How Culture Can Influence Taste

While its true that our sense of taste and how we perceive the flavor of food is mostly genetic and relates to our number of taste receptors, there is also the cultural influence of food. A typical Costa Rican dish called Mondongo is very popular there and can be found at most eateries. However, there is no counterpart to this dish in the United States. Why? Because the people of the United States find the main ingredient to be distasteful. Mondongo is in fact tripe soup or tripe stew. When interviewing our tour guide Mario, I asked him what some of his favorite foods were. Near the top of the list was Mondongo. I told myself that I was going to try it, but I couldn't quite bring myself to do it.

When I asked Mario, "do you think that culture has an influence on how we taste?" he said yes. I already knew that culture has an influence on taste, but Mario put it into perspective. First, he began by telling me that the foods that we are brought up to eat will most likely always taste better than new ones we discover ourselves, and that the 'home-cooked' meals will always seem more appealing. But then, he said that cultures with strange foods (or foods we perceive as strange) most likely have those foods because of that culture's history. That was something I wasn't expecting. Mario began to explain that dishes such as Mondongo probably came into being because of a hardship of sorts. He said that maybe in the past, people had needed more meat than the cow could provide and began to use other, stranger parts of the animal; such as the stomach and intestines, tripe. Mario suggested that they were forced to eat this unfamiliar food, but then found it to their liking and continued to eat it. Now, its a mainstay in the Costa Rican culture.

This I believe is the answer that I needed. I think that Mario is right. I think that the way that culture influences taste is through necessity, upbringing, and tradition. For example, I enjoy eating eating plain potato chips with mustard. Disgusting right? Most, well all, of my friends think so. But, everyone in my family absolutely loves to do the same. Sure our genetics are very similar and that would result in a similar sense of taste, but I believe that I developed the taste because I saw my parents and grandparents do it, and I followed suit.
That counts as a cultural influence in my book. I'm completely certain that if I lived in Costa Rica for the next five years, my sense of taste will be altered in some way, shape, or form. Some scientists don't feel that culture influences our sense of taste in such a way as I have described however. To see the scientific side of the story, please click here.

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