It tastes OK, but I don't want to eat it: New insights into food disgust

Abstract

To better understand food-disgust, we investigated the long-standing theory that disgust towards a food causes it to taste ‘bad’. To induce disgust, participants were served cookies labelled as containing crickets (Study 1); or served whole crickets versus novel (leblebi) and familiar (peanuts) control foods (Study 2). Participants (Study 1: N = 80; Study 2: N = 90) tasted the foods and rated taste pleasantness, desire to eat, disgust and, in Study 1, 16 taste attributes (e.g., nuttiness). Latency to eat and food intake were included as behavioural indicators of disgust. In both studies disgusting foods were presumed to taste bad, but this was disconfirmed after tasting – disgust did not cause the food to taste bad. Nonetheless, the taste attribute results suggested increased attention towards cricket flavours/textures. Furthermore, desire to eat and intake results suggested that disgust, but not novelty, was associated with reduced food wanting. Even if a disgust-inducing food tastes OK, people do not ‘want’ to consume it. By offering novel insights into our understanding of disgust, these results may stimulate progress in new avenues of emotion research, as well as informing the development of methods to reduce disgust and increase the acceptance of novel, sustainable, foods. For example, interventions should encourage tasting to overcome negative expectations of taste pleasantness and should tackle low levels of wanting, e.g., by normalising consumption of the target food.