If your brain is designed to reward you for seeking out salts, sugars, and fats to stay alive, then why do radically different taste palettes between people exist? Shouldn’t taste preferences be similar across the species?

Question

If your brain is designed to reward you for seeking out salts, sugars, and fats to stay alive, then why do radically different taste palettes between people exist? Shouldn’t taste preferences be similar across the species?

In: Biology

Answer 1

Others kind of touched on this, but consider that we agree on a whole host of things being unpalatable (many of them aren’t exactly edible, but it still counts.)

It’s like how humans share something like 99.99% of our DNA, but we’re still remarkably different while also being very very similar in myriad ways that we don’t consciously notice much, whereas our differences are very noticeable to us.

We might disagree on whether an avocado is tasty, but we agree that eating almost any sort of tree bark is not. I suspect we agree a lot more than we disagree.