When I was a kid, I did not like spicy food. Now an adult, I love it.
In: 2025
As others have said, your taste buds do reduce as you get older, but it’s also worth remembering that most of the _flavour_ in food comes from the smell entering your nose from inside your mouth. And as you get older you also **lose your sense of smell**
As a chef who has worked in nursing homes for over 10 years, strong tasting food is an important consideration when meal planning and thinking about nutrition in the elderly.
I think there’s 3 phases.
There’s the baby phase, the child phase and then the adult phase.
I remember a bunch of things went from great to gross when I was maybe 3-6. Weetabix, bananas, fish, eggs. I think this is due to memories forming and I remember having a much heightened awareness of smell and texture rather than just taste.
As an adult I noticed I was liking things which I hated before such as black pepper, mustard, chilli, spicy food. Our sensitivity to taste gets much duller as we’re older, those other flavours were overwhelming as a child. liquorice went from being feeling sick the moment it touched my mouth, to now, just disliking the taste.
My issue is that smell and texture still hold such a large amount of power over what I eat that I’ve not really built up the courage to try fish and bananas again, I don’t remember what they taste like.
I think I’m traumatised from old meal times of being forced to eat things I didn’t like as a child, that I’m now scared to try new things, even though I know for certain, there’s a lot of stuff I probably do like now.
This combination of memories, texture, smells, taste buds, foods being prepared a certain way (overcooked/boiled) and foods combining (a food you like being mixed with a food you don’t like), all influence us that it makes the topic difficult to examine.
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