Food and Innate Preferences

I found the entire chapter to be interesting but I was specifically interested in learning about innate preferences. Innate preferences can be seen in babies in how they prefer sweets and how they shun sour or bitter foods. Their facial expressions have evolutionary value because they depict what they like and dislike. I have seen this exact things happen with my little sister! When she was a baby we would let her try all kinds of foods and she would show this innate preference for sweets. Just like most babies, she had the funniest bad facial expression to trying a lemon. I also thought it was interesting how innate preferences can develop based on what a mother ate while pregnant or nursing. Such as the example in the lecture slides of mothers drinking carrot juice and their babies later having a preference for carrot flavored cereal. When it comes to a lot of foods though, innate preferences are later paired with learned preferences. This is the case when it comes to sour food, a lot of the time humans develop a learned preferences for sour foods later in life. This may be due in part to the mere exposure effect which says repeated tastings increase likings for that food. The following video does a very good job at explaining why we evolve to have a taste for sour flavors. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D2o1WBpPYyI