This article explores attitudes toward the durian, a Southeast Asian fruit that famously arouses emotions as divergent as enticement and revulsion. Starting from the idea that tastes and feelings are historical phenomena, it argues that Western attitudes toward the durian took shape, developed, and varied under specific sociocultural circumstances. It reviews travel narratives and other relevant materials, and describes different and seemingly contradictory phases of the relationship between Westerners and the Southeast Asian fruit. In discussing the historical accounts, it suggests that such changes in attitudes are strictly related to the sociohistorical contexts in which they emerged, namely the cultural shifts involved by what Norbert Elias has described as the civilizing process (in Europe) and the different social structures brought in by colonialism (in Southeast Asia). These shifts and structures impacted on the dynamics of taste formation, and, in turn, investigating such dynamics may shed some light on the social and cultural dimensions of colonialism.