Why do adults have finer taste than children?
I notice that things like soft ripened cheeses, drinks without sugar (hot tea instead of sweet tea), etc, all seem to be hated by children as totally disgusting, while loved by many adults.
But it would seem strange that someone’s taste buds would change – you would think such tastes begin earlier?
???
I’m sure I read somewhere (sorry, can’t be arsed to dig up a cite now) that you actually lose a lot of your taste buds as you grow older. So really, the things that the kids don’t like really DO taste bad, it’s just that you can’t tell. 
I think some of it is just that (some)adults are more prepared to overcome their initial reaction to something - some of my favourite cheeses smell like garbage, feet or vomit, but I’m a grown-up, and rather than squealing “Ewwww! Gross!”, I know that once I get past the initially unpleasant smell, there’s a great flavour experience.
And some of it it just a case of getting accustomed to something. The first time I tasted Guinness, it just seemed nasty and bitter, but through perseverance, I came to really enjoy it (indeed the same is true of other kinds of beer, as well as tea, coffee, etc).
I actually deliberately trained myself to prefer unsweetened black coffee, because it’s easier to order and harder for people to mess up, now I don’t really like it any other way.
Human tastes are malleable. Children generally lack the motivation to persevere in shaping them.
Personally I think children taste better. Adults are too tough.
Assuming that what Etumretniw said is accurate, that’s probably one factor, but there is a bigger issue.
In terms of sight, sound, and taste, there’s really not anything that is good or bad. Let’s take for instance the sight of blood. It’s just a red liquid. A person can see red dyed cornstarch syrup flowing down the sidewalk and not care a bit, while as if they see blood flowing–which looks exactly the same–heave their guts out. Yet two hundred years ago, people would cheer at the sight of someone getting publicly beheaded.
To within a certain range, we’re taught that certain sites and smells are a good thing and others a bad. Sure we’ve got some things that are hardcoded in, but short of physical pain (like something being blared real real loud), it’s likely that you can adapt your internal conception of its value.
Have you never met someone where they get a really fancy meal or they get their favorite drink but it was made with the most expensive brands, and they end up liking their cheapo brands better? That’s because they’ve been acclimatized to those particular things. There’s no adult or child about it.
If you compare steaks in the 50s which were all gnarly and fat ridden to modern day steaks which are nice and lean, modern people would hurl to try and eat a 50s steak and all those guys in black and white would think that the modern steak had no flavor and was dry regardless of how rare you cooked it.
Large quantities of the appreciation of food has little to do with any innate sense of good or bad. It is in majority taught. If you want to find out what is innately good or bad, an indoctrinated child is telling it “really” is. It’s just up to you whether you want to buy into any particular food fetish, be it sashimi or sugarless tea.
You’re looking at it the wrong way round: it isn’t why children don’t like olives, it’s why adults do. Essentially children have unlearned tastebuds in the sense that they roll the way nature does. From a survival point of view, our human tastes have evolved biologically along the lines that if it’s bitter or sour or hot, it’s likely to be poisonous or rotten: creatures without that sense have been selected against by being more likely to die sooner.
Conversely, in nature anything sweet or fatty or salty or bland is likely to not only not kill you but give you an energy boost that will increase your chances of surviving and reproducing: we’re wired through evolution to like these things, and those are the foods children favour.
As adults - and via several thousand years of agriculture, incidentally - we’ve developed foods such as olives or chilis that, while they may taste like they might kill you, actually won’t, and culturally we’ve developed a perverse fondness for small quantities of these as a way of adding piquancy - spice, if you will - to foods that we’ve grown accustomed to.
There’s another evolutionary aspect to this. Namely, that as someone gets older, they are much more likely to have learned what is and isn’t poisonous regardless of taste; which means that it may not be simply a matter of developing a taste for such things, but also relaxation of an instinctive hypersensitivity designed by evolution to keep the less experienced from poisoning themselves. It would fit with the earlier pattern we see in childhood; infants will stick anything in their mouth they can, as a rule; then they will eventually become far more picky. Probably not coincidentally, they also become much more mobile and therefore harder for their parents to control ( and to keep them from poisoning themselves ). So the pattern would be not-very-mobile and not-very-food-sensitive infancy; developing into mobile and sensitive childhood; then slowly developing into less sensitive and more experienced adulthood. Roughly speaking and with lots of individual variation, of course.
So, any lessening of sensitivity as an adult may be a feature not a bug, as it were.
One thing I’ve noticed with kids (at least, my kids) is that babies will eat all sorts of things without discrimination, but two- three- four- year olds seem to lose that ability and start to become extremely picky (I don’t know yet what happens after four…)
I presume there’s an evolutionary thing going on here - babies are generally being fed by a trustworthy adult so there’s no downside to their eating just any old thing. Toddlers on the other hand are capable of going out and foraging for themselves, so there’s a great advantage in their becoming really rigid and refusing to try new things.
