Taste and Food Preferences

Tastes can change our feeding behavior, either by motivating further eating or by leading to rejection of a food or beverage. This capability of shifting [Page 970]behavior is accompanied by positive or negative affective responses to those foods and beverages: We like or dislike them. By origin a biologically relevant facility, taste perception has a great impact on the food industry and society. Food-product development is directed to produce tasty foods worldwide, to gain popularity among consumers, and thus to increase sales. At the same time, easy access to a wide supply of good-tasting foods creates a risk for human health and well-being, as such foods are likely to motivate excess consumption or bias choices toward unhealthy options.

Tastes are the core of sensory properties of foods. In common language, this is underscored by the dichotomous division of foods into “sweet” and “salty” (or savory) categories. Almost any food or beverage enables the perception of sweet, salty, sour, bitter, or umami taste, and tastes are often present in combinations. Sweet and sour, sometimes accompanied by bitter, are salient tastes in many fruits and berries. Many savory foods provide both salty and umami taste. Sweet and sour appear as an alliance in Chinese cuisine, and salty and sour tastes are combined in pickled foods.

A single taste or a combination of tastes are embedded in a product that often also provides a complex combination of aroma, texture, and appearance. These “symphonies” of sensory properties form the sensory character of a particular food that makes the food recognizable in a given food culture. Availability of ingredients, the cooking and preservation conditions, as well as the ways of setting up and serving meals vary by cultures, often geographically. Different cuisines result in different sensory profiles of common foods, whereby the taste intensities also vary. For example, in some regions, bread can be prepared without any sodium chloride, thus appearing without salty taste, while in other parts of the world it appears distinctly salty due to high sodium chloride contents. Bread can also taste sweet or sour, depending on regional bread-making practices around the world. This entry discusses inherent taste preferences, developmental and cultural influences on taste preferences, cognitive inputs to taste perception and preference, and testing consumer responses to tastes.