1001 Arabian Bites: There’s no accounting for acquired tastes

Going out for banana splits was once the ultimate summertime treat, only because I always took the term “banana split” loosely. As a kid, my trademark sundae was three scoops of vanilla, unadulterated as fresh snow and piled into a tulip glass. Long before I had ever tasted a banana split, it joined the list of foods I vetoed, based on a sense of repulsion too arbitrary and too long ago to recall.

This was summer in Cape Cod, so I might have been allowed a steamed red lobster at large gatherings. The funky green paste known as tomalley, which functions as a lobster’s liver and pancreas, is commonly considered to be an acquired taste among adults; I loved it as intensely and perhaps as unnaturally as I despised whipped cream and gagged at the hummus that should have been coursing through my veins.

An acquired taste – something a person comes to like by an increase in exposure to it – is a mystery. Common examples include Marmite, blue cheese, kimchi, coffee, anchovies, oysters; anything that people feel justified in disliking. Some remain forgivable to find offensive, as implied by the waiter’s smirk when I ordered lamb “eggs” at Al-Jazeera, a Lebanese restaurant in Ras Al Khaimah’s Al Hamra Fort Hotel.

When a child’s distastes begin too early to have resulted from an unpleasant sensory memory, there’s not much to do except hope she’ll grow out of it – or at least grow curious enough to try. It was no lack of effort on my mother’s part that accounted for my hatred of condiments, although, to her befuddlement (and mine, retrospectively), I tore through piles of steamed broccoli and spinach like they were sweets about to expire.

Still, I credit my openness in other arenas to her neutrality. She deserves credit for never making us feel punished by vegetables, rewarded by sweets, or threatened by gristle; prejudices that are all too often projected on to children by their parents.

As a teenager, I was surprised when a friend ordered truite aux olives at a bistro and was sickened by the whole trout she received. I cleaned it for her. Like most Emiratis, we ate only whole fish growing up; far more unsettling was my first sight of boneless cod fillets in bulk, so anonymous and anaemic in their chafing dishes. My father regarded fish eggs, eyes, livers and cheeks as the most prized parts of a fish, and our perceptions were calibrated accordingly.

Unfortunately, we can’t force ourselves to eat something until the aversion is gone, any more effectively than we can turn a child off cigarettes by locking him up with a carton of Silk Cut and a lighter.

Some aversions are cultural, no doubt, and learnt behaviours also produce conditioned responses. Some aversions are genetic. I can’t get enough coriander, so I was surprised to discover that I carry the genetic variant some studies suggest is responsible for the soapy taste of coriander that might make it unpalatable. Other studies indicate that genetics are only partly responsible for our attractions, to coriander and more.

It can be psychological. Conversely, in the case of people who once loved spicy food but now find it indigestible, sometimes it’s a matter of accepting limitations.

Sometimes, though, it’s just an unknowable secret.

Nouf Al-Qasimi is an Emirati food analyst who cooks and writes in New Mexico