The Taste Buds You're Born With

On a Christmas trip last year to southern Oregon, I picked up some cheese curds at Rogue Creamery. To me they tasted like a mild white cheese—somewhere on the spectrum between mozzarella and Monterey Jack. I thought they’d make a good ski snack and offered them to my son. He popped one in his mouth, chewed a bit, then promptly spit it out. “There’s something wrong with that cheese, Mom,” Alex said.

Shrugging it off as random kid food-squeamishness, I offered some to my husband, Mark, a serious cheese fan, who bit into one and made a face: “Ugh, that doesn’t taste right.”

To me, the curds’ only fault was that they were too mild. How could the two of them dislike them so much? How could Alex have learned from his dad what to like and not like in a cheese? After all, I’ve been the one who’s been feeding him, for the most part, since before he was born.

It turns out that taste is innate. Something in those curds was detected by taste transmitters in Alex’s and Mark’s mouths which told their brains the curds were yucky. Alex, apparently, inherited his dad’s full taste bud panel. They both love artichokes and Tabasco, and hate corned beef and cheese curds. The work I did exposing him to a variety of food when he was young would appear to have been a waste of time.

Surely, food preferences have a cultural bent. Salvadorians crave pupusas, Vietnamese pho, Swedes potatoes, because those are the foods they grew up with. And we can learn to like foods we initially reject. But sometimes taste extends beyond parents’ control, news that should be reassuring to moms and dads with picky eaters.

As for Rogue Creamery, it makes an excellent Oregonzola, which is sold at many cheese purveyors in the Bay Area.