We Eat What We Are

We love to imagine that we are creatures of refined taste. We like to think we choose the foods we enjoy the way we choose lovers: after some thoughtful exploration, a period of experimentation, and perhaps one regrettable night that never gets mentioned again. Nothing delights us more than congratulating ourselves for our cultivated palates - as if enjoying truffle oil is a sign of maturity rather than simply a sign that we finally earn enough to buy groceries outside the discount aisle.

Over time, we come to believe that our preferences say something fundamental about us. We recite them as though they were personality traits. “I simply can’t live without spice,” someone will announce, as if they personally invented chilies rather than inherited them through a thousand years of culinary coercion. Or the quietly smug whisper, “I only drink dry wines,” uttered with the exact tone one might use to admit membership in a secret society. We cling to these food identities the way children cling to security blankets - and with the same amount of critical thought.

And the true comedy of it all is that we defend these preferences with righteous, territorial passion. We build entire identities out of condiments. Family recipes become sacred texts. We judge strangers not on their kindness or decency, but on whether they salt their pasta water “correctly.” We insist our culinary affinities are rooted in discernment, experience, even morality - the suggestion being that if someone does not enjoy what we enjoy, they have somehow failed both evolution and etiquette.

But the truth - which is both inconvenient and darkly amusing - is that very little of our “taste” belongs to us at all. Before we were even born, geography quietly stocked our future pantry, and genetics programmed our internal recipe approval system. We are not the authors of our palates; we are merely the unsuspecting hosts. And that is where our real story begins.

Geography - The Original Menu Designer

Long before cookbooks, celebrity chefs, or competitive baking shows involving grown adults crying over sponge density, there was geography - silently arranging dinner. Yet from the beginning, geography has behaved like a controlling maître d’, deciding what ingredients were available, what flavors were necessary, and which plants wouldn’t dramatically shorten life expectancy. The earliest humans didn’t so much choose their diets as avoid poisoning themselves until habits formed.

Over centuries, climate and landscape began shaping cuisines with a stubbornness that would put an Italian grandmother to shame. People in hot, humid places embraced spice as a survival tactic - not to “elevate flavor,” but because chilies conveniently murdered the microbes lurking in their food. Meanwhile, those in temperate zones congratulated themselves on liking “delicate flavors,” never once acknowledging that refrigeration does wonders for moral superiority. And then there were the high-altitude Andes, where potatoes became both a staple food and, for a time, a personality trait.

Fermentation, that delicious culinary miracle, was never a whimsical creative act. It was simply what happened when food was trapped in a jar because winter was threatening to kill everyone. But generations later, the descendants of the desperate now speak of kimchi and sauerkraut with the same reverence some reserve for religious relics. Geography forces you to pickle cabbage to survive and suddenly the grandchildren are running Michelin-star restaurants based on it.

Of course, migration only complicated everything. When people moved, they brought along their recipes - and the crushing realization that none of the ingredients tasted the same. Substitutions were made. Techniques adjusted. “Authentic cuisine” fractured into a thousand regional dialects, none of which have spoken in centuries. What began as a way to remember home evolved into food that only resembled memory, the culinary equivalent of trying to recall a childhood friend’s face without the yearbook photo.

And so, Geography, the original silent chef, ended up writing the unofficial menu for humanity - deciding who would worship rice, who would wage war with wheat, who would eat insects with enthusiasm, and who would pay $27 for a handful of them in a New York fusion restaurant. We like to imagine our diets reflect culture, family, creativity. But beneath all those sentimental flourishes lies the quiet, unblinking hand of climate, soil, altitude, and ancient microbial threats, arranging every plate before we ever took a bite.

Genetics - The Molecular Saboteur

If geography stocked the pantry, genetics is the snickering sous chef in the back of the kitchen deciding whether you’ll actually enjoy any of it. It doesn’t negotiate. It doesn’t explain. It simply tweaks a receptor here, deletes an enzyme there, and watches civilizations fracture over herbs. For all our talk of personal taste, the truth is that many of us are one misplaced gene away from gagging at guacamole or weeping with joy over Roquefort.

Take cilantro - the leaf that launched a thousand arguments.

Some people claim it tastes bright and lemony; others insist it tastes like someone wrung out a bar of soap over their tacos. This isn’t a philosophical dispute. It’s a genetic coin toss named OR6A2, which determines whether your olfactory receptor picks up “herbal freshness” or “hotel hand soap from 1987.” Yet instead of acknowledging the raw tyranny of DNA, both sides behave as though the other is suffering from a moral failure. As if taste buds can be rehabilitated through education and exposure therapy.

Then there’s alcohol - humanity’s favorite social lubricant, truth serum, and frequent life coach. For centuries, we’ve applauded the legendary drinking resilience of Russians as though it were a triumph of national willpower and ironclad spirit. And in a way, it is. But it’s also biochemistry. Variations in alcohol-metabolizing genes quietly dictate how efficiently different populations process booze, and Russian genetic profile includes versions of those enzymes that are unusually effective at breaking it down. So, the next time someone raises a glass “to Russian fortitude,” it’s only polite to raise a second one “to the ADH1B allele”. And whatever you do, don’t try to go shot-for-shot with a Russian - unless you’re a Russian, in which case, carry on and try not to judge the rest of us.

