Question: What decides whether or not our tastebuds like something we eat?

Darren Logan answered on 13 Mar 2012:

The tastebuds on your tongue don’t decide whether you like something to eat.

They just detect one of 5 basic tastes:sweet, salty, bitter, sour or umami (which is a meaty taste, a bit like soy sauce). The rest of the flavour of food comes from your nose. You can test this by eating food while holding you nose tightly, you’ll notice that all your food is bland and has very little flavour. Your nose has hundreds of different receptors while allows us to detect all the different flavour of food.

But even then, your tastebuds and your nose just detect the flavour. The nerves in the mouth and nose send messages to the brain and it decode these messages and flavour and decides whether we like it or not. We don’t yet know exactly how that works, but we do know that experience with food helps decide whether we like it. And some foods cause the release of hormones which makes us feel good, which helps us form a preference for those foods.