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“Even foods that are extremely”
: Lyle V. Jones, David B. Peryam, and L. L. Thurstone, “Development of a Scale for Measuring Soldiers' Food Preferences” (paper presented at the Fourteenth Annual Meeting of the Institute of Food Technologists, Los Angeles, June 29, 1954).

The thing most liked
: See, for example, Seo-Jin Chung and Zata Vickers, “Influence of Sweetness on the Sensory-Specific Satiety and Long-Term Acceptability of Tea,”
Food Quality and Preference
18 (2007): 256–64. In this study, they found that subjects' view of the ideal sweetness of tea changed over time. “Liking ratings for the low sweet tea increased over the 19 days of the test, becoming equal to the optimally sweetened tea in the latter half of the study.” In another study, Vickers and colleagues found that while a very sweet yogurt received the highest test scores, less of the high-sweet yogurt was actually eaten. Our likes are not always the surest, or only, guide to our preferences. See Z. Vickers, E. Holton, and J. Wang, “Effect of Ideal-Relative Sweetness on Yogurt Consumption,”
Food Quality and Preference
12 (2001): 521–26.

We begin to pick things
: See Rebecca K. Ratner, Barbara E. Kahn, and Daniel Kahneman, “Choosing Less-Preferred Experiences for the Sake of Variety,”
Journal of Consumer Research
26, no. 1 (June 1999): 1–15.

“Would it be so terrible”
: See Tyler Cowen, “But We Just Had Indian Food Yesterday!,”
Marginal Revolution
, Oct. 16, 2013,
http://​marginal​revolution.​com/​marginal​revolution/​2013/​10/​but-​we-​just-​had-​indian-​food-​yesterday.​html
.

“variety amnesia”
: See Jeff Galak and Joseph P. Redden, “Variety Amnesia: Recalling Past Variety Can Accelerate Recovery from Satiation,”
Journal of Consumer Research
36 (Dec. 2009), accessed Nov. 1, 2013,
http://​papers.​ssrn.​com/​sol3/​papers.​cfm?​abstract_​id=​1344541
. Per Cowen's dilemma, they suggest, “The current findings likely provide more actionable advice to consumers fighting satiation. The recommendation is straightforward: If consumers wish to keep enjoying their favorite experiences, then they should simply think of all the other related experiences they have recently had. For example, the next time you find yourself in the all too common situation of not wanting to eat the same thing for lunch, try to recall all of the other things you have eaten since yesterday's lunch. Our findings suggest this will make your current lunch taste just a little bit better.”

People eating in an ethnic restaurant
: Meiselman and Schutz, “History of Food Acceptance Research in the U.S. Army.”

The most adventurous gourmands
: E. P. Köster, “The Psychology of Food Choice: Some Often Encountered Fallacies,”
Food Quality and Preference
14 (2003): 359–73. In a correspondence, Köster elaborated: “My guess was that at the brink of day eating is not our primary concern other than to satisfy needs. Day planning and organizing activity are more important.” There is also the case, he notes, that some people seem essentially content to eat the same thing day after day, something he once thought not likely. “This illusion was disturbed by two
exceptional experiences. The first one was in a little Indian village in Surinam where people ate cassava every day for lack of other things and seemed quite satisfied in doing so. They would introduce variety when they could get it, however. More perplexing was my experience in Nepal, where the people eat a rice dish called
Bat
every day. The only variation is that they eat it with cucumber in the summer and with cauliflower in the winter.
Bat
is indeed a delicious dish very well spiced and with an exquisite sensory complexity. I lived for about two weeks with a family and to my surprise I loved it still. They obviously did too, because when I invited them to a restaurant in Kathmandu, they chose one that offered exactly the same dish as the one we had at home. It taught me that variety seeking can not be necessary when there is sufficient variety and complexity in the dish.”

Terpenes triggering receptors
: Massimiliano Zampini and Charles Spence make this point in “Assessing the Role of Visual and Auditory Cues in Multisensory Perception of Flavor,” in
The Neural Bases of Multisensory Processes
, ed. M. M. Murray and M. T. Wallace (Boca Raton, Fla.: CRC Press, 2012), accessed Oct. 28, 2013,
http://​www.​ncbi.​nlm.​nih.​gov/​books/​NBK92852/​#ch37_​r118
.

