learning to eat

the child learns quickly how to convert the measurable chemical and physical stimuli reaching it from the exterior into an esthetic estimate of quality—the transfiguration of mathematics into emotion. It discovers what it likes and what it does not like within the ecology of which it is a part—the biological ecology (the plants and animals it eats because they occupy the same habitat) and the social ecology (the eating habits of the society in which it lives). Once learned, these judgments harden into prejudices. That is why it takes so long for an unfamiliar food to be accepted in regions uneducated to appreciate it.

waverley root, food, p394