Do you have food prejudices?
If you think about it, we all have foods that we think or feel negatively about, and we wouldn’t eat at all, or only reluctantly. What is often behind such a food bias?
1. Childhood eating injuries
Often times, a negative reaction to a type of food can be due to unpleasant childhood experiences with those foods. For example, many people dislike types of vegetables like spinach, broccoli, or squash, perhaps because their parents forced them to eat large amounts or forced them to eat them against their will.
Additionally, a food or dish may be associated with a specific traumatic or painful event, such as choking as a child, or it may have been served when something negative and painful happened.
In parts of the world where food shortages are common, people can develop an aversion to foods that they have been forced to eat repeatedly due to a lack of affordable alternatives.
2. Negative associations
Sometimes food biases can stem from negative visual, semantic, historical, social, personal, or other associations associated with a food or dish. For example, some people who did not grow up near the sea find it difficult to eat shrimp, prawns, and other delicacies because they can visually remind them of unpleasant creatures like caterpillars.
Sometimes food is also associated with a social or historical stigma. In many places, for example, there are foods that were called “poor people’s food.” Only later did those foods, including pizza and meatballs, move from this designation to the league of the world’s favorite foods.
3. Lack of familiarity
We often react negatively to foods that we don’t know yet or that we met late in life. They often do not belong in our circle of comfort foods, with which we have developed a strong positive emotional bond.
For example, many people living in Europe or America cannot enjoy cooked banana the first time they taste it, just as many Africans may need time before adopting radish, black bread, or types of cheese.
In addition, we can feel that our taste circuits are already connected for life. We may not be willing to interrupt or modify this taste pattern.
4. Social prejudice
The most disturbing form of food bias is when it is rooted in a bias towards a specific group of people. How often do we hear phrases like “these people are like this and that because they eat this and that.”
There are many people who extend their negative view of an ethnic group or other social group to the foods that these peoples appreciate as delicacies, such as snails, frog legs, sheep, sheep’s head, lobsters, yucca leaf, dog meat, insects. , caterpillars, as well as eating methods, such as finger foods.
Of course, choosing to consume certain foods or not is a purely personal choice. It is unfortunate when our food prejudices reveal a more dangerous prejudice towards other human beings, other cultures or other forms of life.
Here’s a short exercise to test your eating biases:
1. Make a list of all the foods you hate, dislike, or reluctantly eat.
2. For each food or plate, write a sentence about what comes to mind when you think, smell, or see the plate or food.
3. Decide if it is due to childhood eating trauma, negative social, visual, or historical associations, or if the eating bias is related to other, deeper biases. Or it may have another reason that is not mentioned here.
4. Write a sentence about what you think would help change the food bias and if this step is necessary.