What is the purpose in having taste buds? If the point of eating is to gain energy and vitamins, I should like the taste of anything which has either or both. Why do I like the taste of Ice Cream, but not spinach?
Ice cream is loaded with fat and sugars - fuel for your body; spinach is relatively low in energy. It makes sense that your body should be able to discern what it needs to eat in order to sustain itself. Don’t forget that the ability to taste food arose in an environment where there were no shops and fast food restaurants.
Then why doesn’t spinach taste good if my body needs it or vitamins and why doesn’t lard taste good by itself?
Because until very very recently, evolutionarily speaking, the challenge has been for people to get enough nutrition. We’ve developed to like the taste of molecules that provide lots and lots of energy. We never developed an adaptable system of taste because it just wasn’t worth it. And because it just never developed. Evolution is, after all, a random process on some levels.
Well, that still doesn’t explain why I like the taste of some things that have lots of energy, but not all. I like almonds, but not olives. My sister loves olives, but can’t stand nuts.
Basically, you’re spoilt for choice - you have the option of not liking some things because others are abundant.
I don’t have the option. I can’t decide tomorrow that I’m going to start like olives, it’s not an option that I have. What dictates what I do and don’t like the taste of?
Of course you have the option; you can just choose to eat something else from the huge range of other foods abundantly available. Your distant ancestors would not have been so fortunate; food would be relatively scarce and they’d have eaten whatever they could, or starved. So the sense of taste is broadly tuned to recognising energy-rich foods.
I don’t have the option of specifically liking the taste of olives. My body likes the taste of some energy rich foods, but not all. What dictates that?
Like I said, choice; you have the option of developing personal tastes beyond those required to keep you immediately alive (i.e. energy-dense foods). If olives were the only thing on the menu, you wouldn’t be telling us you didn’t like them; you’d either be eating them, or dead.
Sure you do. You just have no compelling reason to exercise it.
This is what we mean when we say that something is an “acquired taste.”
Well then isn’t every food an aquired taste?
copperwindow you are giving far to much credit for fine tuning to a preference that has come about as a reuslt of random mutaion and selection pressure.
As others have said, we have evolved to crave those foods that are highest in energy, which in the natural world translates to fats and sugars. The reaon we evolved that way is simply because such a craving kept us alive. If a person craved leafy greens in a natural state they would fill themselves up on lettuce and spinach and spend so much time obtaining those low energy ffods that they would never gain weight. ven if they could maintain weight with such dietary prefernce they would never gain enough fat to see themselves through winter, drought etc.
The system works. But the system is not perfect. There will always be some foods like artifically prepared olives that rae energy dense that people won’t immediately like the taste of. That’s because the system maximises survival capability. Maybe at some time someone did prefer the taste of olives over the taste of fat or sugar, but such people left no descendants because the trade-off simply wasn’t favourable. People prefer what maximises thier chance of survival, it’s that simple. That does not mean theyprefer everything that is edible, it simply means that within the constraints of the system whatever is preferred is maximally efficient.
Asking why you don’t like olives is akin to asking why horses don’t climb trees. After all there is plenty of edible plant matter in a tree. But horses are maximised for terrestrial life. Any minor gains towards tree climbing ability will be more than offset by losses in running ability, so such moves can never evolve. In excatly the same way moving human taste preference away from fat and sugar towards complex artificial tastes like olives will be counter productive.
In short, it’s a zero sum game. An individual can have highly driven preferences for a narrow range of foods like fat and sugar, or they can have less driven preferences towards a broad spectrum, but they can’ have high drive for everything. That would have exactly the same result as having no preferences at all. By definition something has to be preferred in order for their to be a preference. And if some foods are preferred then by extension some foods like olives and spinach must be rejected.
Olives are really only edible after being subjected to a rather complex process, so for a prehistoric hunter-gatherer (or a prehuman omnivorous primate), acquiring a major taste for olives was pretty well a non-starter.
