Seven months before they are born, babies begin to acquire food preferences. This may sound extraordinary, but it is just one part of the fascinating story of how we develop our sense of taste and perception of flavours.
What happens in the womb is that babies breathe in and out the amniotic fluid, which contains the tastes of foods that the mother has eaten. These tastes gradually become familiar to her baby. One particular piece of research showed this quite dramatically. In a test involving two groups of pregnant women, the first group were asked to eat lots of carrots during the final three months of their pregnancy, while a second group were not. The babies were later fed formula milk which was sometimes made up with carrot juice instead of water. The babies in the 'carrot' group noticeably preferred the carrot juice formula. The babies in the other group showed no preference. When mothers breastfeed, their milk is flavoured by what they have eaten recently, which further acclimatises babies to their families' food culture.
As might be expected, we usually don't remember why we like or dislike certain tastes. Our early exposure to them was too long ago, too deeply buried. One example of this is the almost universal popularity of vanilla. Along with its being omnipresent in our lives, baby powders and many baby foods contain vanilla flavour!
The one taste that everyone likes is sweetness - the only taste preference we are born with. This has its roots in our evolution and survival. Poisonous plants are never sweet, and mother's milk contains natural sugars. All other tastes are acquired - some, of course, more easily than others.
Poisonous plants are often bitter or sour and, unsurprisingly, these are the hardest tastes to acquire. Salt is a very easily acquired taste, but we need only a miniscule amount. Even adults need just one gram a day. Every food we eat contains natural salt, so it's never necessary to add any. Eating too much can lead to stroke and heart disease.
Emotion and food
Our reactions to certain foods and flavours can be quite emotional. This is not surprising, since part of our brain creates emotional memories, and links between food and flavours. Smell and emotion are also tightly linked, as are emotion and eating. Again, we often have no idea where these emotions have come from, though they can be powerful and long- lasting.
If children eat in a stressful situation, even a mildly stressful one, they will immediately learn to hate the food they connect with that situation. The brain will remember the unhappy situation and the food related to it. Further, food eaten in an unhappy situation will be less beneficial than that eaten in a happy one.
There is a famous example of this from the post-war years. Two children's homes in Holland were serving very similar food, yet the children in one home thrived noticeably more than children in the other home. Why? The conclusion was that it was because the thriving group had a nice, jolly house mother whom the children liked, while the children in the other home disliked their house mother and were much less happy.
Brain tricks!
Our brains are programmed to protect us from eating something dangerous. So if the taste or smell of a food is not what we would expect, the brain immediately says 'Stop!' Results of tests on this can make for surprising and sometimes entertaining reading.
For example, when people in one test were given salmon-flavoured ice cream, they said it was disgusting. But if told it was frozen salmon mousse, they loved it! The brain simply rejected a taste that was 'wrong' for ice cream.
In another test, people were asked their opinion of a range of cakes: chocolate, lemon, coffee, plain ... and a blue one. Everyone hated the blue cake. Their opinions of the others varied. When asked, for example, if the lemon cake was lemony enough, some said yes, some said no. In fact, the cakes were identical - just dyed different colours! People tasted what their brains (via their eyes) told them to expect. And predictably, as cakes are never blue, the blue cake was shunned.
In the nursery
What does all this mean for nursery staff? It's essential for mealtimes to be happy, relaxed, social occasions with as home-like an atmosphere as possible. The most successful model seems to be when children help themselves from serving bowls put on each table. Even some two-year-olds can do this, with help. Apart from a rule of 'fair shares', children choose what they like. If all the food is good, all choices are good. And when no comments are made about what they take (or eat), children relax, and often eat better.
It's important to resist putting even light pressure on children to eat something they don't want. It rarely works, and can backfire. Indeed, when I was researching a book, many people told me, 'I was once made to eat x and I've never eaten it again.' They remembered their distress vividly, and who caused it. It's better to model how to taste and try food and to discuss different tastes.
Making it enticing
Enticing-looking food makes us produce more saliva, which in turn aids swallowing and digestion. Red, pink and combinations of the red/orange/yellow range are inviting, as are golden-brown toppings (try cheese with breadcrumbs and paprika). Children often reject green food, but, again, evolution explains this: long ago we learned to reject the colour of unripe fruits and prefer the warm colours of tastier, ripe fruit.
Pureeing greens with potato or into soup and using funny names can help make them more acceptable. Also beware of presenting too much white food, and avoid masking or 'hiding' food - children like to see what they're getting. Importantly, too, it should all smell good! Keep the eating area calm, and make it inviting with colourful plates, napkins, and flowers.
Widening the tastes
Serve a wide variety of tasty foods at meal and snack times, introducing, gently and gradually, bitter and sour tastes. Forget low- flavour foods like 'mild' cheese. It can be instructive to see how readily young children will eat olives, Parmesan, salami, curries, liver, kidney, coriander ... if they're used to them. We seem afraid of serving children flavourful food, so their diet often finishes up being very bland - and beige-coloured! As a result, we're not, as a nation, open to eating unknown foods, unlike people (including children) in the rest of the EU and beyond, who are absolutely used to seeing and eating brightly-coloured food with a wide range of tastes.
Try a 'taste table' (but beware of pressure to 'have a taste'). Have tasting/smelling/handling sessions of new foods, perhaps connected to a story or verse, and before they appear on the menu. The greater variety of foods eaten early on, the more open we can be to new tastes for life.
But remember, after age two or three, children can go through a stage of rejecting previously liked foods. High-energy, easy to chew things such as potato, spaghetti, peas, beans, bananas and cake may be the preferred foods for a while.
Other European countries take food more seriously. For example, children in France, Italy and Switzerland have serious tasting sessions of quality foods, and learn, for instance, to critically taste different kinds of olive oil! It's all paid for by the foods' producers and companies. When will something like that happen here? Meanwhile, it seems it's up to us to train children's taste buds and help them to enjoy the wonderful variety of the world's foods.
TASTE AND FLAVOUR
There are five tastes: sweet, sour, salt, bitter and umami. Umami is 'mouth feel' or 'mouth fullness'. We are aware of it when we eat a strong flavour that seems to fill the whole of the mouth. Different parts of the tongue are particularly sensitive to different tastes - the tip is especially sensitive to sweetness, and the sides to sourness.
Flavour is slightly different. It's more about neuroscience and what we experience in our heads: we register the flavour of something just behind the bridge of the nose and between the ears. We can be very aware of this area when we eat something strongtasting, like mustard.
