose corn syrup, and USDA Red 40 to maintain a 'natural' tomato colour
• Coffee, a bitter beverage prepared from roasted coffee seeds
• Cow cod soup, a Jamaican soup made with bull penis (or "cod")
• Cup cheese, an Amish runny cheese, sharp or mild
• Dark chocolate, processed chocolate that has little or no added sugar or milk, and therefore has a bitter taste.
• Dijon mustard, a condiment
• Durian, a pungent southeast Asian fruit
• Eel, seafood, an Anguilliform
• Eulachon grease, extracted from eulachon fish
• Feet, of cow, calf, pig, duck, chicken, camel, goat, etc.
• Fernet, a particularly strong, grape based, herbal digestif
• Fish sauce, a condiment derived from fish that have been allowed to ferment
• Garnatálg, a Faroese delicacy made of sheep lard
• Gravlax, raw-marinated salmon
• Garlic, a vegetable commonly used for flavoring and added nutrition
• Gull eggs, eaten boiled and popular in Scandinavia and some parts of Scotland and Ireland
• Haggis, a traditional Scottish dish mainly consisting of minced sheep offal, boiled in a sheep's stomach.
• Hajmola, a digestive candy made in India.
• Hákarl, putrefied Iceland shark
• Head cheese, a dish made of meat from an animal's skull covered with gelatin (usually set in a mold)
• Huitlacoche, fungus-infected maize, popular in Mexico
• Insects, including grubs, ants, grasshoppers, locusts, tarantulas, silkworm pupae, etc commonly deep fried and sold as street food in Asia, Africa and South America
• Islay whisky, Scotch whisky made on Islay, known for its distinctive peaty character
• Jägermeister, a strong German herbal digestif
• Jiló, bitter fruit (cooked as a vegetable) popular in Brazil
• Kala namak, black salt
• Kimchi, traditional Korean dish of fermented chili peppers and vegetables, usually made from Chinese cabbage
• Kiviak, traditional wintertime Inuit food from Greenland that is made of little auks (Alle alle), a type of seabird, fermented in a seal skin
• Kola nut, an extremely bitter nut used in West Africa
• Kutti pi, an Anglo-Indian dish consisting of goat fetus
• Liver and/or liverwurst
• Lapsang souchong, smoked Chinese black tea
• Lobster tomalley, the soft, green substance found in the body cavity of lobsters, that fulfills the functions of both the liver and the pancreas.
• Lunch meat, processed meat typically pork and chicken, e.g. SPAM
• Lutefisk, Nordic lye-soaked whitefish
• Malt loaf, favored in Scotland
• Marmite, Vegemite or Cenovis, spreads made from yeast extract
• Mate, the infusion of yerba mate
• Matcha, finely ground powder of specially grown and processed green tea leaves
• Mett, minced raw pork seasoned with salt and pepper, eaten as bread spread with raw onions
• Moxie, a bitter carbonated beverage containing gentian root extract
• Mugicha, or barley tea, which is a popular Japanese beverage
• Edible mushrooms, mushrooms that can potentially be safely eaten.
• Mämmi, traditional Finnish Easter time dessert made from rye flour and malt
• Nattō, Japanese fermented soybeans
• Octopus, seafood, a cephalopod
• Olives, fermented or cured fruit of the olive tree, come in different varieties and have a salty, bitter, oily taste.
• Organ meats, whether tripe, brains, eyeballs, giblets, liver, sweetbreads, etc.
• Oysters, a bivalve mollusk often consumed raw, typically served with a mignonette.
• Pickled eggs, the ova of commonly avians
• Pickled pigs' feet, the appendages of suidaes
• Pinuneg, cooked pork blood in the Philippines
• Pickled herring, a seafood pickled in vinegar, popular in Scandinavia
• Piure, a tunicate with a strong iodine taste eaten in Chile.
• Pork rind, the cooked skin of a suidaes
• Pu-erh, a compressed, aged tea dominated by strong, earthy overtones
• Rakfisk, a Norwegian fermented fish dish often served with lefse and flatbrød.
• Retsina, resinated wine, popular in Greece
• Rivella, a Swiss carbonated soft drink made from whey.
• Root beer, a herbal flavored soft drink
• Rocky Mountain oysters, testicles of bull or boar
• Salty liquorice, Finnish/Dutch ammonium salt liquorice candy
• Sardines, commonly tinned seafood, a catch-all term for fish classified as pilchard, round herring, sprat and minnow/pinkeen
• Sea cucumber, an aquatic organism
• Sea urchin, an aquatic organism
• Scotch whisky, a woody-tasting alcoholic liquid.
• Scrapple, a slab of leftover pork parts.
• Smalahove, the head of a lamb
• Stink bean, beans bearing a rather peculiar smell, quite popular in southeast Asia
• Stinky tofu, a form of fermented tofu, which, as the name suggests, has a strong odor.
• Sun-dried tomatoes, a dehydrated fruit
• Surströmming, Swedish fermented Baltic herring
• Sushi, a Japanese food sometimes made with raw fish and sashimi
• Switchel, an Anglo-Caribbean summer drink based on vinegar and molasses, also called Haymaker's Punch
• Tempeh, a fermented food made from soybeans popular in Southeast Asia
• Ti-hoeh-koé (pig's blood cake), steamed congealed blood pudding sold as a street food in Taiwan
• Tonic water, carbonated water flavored with quinine, giving the beverage its bitter taste.
• Tobacco, plant leaves commonly combusted and inhaled/exhaled
• Unicum, a Hungarian herbal bitter
• Wasabi, and similarly horseradish, due to their pungent odors and strong taste
• Wine and fortified wine, the fermented juice of grapes

See also

• Aftertaste
• Food choice
• Food preferences in older adults and seniors
• Habituation
• Taste

Further reading

• Otis, L. P. (1984). "Factors Influencing the Willingness to Taste Unusual Foods". Psychological Reports. 54 (3): 739–745. doi:10.2466/pr0.1984.54.3.739. S2CID 144931730.