At Bryan and Cat's place the other night, I tried wine yet again. This time it was only half terrible. I'm experiencing the same thing that happened with Guinness; I find myself occasionally feeling a vague desire for a glass of wine, while at the same time remembering how terrible it tastes. I think that, just as with Guinness, what I'm actually drawn to is the environment that I associate with the drink — the theatrics of carefully pouring a pint of Guinness and enjoying the creamy head, or the relaxing experience of enjoying a glass of wine and good cheese in a pool with friends. Still, for whatever reason, I find myself slowly (and painfully) acquiring a taste for these things that taste so terrible at first.
I've never understood the concept of 'acquired taste,' and why people pursue it. Your sense of taste is one of your body's primary ways of determining whether ingesting something is going to raise or lower your chances of survival. It's a sense evolved over hundreds of thousands of years. Rats have an even more acute sense of taste than humans, because they don't have the ability to vomit, so they need to be doubly careful to avoid ingesting anything harmful.
This is a useful tool. And yet we try so enthusiastically to subvert it, forcing unpleasant (and, in fact, harmful) things past it until our body finally grudgingly accommodates it, like the bound feet of Chinese servant girls. It doesn't really strike me as a desirable goal.
And yet I continue trying wine and beer, hoping to finally be able to enjoy a glass socially with friends. Sometimes you've got to tighten the corset if you want to get the man.
Posted by j. french 2 hours, 51 minutes later
I have to totally disagree w/ your ideas about sense of taste and raising or lowering your chance of survival. Perhaps I'm misunderstanding you, but many times things that taste good are actually bad for you. And vice versa. I mean I'm sure things like drano and the like taste bad to a human for a reason...but if you ask the average human child, spinach probably tastes just as bad. Drano will kill you, spinach will not.
Unless of course you are just trying to justify not consuming things you don't like (aka things of the non-dairy, non-toaster strudel, non-pizza variety) in which case you should sell this argument to kids for 5 dollars a pop on a website called www.momcantmakemeeatspinachanymore.com
Posted by Dan 19 hours, 18 minutes later
Haha, touche. I've wondered about that at times. Why is it that our tastes don't seem to correspond very well to what's good for us, if we've got all these years of evolution shaping us? My best guess is that to a caveman, spinach really wasn't all that important to survival. The body seems designed to seek out fatty foods and store away the energy in case food later becomes scarce. It has only been a snort time (evolutionarily speaking) since food supplies became generally reliable and we stopped needing to hoard every calorie we come across.
I sometimes wonder whether, 50,000 years in the future, humans will have adapted so that our biological needs match our taste. Maybe we'll no longer have such a liking for sweet and fatty things, now that we have a reliable food supply and tend to be a lot more sedentary as a species. Or perhaps our bodies will learn to stop hoarding so much of the unused energy in food (becoming overweight does reduce your changes for reproduction) and humans in the future will be able to eat a diet more in line with what tastes good, without becoming overweight. The body could just discard anything it doesn't need in the next day or so (read: sweet and creamy poop).
Dude. I may be onto something. "Yeah," you may argue, "but what about people in poorer nations that don't have access to a reliable food source?" Well, remember, the energy isn't disappearing. It's just not being stored inside your body. Your waste will be much more energy-rich than it is now. If you think you're going to need it, you're always welcome to store whatever your body doesn't need right away, and eat it again tomorrow. And that wouldn't be such a bad thing because the poop will taste better than it does now (see 'sweet and creamy' remark above). It will be a utopia.
But that's getting off onto other subjects. As far as my original point goes: Every acquired taste I can think of — alcohol, tobacco, even strong cheese (which, obviously, is essentially curdled milk) — are substances that are inherently harmful or poisonous. It would be advantageous for a primitive man to have an instinctive aversion to fermented juice or curdled milk.