BBC News
If the thought of gobbling down a mound of sprouts or chewing on some rabbit makes you feel queasier than a trip on a rickety rollercoaster, it could be because of your childhood food memories.
According to a new survey, these memories have a huge impact on our tastes in later life with almost half (43%) of people questioned across the UK admitting they have not tried the food that gave them their earliest bad flavour memory again.
Smell expert, Professor Tim Jacob, from Cardiff University's School of Biosciences, said flavour was actually a mixture of two senses - taste and smell - and in many people, these were inherently conservative.
"We spend our formative years being fed with things that are sweet and are quite bland," he said.
"Once we have established what foods we need to survive, why change it? We often don't want to take that risk.
"Because of the way our tastes develop, things like olives are an acquired taste but memory and emotion remain closely linked to flavour preferences throughout our lives."
According to Professor Jacob, our childhood palates are not too partial to sour or acidic foods and a taste for salt only develops when we are around six-years-old.
"Children's foods are basically very conservative for biological reasons. But as they grow up it seems some tend to stick with this conservatism even though biologically our tastes change," he said. Read more...
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