Likes and Dislikes

I hate okra. But there are members of my family who eat it like popcorn. I like Oreos, not that I buy them, but if they’re around, I do enjoy them. Yet my sister Sally avoids them like a plague. Why? I’m not sure.

We all have taste buds. We can taste sweet versus salty. Spicy versus bland. Something in those taste buds on our tongue triggers something in our brain. While this is especially helpful when we put something that’s gone bad in our mouths, causing us to spit it out, it’s also a strange sense. Because why does one person like licorice and another hates it? Why does one person like sweet more than salty? Why do I like broccoli but hate lima beans?

Now some tastes are acquired over time. During my years in Texas, I found I needed my salsa spicier and spicier as I adjusted. And what we loved as kids, we may not like as adults. Meanwhile, what we like as adults we may have hated as kids. Cultures play into this, too. Mexicans love their food spicy. Scandinavians have very bland tastes. (Witnessed by me who saw the spice aisle of the grocery store shrink by more than half when I moved from Texas to Minnesota. There were moments I wondered if these Scandinavian descendants even knew what spices were.) Who truly knows what triggers the tastes we like and don’t like. But we can be grateful that God didn’t create us like animals. We can taste. It’s part of our uniqueness.

Emry has been trying many new foods over the past month. Thus far she hasn’t seemed to dislike any of them – until this week. I had given her peas a couple of weeks prior, but not very many. I thought most of them ended up in her high chair because she was still learning the mechanisms of picking small things up and getting them into her mouth. This time I gave her more and then went into the kitchen to get some things prepared for dinner. When I returned, I thought she had eaten a few. But when I picked one up and put it in her mouth for her, she immediately spit it right back out. I tried again. Same result. And then I noticed she was carefully picking up the Cheerios on her tray, avoiding the peas mixed up in them. We had met our first distaste: peas. In fact, I found the ones I thought she had eaten in her highchair.

I am sure we will meet many things over the next many years that Emry does not like. In the meantime, it was rather amusing watching her spit out the peas, pushing them out of the way so she could get to her Cheerios. And at least we haven’t started throwing things we don’t like on the floor. Meanwhile, we’ll stick the sweet potatoes, yogurt and peaches. And maybe over the next few days we’ll try green beans. Yea!