As with other questions concerning our development, people also argue about the question of how taste develops, whether it is innate or trained.

There are enough examples of people who prefer one taste throughout their lives, e.g. sweet, or salty, and just as many people can be found who will confirm that their taste has changed over the years.


However, it is certain that certain eating habits are already passed on to the baby in the womb, but especially during breastfeeding, because the baby "tastes" the food through its mother's milk. This takes on different flavours, which the baby gets used to. The more often the mother eats certain foods or prefers certain flavours, the more the baby will be able to get used to them from the beginning.

Although this is no guarantee that the child will later accept all foods equally, it has been proven that children can be accustomed to tastes in this way and will accept the food offered to them more easily.

This is especially true for special culturally determined eating habits, such as very spicy food, or food that is very untypical for Europeans, such as insects or worms, which are considered delicacies in some cultures.

So habituation happens not only through taste but also through experience in the community, because the sense of belonging is also created through culinary traditions, which are all a matter of early habituation.

If you were to offer a European child certain foods unprepared, their reaction would probably be rejection or immediate spitting out. Children in India or Indonesia, however, are not bothered by the spiciness or taste of strong spices such as chilli and curry. In Indonesia, for example, salty, hot spice balls are eaten like sweets, to give just one concrete example.

Shaping and changing one's own preferences

Nevertheless, the sense of taste, like all senses, does not behave according to rigid rules. There are people who never get rid of an aversion to a certain food throughout their lives. This aversion does not necessarily have to be triggered by a negative experience, but in many cases it is.

If, for example, you have eaten so much of a food that you feel sick or even vomit, the brain can store this negative reaction and trigger an immediate aversion over a long period of time when you come into contact with this food again.

This mechanism dates back to prehistoric times, when humans had to learn that certain things were inedible and should be avoided. If one had this experience when eating, one was automatically protected from repeating the same mistake.

Children also often seem to reject things that would not be good for them, but which they will like at a later stage as adults. This applies, for example, to alcoholic drinks, or often to foods that their digestive system cannot yet tolerate, such as onions and garlic, which have a strong flatulence effect, as do legumes. It is assumed that this is also a protective function of the body.

Highly salty food is unhealthy for babies because their kidneys are not yet developed enough to cope with the salt. Very salty foods are often simply spat out by babies, whereas sweet-tasting foods are usually readily accepted by them, because they are reminiscent of breast milk, which also tastes slightly sweet.

That's why you can offer different, initially rejected foods again from time to time to test whether the offspring has acquired a taste for them.