Given his background, Duncker had a strong sense of how those with power manipulate the powerless. To him, a child being manipulated to change their ingrained food likes was in a similar position to the population of Nazi Germany.
Duncker’s findings are deeply worrying. If just one story about a not very inspiring mouse hero could make children change their likes to such a degree, what are the effects of a daily barrage of advertising stories, in which godlike athletes are shown drinking sugary beverages and the least nutritious cereals are those with the cutest characters on the box? ‘Don’t trust that tiger! He’s a bad tiger!’ I used to tell my son as we walked down the cereal aisle.
What can any one of us do in the face of such social pressure? Duncker offered himself up as an example of how individuals could train themselves to new likes, despite their social prejudices and circumstances, through a kind of ‘inner reorganisation’. When he arrived in Cambridge from Germany, Duncker was appalled by the prevalence of something called ‘salad cream’: a sharp condiment beloved in the British Isles that has the texture of mayonnaise but the acrid taste of spirit vinegar. Like many mass-market foods, it has a devoted following among those reared on it, but to Duncker, who wasn’t prepared for the taste, salad cream came as quite a shock.
Suffice it to tell just one personal experience. When I first came to England, I was made to understand that raw green salad leaves could be made into ‘salad’ with the aid of a bottled substance of yellowish color, called salad dressing. It looked like mayonnaise; I expected mayonnaise – and I dare say I was deeply disappointed. No, I did not like it. But as I did not like raw leaves either, I was therefore prompted to adopt the most favorable and adventurous attitude. I tried again, and I still remember the day when suddenly I discovered that this was not an unpleasant variant of mayonnaise but a kind of mustard which was not unpleasant at all. Thus by accentuating the mustard potentiality and suppressing the non-mayonnaise aspect, I came to like it.70
Like Lucy Cooke, Duncker knew that there is huge scope for changing our likes and dislikes: not all of them, for sure, but enough to make the difference between a good diet and a bad one. Whether you are a PROP taster or not; autistic or not; neophobic or not; fussy or not; a foreigner or not; genes are never the final reason why you like the particular range of foods you do. When a boy likes nothing but cornflakes, it says less about him than it does about the world he lives in.
It would help if we stopped seeing our personal likes as such a deep and meaningful part of our essence. There are many things about ourselves we cannot change, but the majority of food likes do not fall into this category. Our tastes are learned in the context of immense social influences, whether from our family, our friends, or the cheery font on a bottle of soda. Yet it’s still possible, as Duncker showed, to carve out new tastes for ourselves. We can put the impressionable nature of our likes to good use. If we expose ourselves enough times to enough different foods, we may find, like Duncker, that the flavours we once disliked have now miraculously become likeable.
In Duncker’s case, sadly, taking what he called a ‘favourable and adventurous’ attitude to food was easier than taking a favourable attitude to life. By the time he was doing his experiment with children and white chocolate, he had been suffering from deteriorating mental health for the best part of a decade. Duncker missed life in Berlin, but knew he could never return while the Nazis were in power. Unlike his tastes in salad, this situation was intractable. In 1938 he emigrated from Britain to the United States to take up a job at Swarthmore College. It was there he committed suicide in 1940, at the age of thirty-seven.71
Every culture seems to have certain challenging vegetables that children find hard to love at first bite. And at second. And third. In Brazil, it is okra (the sliminess). In France, it may be turnips (the bitterness). In lots of countries, it is beetroot (the purpleness).
There are plenty of reasons to find beetroot off-putting. There’s the curious taste, reminiscent of earth and blood (the culprit is a chemical compound called geosmin). Also, the texture, which in its cooked form is neither crunchy nor soft but fleshy. Most of all, there is the shocking colour that bleeds inescapably over everything on your plate.
Yet among sophisticated adult eaters, beetroot is often a special favourite. It thus offers a case study in how we can learn new tastes. It’s not just that people learn to tolerate beetroot: they switch from dislike to adoration. Since the 1990s beetroot has been a beloved item on restaurant menus, often paired with goat’s cheese. Adult beet lovers enjoy the very qualities that children find so awful: the earthy taste and meaty texture and, most of all, the bright crimson pigment, which can dye a whole pan of risotto a joyous pink.
Between the beet haters and the lovers, there is a gulf. Some of it can be explained – as with many other dislikes – by the form in which we first encounter the outlandish purple vegetable. Childhood memories of vinegary pickled beetroot do not help. When someone learns to love beetroot, it is often because they have been given a taste of these roots in a new and more appealing form, when eating out: a fresh and vibrant beet and orange salad, say, or a moreish deep-fried beetroot crisp.
Regardless of cooking method, however, there does seem to be something in strong vegetable flavours such as beetroot that people take longer to hit it off with. In one study, seven- and eight-year-old children from the Netherlands were given tastes of pure beetroot juice every day for fourteen days, the kind of ‘exposure’ that in theory should lead to liking. But at the end of the fortnight, they continued to find the beetroot taste ‘too intense’.72
Maybe it is the sense of achievement at having conquered an aversion that makes adult beetroot fans flaunt their enjoyment so overtly. Foodies trumpet their love of the hated vegetables of childhood: cauliflower and Brussels sprouts join beetroot as dinner party favourites. But beetroot eaters are not just showing off. It is possible to reach the point where these complex, bitter flavours deliver more pleasure than the simple blandness of mashed potato.
The psychologist E.P. Köster has shown that one of the beneficial effects when children are exposed through ‘sensory education’ to a wider range of flavours is that they start to love complexity and be bored by simplicity.73 Given time and enough attempts, we actively seek out those foods – like beetroot – whose charm is not at first obvious.
The women have a lot to talk about;
they remember their homes,
and dinners they made.
Poem written by EVA SCHULZOVA, aged twelve, in the Terezin Concentration Camp
When Abi Millard was four, her mother Dawn started to notice that Abi was acting strangely at mealtimes. She seldom seemed hungry and often put down her fork after a bite or two. Though generally happy and well behaved, Abi was, in Dawn’s words, ‘a nightmare’ when the family went out to eat with friends, ‘messing around and not eating her dinner’. They took her to the doctor who diagnosed congenital anosmia: an inability to smell, which also means an inability to taste food properly, given almost all of what we call ‘taste’ is really flavour perception through