27. Eat It Again! How Repetition Rewires Your Taste

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March 5, 2025 • 8 mins

Eat It Again! How Repetition Rewires Your Taste

If you’ve just recently gone low-carb, say as a New Year’s resolution, you may be overwhelmed by the sheer difference from your old diet.

Faux-tatoes instead of mashed potatoes. Lunches that don’t include sandwiches, heavy cream and flavored stevia in your coffee instead of creamer. I am here to cheer you on and give you good reason to stick it out. A reason that doesn’t have to do with the scale or your health.

Many years ago, when my sister was a private school teacher, her pay was painfully low. She had to scramble each spring to find a summer job. For a few years, she worked for a company that brought over French foreign exchange students. She had to find them host families, and then during the week, she drove them around the San Diego area in a van, showing them the sites and giving them a taste of American culture.

Speaking of taste, every single French teenager she worked with simply adored liver pate, but found peanut butter revolting. From this, it becomes clear every taste is an acquired taste. If you’re just starting your low-carb journey, you may find that some things taste…funny. Not bad, just different from what you’re used to, different from what you grew up on. Please remember that all tastes are acquired tastes.

Do you know how old I am?

“How old are you?” I hear you cry. I’m so old. I walked home for lunch every day. Through elementary school, mom largely relied on simple stuff for our lunches, canned soup, frozen pot pies, or macaroni and cheese, or frozen pizza and wagon wheel shaped noodles with jarred spaghetti sauce and Parmesan.

The jarred sauce she used back in the 1960s was Ragu Old World Style. I don’t know if the recipe has changed over the past 50 odd years, but it currently contains tomato puree, which is water and tomato paste, salt, olive oil, sugar, dehydrated onions, dehydrated garlic spices, garlic powder, onion powder.

That was the jarred spaghetti sauce of my childhood, and I often had it at lunch. My mother did make awesome homemade spaghetti sauce for family dinners. I wish I had that recipe.

Then at 19, I quit sugar and white flour. I started eating whole wheat noodles and I switched over to a jarred sauce that had no sugar.

It tasted… funny. Not bad, mind you, I was willing to eat it. It just tasted different. It wasn’t what I’d grown up on, but I wasn’t going back to eating sauce with sugar and it, so I stuck with it. Pretty soon, that sauce was what my taste buds expected, and it tasted great.