Weird, strong-tasting foods are all well and good for adventurous foodies, but what if you don’t like that stuff? Are you doomed to a life of excessive weight and clogged arteries if brussels sprouts make you cringe and pile of mac and cheese is your idea of heaven? Nope. Even though your intuition may tell you that your tastes are innate, they are actually quite flexible. That is, your tastes can change and expand if you are willing to try a different approach. MORE: Is Iceberg Lettuce The New Superfood? I know this because I’ve experienced it. Like most Americans, the flavors I was exposed to as a child were pretty limited. And vegetables in particular were rarely prepared with much care. As a result, the list of foods I hated for most of my life was long and, I felt, resolute. I hated spinach, beets, cilantro, brussels sprouts, lima beans, avocados, eggplant, and even mango. And most of the other veggies I ate were just OK in my book. I was not impressed. The first step in changing my opinion was realizing that all brussels sprouts are not created equal. The ones I had eaten as a child had been frozen and then steamed. I therefore believed that all brussels sprouts were soggy and bitter. It wasn’t until I discovered that ingredients from the farmers market were actually completely different from the ones I grew up with that things started to change. Young fresh brussels sprouts don’t have any of the sogginess or bitterness I expected. MORE: Eight Delicious Weeds You Should Eat Now I also learned that new and improved cooking methods could completely change how I felt about a flavor. To me, cilantro tasted entirely different in the context of Vietnamese food, which I didn’t try until I was an adult, than it did in the Mexican food I ate as a child. Now I enjoy it both ways, but I needed a new context to understand the taste in a new light. Once I realized these things I became determined to learn to like every food I previously disliked. The way to do this is with something I call the one bite rule. I made a rule to always at least try a food I didn’t like if it was being presented in a new setting. My tastes didn’t change overnight, but after enough attempts I overcame the rest of my food aversions. Research has shown that experience and familiarity (not genetics) is the main factor in what we do or do not like. And it takes an average of 10 to 12 exposures for a food to move from “weird and gross” to “familiar and good.” Fennel, beets, and scallops were some longtime holdouts for me, but eventually I conquered them all. Darya Rose, Ph.D, is the author of Foodist: Using Real Food and Real Science to Lose Weight Without Dieting and creator of the award winning blog Summer Tomato. MORE: Obsessed With Veggies? There’s An Ice Cream For That
