Our tastes are learned in the context of immense social influences, whether from our family, our friends, or the cheery font on a bottle of soda.

It’s not just that people learn to tolerate beetroot: they switch from dislike to adoration.

When children are exposed through ‘sensory education’ to a wider range of flavours they start to love complexity and be bored by simplicity.

Memory is the single most powerful driving force in how we learn to eat; it shapes all our yearnings.

When we talk of memory of food, we generally assume that nostalgia is a phenomenon that occurs late in life - like Proust being transported to his youth by a madeleine dipped in lime-blossom tea. But food memory is there from the start. Even babies have nostalgia!

We are all born with echoes of our mother’s diet, which means that no one is a totally blank slate when it comes to flavour.

Already, by thirteen weeks, the taste buds are mature. A thirteen-week-old foetus weighs maybe an ounce, with no fat under the skin, no air in the lungs. Yet already they can not only swallow but taste, and these sips of fluid leave memories.

Anything can start to taste good if you have enough positive memories of being fed it by a parent.

Molecules that look near-identical to a specialist chemist lab will be easily distinguished by an ordinary person who smells them.