If you get in early, you can often get them hooked on “non-childish” foods before they know to reject them. I know quite a few kids who will happily eat olives or hot salami or pickles (not so much on the Brussels Sprouts though…)
ETA: Or… what he said!
Overall I think you’re right, but your two examples are weird :). Olives are nature’s little fat machines: they produce a tremendous amount of oil. THe bitterness is an unfortunate side effect of this production, but when you salt the bejeezus out of them, you can get rid of some of that bitterness. And hey presto: here we’ve got salt and fat, two of the things humans naturally adore. The bitterness is the primary joy of good olives, yeah, but I think that people probably started eating brined olives for the fat and the salt.
Chillis add spice, but they do something else really interesting: they cause your body to release endorphins. They’re not a mind-altering drug, but they turn you into nature’s little mind-altering-drug factory.
A lot of the foods that kids don’t like have, I think, very strong initial bitter flavors, followed by very complex flavors. For myself, I had to deliberately learn to like things like beer, good olives, and black coffee: I knew that if I was able to get past the initial bitterness, I’d learn to recognize a lot of really interesting flavors that lurked behind it. This wasn’t something I was willing to do as a kid.
Daniel
This is it, and a simple Google will give you plenty of cites. Adults do not have a finer sense of taste than children do. It is the other way 'round. And, IIRC, there is a gender discrepancy, too – women tend to have many, many more taste buds on the average than men do.
I was always somewhat skeptical of this, until I started having dinner with my parents and my nephews. If I actually manage to get my nephews to try something new, they’ll complain about off-tastes that I’d never really noticed before (particularly, bitter and sour ones). My parents, on the other hand, have lost all sense of taste, and over-season everything. It’s like eating at a salt-lick when my mother cooks anymore.
Kids are so weird about it, though. When I was little (3-5), when we went to this restaurant my dad’s company owned the waiters all knew me and they’d bring out a Shirley Temple with TONS of cherries in it, a dish of lemons, and a dish of pickles. Heaven!
Now I want a Shirley Temple. Do they still make fake cocktails for kids?
My three-year-old has liked Greek olives since she’s been eating solid food. (Miso soup is one of her favorite things, but I don’t know if that’s weird or not!)
Yep. I order Shirley Temples quite often. I’ve also never known a toddler who didn’t like lemons. They make funny cute faces, but they always go back for a second slurp.
“Bitter” is a weird and hardly used flavor in American cuisine. We’ve got…coffee…um…and, uh…coffee…and that’s really about it. Maybe a few greens which are very mildly bitter. So most kids don’t get a chance to taste bitter when they’re little - if you wanted to introduce a toddler to bitter, what food would you choose? Odds are it’s not part of the standard American diet, but is some furrin food. Even adults don’t like bitter much in our country - when I recommend baby dandelion greens, people make funny faces, and those are only a tiny bit bitter. Want to make someone’s eyes water? Give 'em a single drop of gentian tincture!
My charges, 3 of 'em all under 4 years, love broccoli rabe, which is a mild bitter. But I wouldn’t have found it were it not for Thai food.
I wouldn’t be at all surprised if kids in places where bitter is a good taste enjoy bitter things far more than American kids.
Chocolate and beer are both bitters; I believe a lot of spices are bitter as well (go taste some cinnamon or cumin straight up). Plenty of vegetables are bitter, although supermarket hybrids often have the bitterness bred out of them in favor of sweetness. Orange peels are bitter. Grapefruit has a bitter component to it. I think that garlic has a bitter component, although I’m not so sure on that.
Daniel
I think it is a mix of taste bud sensitivity and habit. Kids can become habituated to different foods. Cameroonian kids gladly slurp up bitter ndole greens and slimy okra sauce.
Kids aren’t habituated to many things because they haven’t been around long, and also because they are at a stage where they are just learning the idea of controlling your destiny, and one of the few things they can practice that on is what they put in their mouth. Which is why food arguments often get so emotional- to a kid you are attacking her newfound sense of self.
Our culture has made this even worse by starting whole lines of “children’s food.” We have children’s yogurt, children’s TV dinners, children’s menus at restaurants…this enforces the idea that children are expected to only like a narrow variety of foods and are not expected to try new things.
Next time try marinating them.
You could try soda water and <<drumroll>> Angostura bitters!
It seemed to me that kids’ affinity for sweets might be linked to their growing brains. Thought I read that somewhere. I’d give you more info, but my old, shrinking brain seems to have lost it.
I noticed this with both my sons. When they were in the 12-18 month old range, they’d eat mussels, anchovies, etc.
Now that they are 3 and 6, it’s hard to get them to eat just about anything we eat, especially if it’s green (except canned green beans, they seem to love those).
I believe that it’s more of an evolution of experience and exposure. I worked for many years in fine dining restaurants and have tried innumerable combinations of spices, greens, meats, cheeses, root vegetables, seafood etc.
When I was a child I didn’t like many of the things I like now, and I taste subtleties in food that I could never delineate as a kid, so I think it’s more of a cultural/exposure thing, and not a decline in the number of tastebuds you have as you age.
An excellent point.