How we perceive something
: Paul Rozin, “ ‘Taste-Smell Confusions' and the Duality of the Olfactory Sense,”
Perception and Psychophysics
31 (1983): 397–401.

“reading is a longer”
: The Woolf quotation comes via Katerina Koutsantoni,
Virginia Woolf's Common Reader
(London: Ashgate, 2013), 71.

What we like is sometimes
: As one well-known study found, people's preference for Coca-Cola over Pepsi in a taste test was influenced by having access to brand information. Samuel McClure et al., “Neural Correlates of Behavioral Preference for Culturally Familiar Drinks,”
Neuron
44 (2004): 379–87.

“The same cognitive”
: See Astrid Poelman et al., “The Influence of Information About Organic Production and Fair Trade on Preferences for and Perception of Pineapple,”
Food Quality and Preference
19, no. 1 (Jan. 2008): 114–21. The authors noted an interesting effect. “When the subjects are considered as a uniform group, the individual differences indicating different outcome of underlying cognitive processes will be kept hidden.” However, “when subjects were grouped according to their affective attitudes towards organic or fair trade products, perception differed as a result of the information provided. Subjects with a positive attitude towards organic or fair trade products perceived products to have a stronger sensory impact in the presence of such information than in its absence. Similarly, subjects with a negative attitude towards organic or fair trade products perceived products to have a weaker sensory impact in the presence of such information than in its absence.”

The power of this conditioning
: See, for example, Kevin P. Myers and Margaret C. Whitney, “Rats' Learned Preferences for Flavors Encountered Early or Late in a Meal Paired with the Postingestive Effects of Glucose,”
Physiology and Behavior
102, no. 5 (March 2011): 466–74.

In her study, people who downed
: See M. L. Pelchat and G. M. Carfagno, “GI Glucose Enhances ‘Mere' Exposure in Humans,”
Appetite
54 (2010): 669.

One way to avoid the treatment
: Graciela V. Andresen, Leann L. Birch, and Patricia A. Johnson, “The Scapegoat Effect on Food Aversions After Chemotherapy,”
Cancer
66, no. 7 (1990): 1649–53.

“Mere repeated exposure”
: R. B. Zajonc, “Attitudinal Effects of Mere Exposure,”
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
9, no. 2, pt. 2 (June 1968): 1–27.

In one typical study
: Leann L. Birch and Diane Wolfe Marlin, “I Don't Like It; I Never Tried It: Effects of Exposure on Two-Year-Old Children's Food Preferences,”
Appetite
3, no. 4 (Dec. 1982): 353–60.

Try it
: Or, as the food writer Jeffrey Steingarten put it, “after repeatedly sampling ten of the sixty varieties of kimchi, the national pickle of Korea, kimchi has become my national pickle, too.” Steingarten,
The Man Who Ate Everything
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997), 4.

They often abandon efforts
: See B. R. Carruth, P. J. Ziegler, and S. I. Barr, “Prevalence of Picky Eaters Among Infants and Toddlers and Their Caregivers' Decisions About Offering a New Food,”
Journal of the American Dietetic Association
104 (2004): 57–64.

In an English study
: A. Bingham, R. Hurling, and J. Stocks, “Acquisition of Liking for Spinach Products,”
Food Quality and Preference
16, no. 5 (July 2005): 461–69.

People liked peas
: But what
about
those spinach dislikers? Is mere exposure a form of liking, or does it merely reflect “weaker distaste”? The psychologist Christian Crandall set out to answer this in an innovative experiment at a salmon cannery in Alaska. Rather than introduce something unfamiliar, he introduced, in a fairly controlled setting, something already liked, though novel to the factory: doughnuts. The longer doughnuts were in the factory break room, the more of them people ate. Considering other explanations, Crandall suggests that sheer boredom might have led cannery workers to eat more sweets, although parallel consumption of other desserts did not rise during this time. One wonders, however, if there was also some novelty effect at work, and whether doughnut consumption would have itself stabilized and even dropped over time. Or perhaps there is just something inherently likable—even addictive—about doughnuts. See Crandall, “The Liking of Foods as a Result of Exposure: Eating Doughnuts in Alaska,”
Journal of Social Psychology
125, no. 2 (1995): 187–94.

