Do you think our taste buds change? (ingredients, mushrooms, pancakes)

[Cherie Tebo]

When I was a kid growing up I ate dill pickles,cereal,muffins,bolonga sandwiches,pancakes,waffles just to name a few.Now I can't stomach them anymore.There's even some veggies I can't stand to eat anymore too.

I don't feel I've become a picky eater I just don't crave the items I mentioned above.

[Cunucu Beach]

I was picky, picky, picky as a child and could not tolerate pepper-hot foods, although I liked mild Mexican foods. Today I eat almost anything, even hot Mexican and Asian foods that are loaded up with hot spices. Taste buds get duller with age and foods that I thought were yucky as a child now taste wonderful to me, especially well prepared vegetables.

[slackjaw]

As a kid I used to be able to eat frosting from a can using two fingers (if you want to be crass can call them diddle-digits) and drink chocolate syrup by the can. These activities usually resulted in my Mom kicking my ass upon eliminating my sisters as suspects.

Nowadays I feel somewhat ill even thinking of chomping on crunchy thick frosting by the mouthful.

[joey2000]

I don't think our taste BUDS change much if at all, but our tastes do and often in common/expected ways, eg we don't like or can tolerate sweets as much, we do like veggies more, etc. I was also a picky eater as a kid but like almost everything now.

[TKramar]

To some degree they must. I used to like PEZ, and I no longer do.

[nan5623]

I believe as we mature, so does our taste buds. I gagged at the thought of Mom making me eat avocado ~~ NOW, I love them. Some things I could live until I was 150 and never like ~~ ANY hot cereal or mushrooms.

[jtur88]

Our taste buds only differentiate four taste qualities (sweet, salt, sour, bitter). All the rest is smell and mouth feel, heavily influenced by past experience with associated events.

Sweetness is one of the things our taste buds detect, and an adult still retains the same capacity to detect sweetness. But as one gets older, the digestive system reacts differently to sugars, and makes one feel more ill at east after ingesting a lot of sugar. One's psychological and physiological reaction to certain foods have more to do with rejecting them, than the actual taste of the food.

But most of all, it comes down to smell, and most smells are regarded as pleasant or unpleasant through learned response, rather than "good" or "bad" smell. One keeps on learning smell responses, and an association with a smell can turn one off the foods that resemble it. If you get sick once from eating pineapple, and throw up vomit smelling like pineapple, you'll probably never again "like the taste" of pineapple.

For example, it was quite late in life before I learned to like beer, because of a childhood association with the smell of stale empties in the morning with cigarette butts in them.

[Cherie Tebo]

Maybe instead of taste buds I should of used tastes/cravings for foods.

Maybe the reason I don't crave the kinds of foods I used to crave as a child is because of all the ingredients I've read on different packaging.Some of them words are over a foot long.LOL

I could be putting something into my body for all I know.

[gentlearts]

I still like most things that I've always liked BUT....
It seems that so many things taste bland and flavorless to me. Like today, I had a BLT for lunch. I loaded it up with mayo, salt and pepper, but it still did not have much flavor. Maybe there is no such thing as a flavorful tomato anymore.
That's not all either, I seem to need a lot more hot spicy stuff on my food in order to taste anything.

[Cherie Tebo]

Originally Posted by gentlearts

I still like most things that I've always liked BUT....
It seems that so many things taste bland and flavorless to me. Like today, I had a BLT for lunch. I loaded it up with mayo, salt and pepper, but it still did not have much flavor. Maybe there is no such thing as a flavorful tomato anymore.
That's not all either, I seem to need a lot more hot spicy stuff on my food in order to taste anything.

There's a big difference between store bought/homegrown tomatoes.The store bought tomatoes are quick grown where they're not allowed to ripen properly.Where a homegrown tomato has time to ripe on it's own.

Look at how most fruit like bananas are pretty green in the stores.Oranges are about the same way.

When I lived in Southern California where there's plenty of orange groves an employee of a grocery store told me that they get there oranges etc from out of the USA . When I inquired of why they don't get their oranges right there California I was told by that person that California orange groves don't supply enough oranges.