What can make a food to taste delicious?

Have you ever travel to another country, gone to order some food, look around in the restaurant, in the street, and find some new foodstuff that you never thought they could be a dish or be on your plate?

Spicy snails with herbs

 

 

 

 

 

Tarantulas

 

 

 

 

 

 

Raw Chocolate Cupcakes with Nettle Frosting

And then, how bravely did you feel to try them? Since very young ages we have been learning about our food preferences, and it is likely that we prefer the food that we have been growing up with.

In the old days, food scarcity was quite common over the earth,  and parents were trying to feed their children with the tastiest food encouraging them to eat. Today food tables seem to remain shifting from food scarcity to over-consume or even to have food excess as a treat.  What comes to your mind when we talk about food as a treat? I personally wouldn’t think about a cauliflower (my respects, to people who love cauliflower, it isn’t my cup of tea).

It is your decision what you eat, but how do you take that decision? We normally know what to eat when we are in our home, and usually, we take those decisions coming from the information that we have got from our culture. Last year, I went to Thailand, there was plenty of places where to have food, in the street, in places inside, and all the Thai people seemed very clean. In fact, their cleanliness is part o their religion and culture. I consider Thai people have a big range of choices of food, and most of them looked caring for tourists in terms of not making food too spicy food for people from the west, asking and advising how hot food was. As in most in the countries in the word, there was Mc Donalds and Burgerking. When it was very difficult to see tourists in local shops and restaurants, most of them in places very similar to their countries where they were from. Even knowing that you are in a foreign country, people tend to eat more in places where they are used to rather than going to new places.

Food often needs to be adapted to successful in a different a new region, for example, Japanese tend to like food less sugary than Americans do. And bands adapt to people taste preferences, so probably burgers in Mc Donalds from Thailand are going to be different from burgers in a Mc Donald in the UK. However, because we associate this brand with something that we know already, we feel safer, and even the food would be more similar to the Thai food, we still would think that we like it.

One of the things that make people change their opinion to try something new is watching other people to eat the same, something that we thought could be disgusting could change our mind after seeing a famous nice face eating with pleasure. In the following video, we can see how Angelina Jolie prepares and eat scorpions for dinner.