In one study, people began
: Lisa Methven, Elodie Langreney, and John Prescott, “Changes in Liking for a No Added Salt Soup as a Function of Exposure,”
Food Quality and Preference
26, no. 2 (Dec. 2012): 135–40.

the soup was not labeled
: See D. G. Liem, N. Toraman Aydin, and E. H. Zandstra, “Effects of Health Labels on Expected and Actual Taste Perception of Soup,”
Food Quality and Preference
25, no. 2 (Sept. 2012): 192–97. Although, as Fredrik Fernquist and Lena Ekelund have noted, the type of food seems to determine whether health information has an effect on hedonic liking. Earlier studies include cases where health aspects do not affect liking, suggesting that food which is already considered healthy is not affected by information about, for example, fat content. Fernquist and Ekelund, “Credence and the Effect on Consumer Liking of Food—a Review,”
Food Quality and Preference
, in press, manuscript accessed online on Nov. 1, 2013.

In another experiment
: Richard J. Stevenson and Martin R. Yeomans, “Does Exposure Enhance Liking for the Chilli Burn?,”
Appetite
24, no. 2 (1995): 107–20. The authors note that “no subject referred specifically to liking or preference in describing the purpose of the experiment. However, some subjects thought that the experiment concerned some form of sensory adaptation to the chilli burn.” One wonders if this in itself could predispose the subjects to “like” the chili more
the hotter it got, to please the researchers or show their own bravery. But before and after the trial, subjects drank a tomato juice mixture with capsaicin added, and they reported no increased liking for that.

“Some people would answer”
: George Orwell,
As I Please: 1944–1945
(Boston: David R. Godine, 2000), 42.

Chances are your mother did
: Julie A. Mennella, Coren P. Jagnow, and Gary K. Beauchamp, “Prenatal and Postnatal Flavor Learning by Human Infants,”
Pediatrics
107, no. 6 (June 2001), accessed Nov. 1, 2013,
http://​www.​ncbi.​nlm.​nih.​gov/​pmc/​articles/​PMC1351272/
. The authors note, “The flavor of a food includes, among other sensory stimuli, the oral sensation of taste and the retronasal sensation of smell. It has been suggested that relative to taste, where hedonic tone and liking are more hard-wired, liking for olfactory components of flavor is largely determined by individual experience.”

Trained sensory panelists
: See J. A. Mennella, A. Johnson, and G. K. Beauchamp, “Garlic Ingestion by Pregnant Women Alters the Odor of Amniotic Fluid,”
Chemical Senses
20 (1995): 207–9.

Out of the womb
: As adults, our reactions are not quite so important but still significant enough that in one experiment, face-reading software was able to tell when subjects were drinking an orange juice they said they did not like. It had less luck with the juices we
liked
. See Lukas Danner et al., “Make a Face! Implicit and Explicit Measurement of Facial Expressions Elicited by Orange Juices Using Face Reading Technology,”
Food Quality and Preference
32, pt. B (March 2014): 167–72,
http://​dx.​doi.​org/​10.​1016/​j.​foodqual.​2013.​01.​004
.

Making faces is part
: One study found that only disliking food triggered “microexpressions of negative emotions,” particularly on the first exposure. See René A. De Wijk, “Autonomic Nervous System Responses on and Facial Expressions to the Sight, Smell, and Taste of Liked and Disliked Foods,”
Food Quality and Preference
26, no. 2 (2012): 196–203.

Simply seeing other people
: Particularly if the food in question is perceived to be healthful. In a study by Morgan Poor, subjects rated chocolate higher when they saw images of just the chocolate versus someone
eating
the chocolate; with apples, the reverse was true. Morgan Poor, Adam Duhachek, and H. Shanker Krishnan, “How Images of Other Consumers Influence Subsequent Taste Perceptions,”
Journal of Marketing
77, no. 6 (Nov. 2013): 124–39.

“Babies who refused tomato juice”
: Sibylle K. Escalona, “Feeding Disturbances in Very Young Children,”
American Journal of Orthopsychiatry
15, no. 1 (Jan. 1945): 76–80.

In a study of preschoolers
: L. L. Birch, “Effect of Peer Models' Food Choices and Eating Behaviors on Preschoolers' Food Preferences,”
Child Development
51 (1980): 489–96.

“The French eat horses”
: See Gillian Tett, “The Science Interview: Jared Diamond,”
Financial Times Magazine
, Oct. 11, 2013.

As with any food
: See the excellent essay by Kari Weil, “They Eat Horses, Don't They? Hippophagy and Frenchness,”
Gastronomica
7, no. 2 (Spring 2007).