Likes and dislikes cannot be reduced to molecules and genes. It means that our food habits are not final and fixed but adaptable and open, if only we will give ourselves half a chance. We did not come into the world disliking bitter greens; we were taught to dislike them by our environment. Taste may be identity but it is not destiny. The hope is that while we are stuck with our genes, the environment is something that can change.

Every day, children are exposed to messages - whether on giant hoardings and TV ads or from looking in friends’ lunchboxes - telling them that they should like the very foods that will do them the most harm.

Every culture seems to have certain challenging vegetables that children find hard to love at first bite.

Foodies trumpet their love of the hated vegetables of childhood: cauliflower and Brussel sprouts join beetroot as dinner party favourites.

Our sense of taste is something that anchors us to the person we have always known ourselves to be.

One of the reasons that we do not usually think of our tastes as learned is that most of the learning tends to happen in the very early years of life; and then it stops.

Flavours - these memories generated backwards through our nose - are all learned.

Registering different flavours is one of the main ways that our bodies interact with the world around us. Amazingly enough, the human olfactory bulb is the only part of the central nervous system that is directly exposed to our environment, through the nasal cavity. Our other senses - sight, sound and touch - need to travel on a complicated journey via nerves along the spinal cord up to the brain. Smell and flavour, by contrast, surge direct from plate to nose.

Flavour is not actually in food, any more than redness is in a rose or yellow in the sun. It is a fabrication of our brains and for each taste we create a mental ‘flavour image’, in the same way that we develop a memory bank of the faces of people we know. The difference is that whereas faces fade when you haven’t seen them in a while, flavours and smells have a way of lodging themselves in indelibly.