On the other hand, a nice ripe piece of fruit (loaded with sugar) is a classic primate food; the basic primate trait of good color vision may have evolved in order to efficiently find sugar-rich and colorful fruits. Our own ancestors (and several other primates as well, including baboons and chimpanzees) also developed a taste for yummy, energy-dense, high-protein, fatty meat. Finally, a taste for salt is widespread among many animals.
And there you have it, the Holy Trinity of Junk Food: sweet, fat, and salt. Mmm-mmm, good.
[QUOTE=MEBuckner]
On the other hand, a nice ripe piece of fruit (loaded with sugar) is a classic primate food; the basic primate trait of good color vision may have evolved in order to efficiently find sugar-rich and colorful fruits. Our own ancestors (and several other primates as well, including baboons and chimpanzees) also developed a taste for yummy, energy-dense, high-protein, fatty meat. Finally, a taste for salt is widespread among many animals.
Well then why don’t I like the taste of mangos?
Im sure conditioning plays a role as well, ie if your parents feed you it it becomes an acquired taste. Natures way of letting parents make judgments about good/safe foods for children.
Also theres probably the need to be cautious about new foods, so unfamilar foods you encounter in life will have a better chance of not tasting good unless its very similar to something else you already eat regularly?
Otara
It may be that under natural conditions, ripe olives are primarily dispersed by birds, and contain bitter chemicals in order to keep away mammalian frugivores which would not disperse them as well. Humans have found a way to circumvent this in order to make use of a rich food source.
Mangos are in the same family as poison ivy, and many people are allergic to the chemicals they contain. Offhand I don’t know what disperses them in the wild, but it is probably something with a good deal of tolerance to mango irritants.
Many plants contain bad-tasting chemicals in order to prevent them from being eaten (or, in the case of fruit, to keep away the wrong kind of disperser). Some people are more tolerant of these chemicals than others, and under primitive conditions would have access to an enhanced food supply. On the other hand, eating too much of such aversive chemicals can have a detrimental effect. In any population, there is likely to be some people who will enjoy eating what others can’t stand, but exactly which foods these are will vary between individuals.
The problem that you’re running into is that you’re starting with a flawed premise. What you’ve got there is a fallacious teleology.
The phenomena of subjective taste is simply not fully explained by the requirements of biological life.
In a gross sense, yes, mother’s milk tastes better than iron filings. This is useful.
The degree to which taste is learned cannot be overlooked, though. If you subject the children you know to a taste-taste between a wriggling grub and a bar of chocolate, you can have little doubt about the expected results. This has little to do with the relative nutritional value, and you will get entirely different results if you conduct your test in a part of the world where food insects are taken for granted and chocolate is a foreign concept. They’ll spit that nasty chocolate out and reach for another fistful of grubs.
There are plenty of non-nutritive substances which we are enculturated to enjoy the taste of, and nutritious substances which we would gag on. Typically, young children don’t like the taste of coffee, and people learn to enjoy it when they are older. If we had a culture in which coffee was, for some reason, mixed into the pabulum of infants, then people would grow up taking it for granted that coffee tastes “good.”
We tend to forget about how we were coaxed into accepting pureed cereal, apples, and bananas as tasty food. We don’t remember a time when the natural thing to do seemed to be to spit as much of it out as we could – after all, it wasn’t sweet hot milk, which we knew we liked.
As we grow older, we’re slowly introduced to a wider world of flavours. Things that are similar to what we know are easier to accept. A huge part of our personal tastes is received from our parents and our surrounding culture.
Introduce an adult to a taste sensation that is remote from his culture or experience, and you’ll find that they’re effectively three years old again, and as mistrustful of, say, kimchi or umeboshi, as they initially were of creamed peas. “Hey! What are you trying to put over on me? That’s not food. I know food. That ain’t it.”
Observe a person who was indulged as a “picky eater” as a child, and you’ll find that many common foods are still intolerable to them. The rest of us just got over it. 
The REAL question is…what quality of molecules gives us the sensation of taste?
Molecules fit into receptors on the surface of your tongue in a lock-and-key type interaction. That then activates nerves that take the sensation to your brain.