How does that pertain to food preferences? Well, I don't know if childhood exposure is good, bad, or indifferent. Maybe it affects some more than others. I knew a guy who had the most wildly eclectic palate, and when I asked about his upbringing, I was surprised to learn he was raised on the blandest of diets.
I've know people the opposite (my brother, for a start)- they eat very limited foods, and they'll say it's because that's what they were raised with and that's what they like.
Mountain Cat is like the opposite of that - was raised with lots of choice and still embraces that. Is her openness today because of her experiences as a child? If she'd gone the other way, would we say, "Oh, she hates offal now because she had to eat it as a kid?"
Personally, I think it's a fascinating thing, and it's about a lot more than our food preferences. It goes, really, right down to how we experience the world around us, and how we relate to it.
My parents are fairly old-school racists. So are a couple of my siblings. A couple of us, however, are as much turned the opposite as possible, so what gives? We were all exposed to the same language, same ideas, raised in the same house, same school, yet the oldest and youngest are the two most tolerant, and the ones in the middle are the least. Interesting, huh?
Back to food...for the record, I'm somewhere in the middle. While I don't feel my diet as a kid was limited, in that we had beef, chicken, pork, potatoes, onions, carrots, cabbage, beans, tomatoes, turnips, radishes, celery, plums, apples, pears, cherries, berries, and a host of other "common" items, it certainly didn't encompass anything other than a blend of American Midwest and American South diets, and really a subset of those. No Chinese. No Italian. No Greek, Middle East, Mexican, etc. Now, I happily eat dishes from all those cuisines. You know how I am with my pizza - I didn't have a proper pizza restaurant pizza until I was 19. Do I love pizza because I missed out? I don't know. I love pork chops and I ate a ton of those growing up.
Consider this - we generally assume each generation is a little more worldly than the one before. I know it works that way in my family. I eat more things than my dad would ever consider. My mom will at least try something, but odds are, if it's not from that list above, she won't like it. They both absolutely abhor garlic. I love it and double the garlic in any recipe it calls for.
So I eat more things than my dad, I travel more than he ever did, etc. So his dad must have been even worse, or at least the same, right?
Wrong. Grandad would eat just about anything. Born and raised in central Kentucky in 1910 or thereabouts, farmers, fed themselves. When he retired and started to travel a bit, went to Florida, he couldn't get enough seafood. He probably never had a shrimp or lobster or a scallop until he was 62, but once he did, he loved it all.
I think it mainly just comes down to the mix of chemicals in our brains that make us each the individuals that we are: one person will react to something differently than someone else will react to exactly the same thing.
In the end, though, I don't care one way or the other...I eat what I like!