And then there’s cheese - the West’s soft-power weapon and Asia’s longstanding biological no, thank you.

Lactase persistence isn’t a refined cultural victory so much as a genetic clerical error that benefited the populations who saddled themselves to cows early on. While Europeans proudly evolved the dubious talent of drinking milk into adulthood, much of East and Southeast Asia wisely recognized that picking fights with lactose was a losing battle and declined the invitation. Yet each side still feels vaguely superior: one believing brie is a passport to higher civilization, the other marveling that anyone would voluntarily ingest something capable of disabling a digestive tract. It all comes down to whether your genes let you metabolize cheddar - or warn you, in unmistakable terms, that dairy is a three-day negotiation you will categorically lose.

What genetics really gives us is not taste but permission. It whispers “yes, enjoy that” or “absolutely not” long before our conscious minds enter the scene. And we, ever the romantics, take credit anyway - as though personal identity resides in our tRNA and not in our behavior. If geography established the menu, genetics decides whether we’re allowed to like anything on it.

Which is really pretty funny when you think about how seriously we defend our preferences - unaware that we are, at best, enthusiastic puppets.

The Uncomfortable Realization - Geography and Genetics Are Running the Table

Once you place geography and genetics side by side, the illusion of personal agency dissolves faster than gelato in August. Geography dictates what food is within reach; genetics decides whether we’re wired to enjoy it. Between the two, there isn’t much left for “preference” to do except file the paperwork and pretend it was in charge all along.

Consider spicy food and the global line between “pleasantly warm” and “why is my soul trying to exit my body.” The equator breeds chilies; the climate made them useful; the microbes made them necessary. Geography served the dish and genetics stepped in to determine whether your heat receptors will greet the first bite with pleasure, nostalgia, or an involuntary gasp followed by visible sweating and the creeping suspicion that free will is mostly decorative. Yet modern diners insist on treating spice as a moral achievement: Southeast Asians roll their eyes at Westerners who spiral into a full existential crisis over a jalapeño, while Northern Europeans cling to black pepper like it’s an extreme sport. In the end, your heat tolerance isn’t proof of courage or character - just geography and genetics deciding how sweaty you’re destined to be at mealtime.

Or the great cheese divide. Geography placed cattle in Europe and yaks in the Himalayas; genetics flipped a coin to decide who would produce lactase into adulthood and who would greet dairy with violent philosophical objections. From that tiny enzymatic fork in the road came wine-and-cheese soirées on one continent and, on another, a thriving multibillion-dollar lactose-free industry built on the acknowledgment that milk is basically a dare. Cultures formed, stereotypes calcified, culinary diplomacy faltered. At no point did anyone stop to ask whether individual taste had any say in the matter.

Even alcohol - that universal peacemaker, troublemaker, and occasional amateur therapist - is just another negotiation between land and biochemistry. Where grapes grew, people fermented grapes; where rice thrived, they brewed sake; where neither succeeded, they distilled anything that would sit still long enough. Geography poured the glass. Genetics calculated the consequences.

And the human wedged in between raised the drink to their lips, convinced the entire ritual was an act of free will rather than a quiet conspiracy between soil, enzymes, and denial.

Once you notice the pattern, it’s impossible to unsee. What we eat feels personal, but what we love is merely what we can tolerate, and what we tolerate is whatever climate, ancestry, enzymes, and microbial exposure decided would not kill, embarrass, or medically betray us. We are, all of us, gastronomic middle management - dutifully carrying out orders from higher powers while pretending to run the company.

The Existential Digestif – We Eat What We Are

In the end, maybe it doesn’t matter how much of our taste we actually choose. Maybe none of it. Maybe we’re all just following invisible maps written by latitude lines and ancient enzymes, chasing pleasures our ancestors stumbled across by accident and decided were worth keeping. Maybe every dish is just a love letter sent forward through time by people who needed to survive long enough to make us.  

Walk through a night market in Bangkok, a trattoria in Rome, a diner off a freeway exit in Southern California. The people eating there aren’t calculating evolutionary history or debating lactase persistence or comparing enzyme variants. They’re doing something simpler and better: trying to feel good for a minute. Geography stocked the shelves; genetics set the tolerances; but the real magic happens when a plate hits a table and someone takes a bite and remembers - or forgets - something important.

Food is memory. Food is coping. Food is celebration. Sometimes food is therapy we don’t have to explain to anyone. It’s one of the few reminders that life isn’t supposed to hurt all the time. Some of us chase heat so we can sweat and feel alive. Some of us pour vodka to quiet the noise of being human. Some of us eat cheese like it’s a religion; some of us avoid it like it’s a warning from God. None of it is wrong. None of it is right. It’s just what we were handed - and what we turned it into.

So, no - we’re not the architects of our palates. We’re the inheritors of them. But that doesn’t make the ritual of eating any less beautiful. In fact, maybe it makes it better. We get to take what geography and genetics gave us and make it ours anyway - share it, argue about it, pass it on, ruin it, reinvent it, or cling to it like it’s the last true thing in a world that keeps moving the goalposts. So, sit down. Eat something that makes you happy. You don’t have to understand why you love it. You just do.