You’re dying. You haven’t eaten anything in ten days. Another day without food and that’s it — game over. What would you be willing to eat? Anything? Everything? Even things you find most disgusting now? I’m not so sure anything I eat on the regular are things I would have guessed myself eating ten years [...]
You’re dying. You haven’t eaten anything in ten days. Another day without food and that’s it — game over. What would you be willing to eat? Anything? Everything? Even things you find most disgusting now?
I’m not so sure anything I eat on the regular are things I would have guessed myself eating ten years ago. First time I tried oatmeal, I gagged. Vegetables were torture. Water? Woah, woah. You mean I can’t tank fizzly soft drinks all day?
But it’s not: don’t like it > never will like it.
It’s: don’t like it > maybe next time.
Taste (and your ability to hack back certain foods) isn’t binary. How many things do you enjoy now that you hated when you were younger? Coffee, beer — it’s easy (and common) to hate these things upon first taste. But culture pushes most to build taste for them over time.
Don’t think, “I don’t like this. I’ll never like this.” Think about the culture behind what you eat. Think about degrees of dislike. Think about whys of dislike. Is it the taste? Texture? Smell? What makes you try something a second time even if you didn’t like it the first time around?
And then attack them. Eliminate the bottlenecks.
Think of cultivating your taste as one in the same as cultivating your physical self. You wouldn’t expect to deadlift 600 pounds overnight, so don’t expect to dive into raw vegetables (or something you find unbearable) overnight.
The best training program — or any magical set and rep combo — doesn’t matter unless you’re consistent. Same goes with taste. Start with simple habits and build on them overtime. Start general.
This isn’t necessarily a specific tip, but rather a light bulb. There are tips out there — tips that’ve worked for me that I’ll get to for certain goods — but that’s less important than accepting you’re going to have to train your taste.
You have to train your body.
You have to train your taste.
Few people have physical dominance without palate dominance. But, as usual, one does not simply walk into Mordor.
If you know something is good for you and you want to eat it, but you hate it, don’t give up hope. Train your taste. You’d probably eat nasty, wiggly, creepy crawlers if you were starving to death.
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Image credit: worms