T is for Taste

Preference is learned. It is built from repetition, context, and association, which is why the food of your childhood tastes like comfort and why the same dish can be beloved in one country and refused in another.

Highly processed food is engineered to sit at the exact intersection of salt, fat, sugar, and texture that overwhelms ordinary food. After a long enough run of it, a plain vegetable genuinely does taste like nothing. That is not a character defect — it is a recalibrated baseline.

The good news is that the recalibration reverses. Give it a few weeks of lower intensity and real food starts tasting like something again. Cooking accelerates this enormously, because it puts you in charge of the salt, the fat, and the sweetness.