by Megan DeLaire
For most people, a ripe, juicy cherry tomato is something to covet. With its firm and glossy skin, tender flesh and burst of flavour, it’s treated like a delicacy whether eaten on its own, in a salad or on a sandwich.
Unless you’re me. Or, at least, unless you were me before I figured out a solution to my picky eating habit. While it might make other people salivate, the prospect of biting into a tomato used to make my gorge rise. Adjectives I’d use to describe tomatoes included wet, acidic, mushy, watery and mealy.
In fact, my brain stores a long list of unflattering adjectives for a rainbow’s worth of vegetables.
For more than half of my life, I’ve wanted nothing to do with broccoli, tomatoes, onion, mushrooms, Brussels sprouts, squash, peppers, asparagus, green beans or anything resembling a vegetable or vegetable-like fruit, whether prepared by a celebrated chef or in the home kitchen of someone I loved.
Then I moved into my own apartment at 19, began to shop for my own groceries and cook all of my own meals. With a newfound sense of ownership over food preparation and the ability to see a vegetable through from raw and whole to chopped, sautéed, roasted, pan-fried or steamed, things began to change.
In my twenties, I began to forage and grow food—tomatoes, peppers, fiddleheads, garlic mustard and more— and found that anything I grew or picked myself was automatically less offensive. I could deal with the texture and acidity of a raw cherry tomato if I’d grown it myself. I could even let myself enjoy it. It was a matter of pride to eat food I’d grown or picked and, as a bonus, I noticed I liked the taste more. I still don’t love mushrooms but, being able to experiment with them in my own kitchen, with my own hands, has brought me around to some varieties. And although I mostly stopped eating meat in 2018, I’ve since tasted the occasional bite of pork after watching someone butcher the meat or talking to the person who raised it.
There might even be a documented scientific basis for this phenomenon. Research out of the University of Copenhagen in 2019 demonstrated that people prefer the taste of food we’re familiar with, but if we know where the food comes from and how it is made, it tastes even better. For this study, researchers in Indonesia had 165 participants taste and rate nine different samples of tempeh—a traditional Indonesian food made from fermented soybeans. After they had sampled the tempeh with no context, they were taught about the ingredients used, whether they were locally grown or imported, and production methods, then asked to taste and rate the samples again.
“When the young people were told that the tempeh in front of them was made from local ingredients with traditional production methods, the information made the products taste significantly better,” study co-author Michael Bom Frøst said in a media release from the University of Copenhagen.
Another study published in 2020 by Danish researchers Rikke Højer, Karen Wistoft and Michael Bom Frøst, found children who had previously disliked eating fish came around to it after handling, playing with and cooking it. They theorized that handling and preparing the fish helped the children recategorize it from a perceived animal to perceived food, and also that their pride in preparing the fish themselves promoted their acceptance of it. That study cited others by researchers in the U.S., Germany, Spain, Switzerland and elsewhere that made similar conclusions in experiments involving fruits and vegetables.
By extension, could the tactile experience of handling your own food as you grow and harvest it yield an even better outcome? Or maybe it’s just that we tend to overvalue things we’ve put more effort into, as multiple studies, including one published in 2019 by researchers in Switzerland, Poland and the U.S. have found. People who study that phenomenon call it the Ikea effect after the furniture company’s build-it- yourself model.
Whatever the explanation, the conclusion seems to be the same for me. The more I handle food before I eat it, the more I enjoy it, and this savouring of the journey versus the destination has actually helped me improve my palate to include foods I didn’t enjoy previously. I take pleasure now in preparing and eating a caprese sandwich, sauteing asparagus in butter and garlic, tossing enoki mushrooms into a bowl of ramen—after peeling them from each other purely for the enjoyment of doing so—and transforming a head of cauliflower, an onion and some other ingredients into Yotam Ottolenghi’s savoury cauliflower cake. I am both happier and healthier for it.