On this overcast cloudy day a gloom has extended toward far reaches of the horizon as my eye can see. Evening is approaching and I am struck with the realization that I have been up for a little less than 5 hours and that the impending lively part of my wakefulness awaits me. Oh how my circadian rhythm has masterfully adapted to a summer routine! The ambience of this Sunday that is not any sort of holiday makes it a restful one in which clarification and cleanliness are natural and do not evoke a sense of rush or angst that is typical of getting everybody ready for Catholic mass or to praise someone on their day. My plan for today is not rigid or set, but my ideas can flourish when my mind submits to fantasies and self-assessment. It has been brought to my attention that food and the idea of food arouses certain emotions while surpassing others and I cannot help but to think about my oldest memory of food: the first time I threw up apple chunks.
Granted, this memory does not conjure up the best memory about food, however it is prevalent to me every day in my life as a part of my decision making especially when I recall something twelve years ago. The fact that I ate almost nine corndogs throughout the day and then half of a small apple was a certain activity that would make most people regurgitate, yet it is my malignant disposition towards the fruit through this concrete memory that defines me today. Through my persistent dislike for apples I have been both laughed at and even punished. Yet it helps me to stay in my lane through a psychological process of Taste Aversion Learning commonly known as learning to be picky and decisive. This in effect is a type of conditioning innate in sophisticated organisms to associate a taste with nausea and sickness. To me, I did not care how much food I had eaten, I was more inclined to thinking that it was just my personality to dislike apples and that I would throw up more often than not just by excessive indulging of that specific juicy taste.
Obviously now my perception of apples have changed and I am now more inclined to accepting an apple from someone and or picking one for myself. This topic brings back a flood of memories that have to do with apples especially from the subsequent questioning of others as to why I only selectively dislike apples and not apple based products such as apple juice, apple sauce, or apple cider donuts, or even its close cousin pineapple. Surely there is a method to my madness and specific memories guide my comfortableness to these foods rather than to plain apples. Another lasting memory of mine is of running races outside my dad’s home village in Nigeria. We would only stop to catch breath and admire the men scaling huge trees to chop down pineapples. I was certainly amazed; no way someone would go through all that to eat something nauseating or unpleasant. Furthermore, with the cider and donuts particularly, a seventh grade field trip proved to be the most dreadful experience of my young life. We went to one of the largest apple picking fields in all of New York. Thank God for the chance of rain that day because there were two options. Either stay in under wooden picnic barns and eat donuts and drink cider or go out in droves and pick apples. I chose the latter option and ended up venturing from the group to having an enjoyable time mosh pitting in the marshes rather than picking apples. Exhausted I returned to the barns to eat and sip the deucedly pleasing produce.
I digress when it comes to food, but the most tantalizing detail I have picked up from this is that taste preferences are not just interculturally different, but more likely, interpersonally and intraculturally different. I can see with my very eyes my own little brother’s huge dislike for certain foods for no real reason merely that it looks bad. He has hated ketchup and other condiments since before he could even speak coherent sentences and that has just recently changed now that he’s four. Now he likes ketchup and hates mustard and onions and broccoli and will yell and scream to get them off his plate. The interesting thing about this is that it is not just little kids who have this tendency to show extreme displeasure for particular foods. My friends at Seton Hall are considered adults in the real world yet are still hung up on their preferences for food and some, even the quiet ones, continually behave like particular foods egregiously embarrassed them in the past. I refuse to just chalk that up to the culture of the university that students voice their displeasure with the dining hall but rather to psychological theories such as displacement and social facilitation. Precisely, the social facilitation that makes it easier for one to talk openly around his or her friends at the same table and the displacement of frustration accumulated throughout the day that is targeted at foods one dislikes. With this dynamic, the issues one deals with may be exacerbated by any such extraneous acts and may lead to the person choosing to blame the institution and even choosing not to go to the cafeteria for a while.
The fact that everyone has their different taste preferences is commonly accepted, however the aim of this essay is to leave the reader thinking critically about their mundane life decisions and what led to them. Yes, taste aversion learning develops evolutionally early and may sometimes be stupid although it at the very least is a powerful way of staying true to oneself. When it comes to food, in my mind there is no such thing as a clear disposition; eating is just an act of ensuring survival. However, when there are eating disorders and obesity that is when the problems arise. At the end of the day it is better to be intransigent when it comes to a silly saying as “I don’t eat apples because they make me throw up” than to “I eat apples to throw up”. And similarly, eating too much can be representative of losing control because one has lost the ability to choose adequately for oneself.
Comments
Post a Comment