We might think we love food from far-flung lands, but most of it is tailored to suit our tastes. If you could only ever eat one cuisine again, which would you choose. While terrain, climate, flora, fauna and religion have influenced traditional cuisines, individual cultures also develop unique preferences and aversions with these confines. The anthropologist Jeremy MacC,ancy has observed that the hunter-gatherer tribes on Earth today, nomadic peoples who do not farm and can eat only what nature has to offer- are as finicky as the next person. The Mbuti pygmies in Angola understandably find the idea of feasting on leopards a bit gross, because leopards eat humans.And primates resemble people too much to be appetising. Kalahari bushmen know about 100 desert plants to be edible, but only 14 varieties are considered desirable.They hunt giraffes, warthogs and antelope, but think ostrich tastes bad, and zebra meat is dismissed as smelly.
Along with environmental and cultural factors affecting our food choices, there is evidence that genetic makeup influence how we experience taste. The basic tastes of sweet, sour, salty, bitter and umami are detected when chemicals that produce those tastes bind with certain receptors on our tongues. We all have different amount of these various receptors, depending on our DNA,and research has shown that sensitivity to one particular bitter compound. Most of our food loves and hates are learned. foetuses and breastfed babies can taste what their mothers eat, and have been shown to develop early affinities to certain flavours in their mothers' diets. And when we start eating olids, our concept of acceptable food evolves quickly. Over time, the way we perceive certain flavours is programmed according to how we usually consume them. However, despite a national love of food from far-flung lands -Turkish to Thai, Sicilian to Sri Lankan, Polish to Punjabi, most restaurants here are tailored to suit British tastes. Humans may be omnivores, but we're damned picky omnivores. One nation's succulent horse fillet is another's scandalous counterfeit beef. While terrain, climate, flora, fauna and religion have influenced traditional cuisines, individual cultures also develop unique preferences and aversions within these confines.