Why we need to re-wild our taste buds

I used to have a brilliant history teacher who’d turn dry facts into something special, but I'll never forget the day she completely lost it with our class over food. I forget the context but when we all chorused that our favourite foods were chips, pizza & ice cream she flipped. The ten-minute passion-rant that followed was about tomatoes: their colour, their tang and their sheer deliciousness. It was quite funny really, and we of course just rolled our eyes, but something stuck with me…

If you stop and think about the humble tomato, it’s a sensory marvel: bright red, smooth, perfectly spherical, tangy and juicy in every bite.

So how did we get to a place where this natural wonder barely registers, while chips still get a standing ovation?

Tomatoes - a sensory marvel AND I grew these ones. Proud!

Once upon a time, a tomato, a handful of berries, or a find of honey would have felt like winning the lottery. For our hunter-gatherer ancestors, these foods weren’t just tasty, they were rare, exciting, and life-sustaining. But today, our instincts have been hacked. Big Food offers up engineered alternatives that overwhelm our senses, making nature’s jackpots seem ordinary at best.

Our taste buds, in other words, have been numbed. What we need now is to rewild them. And the earlier we start, the better.

Once upon a time… more than just a tasty sensation.

For most of human history, our taste buds were finely tuned survival tools. Sweetness meant energy. Sourness often signalled freshness. Bitterness warned us of toxins but, in the right doses, also pointed us toward protective plant compounds. Salt was precious - a clue to vital electrolytes. Every flavour had a purpose, and we craved what our bodies sought.

Fast forward to today, and our taste buds are swimming in a very different landscape. Supermarkets line their shelves with foods designed to hit our brain’s reward systems harder than nature ever could. Sweetness is no longer rare, it’s everywhere. Salt isn’t precious, it’s cheap. Flavours and textures are turned up to full volume, layered, engineered, and blended to be irresistible.

The result? What once felt like an extraordinary find - that juicy tomato and fresh berry, now barely register. Our senses, once wild and sharp, have been domesticated. It’s as if they have been trained to chase fireworks all the time: we want ‘wow’.

The case for re-wilding

When I talk about re-wilding taste buds, I mean restoring them to their natural role where they can guide us toward real nourishment and not just excitement. The good news is that they’re not broken, they’re just out of practice, and given the chance, they can adapt back. The body is remarkably good at recalibration over time.

Where to start?

As adults we need to learn to enjoy subtler flavours again, eating more mindfully to notice the sweetness of a carrot without needing the hit of a fizzy drink. Even that tomato gets a shout out, especially when paired with other great flavours. This is all possible, but it takes patience and persistence. Our food environment isn’t going to limit the supply of the easy hits we’ve grown to love, so there’s a challenge here for all of us, but small gestures add up.

Ah, the humble apple! Great on its own or in a pie. Oh, and a great kids' snack pot: crudités, pickles and cheese - so tangy but all natural and super-wholesome.

For children, the opportunity is huge. Their palates are still flexible and their preferences still forming. Early exposure to varied, natural flavours such as the sourness of rhubarb, the bitterness of greens and the earthiness of mushrooms can set the stage for a lifetime of adventurous, balanced eating. Inevitably it’ll come with its challenges, but the big message here is that it’s easier to build strong, adaptable taste buds from the start than it is to retrain ones that have spent decades in sensory overdrive.

Rewilding (or just wilding) tastebuds matters in childhood. It’s not just about encouraging kids to “eat their veg.” It’s about protecting their natural instincts before those instincts are dulled, overwritten, and reshaped by foods designed to hack them.

Why It Matters – beyond the flavours

Rewilding isn’t just about rediscovering the joy of natural flavours. It’s much bigger than that. Our sense of taste evolved to signpost us towards good nourishment because each flavour combination defines something our bodies need.

Natural foods still have plenty of flavour, but it's more than that. A natural flavour in its whole form is a signpost to a nutrient combination. Flavour without the food hacks our senses.

• Sweetness once signalled energy. The source was fruit and occasionally honey, naturally packaged with fibre, vitamins, and antioxidants that slowed release and protected health.

• Bitterness could be a warning sign, but in plants it often pointed us toward powerful protective compounds. We’re talking about polyphenols in dark greens, or antioxidants in cocoa.

• Umami helped us detect protein, our essential building blocks for growth and repair.

• Sourness hinted at freshness and fermentation, often marking safe-to-eat foods rich in probiotics.

In a natural setting, these signals kept us balanced. But today, our instincts are being constantly misled. Sweetness without fibre. Salt without minerals. Flavour cranked up without the nutrition to match.

Our taste buds scream “jackpot” when what we’ve really hit is a hollow promise, and when our bodies spot the deficiency, they just crave more... and we eat more.

Hello weight gain.

Rewilding is about tuning the signals back into truth. If we relearn to enjoy the tang of a tomato, the bitterness of rocket, or the natural sweetness of an apple, we’re broadening our palate and allowing our biology to steer us back toward foods that serve rather than drain us.

But it’s not easy. Our environment isn’t going to change any time soon. We can’t un-invent the potent foods that shout at us, and they’re not leaving the supermarkets any time soon. For now a little awareness is a tool to begin a journey, and the knowledge that even small dietary changes mount up.

Flavour everywhere! But the one on the right brings all the benefits.

Where to Start? Small and practical

Re-wilding taste buds doesn’t happen overnight. Small, consistent steps make the biggest difference, and our bodies are wired to adapt more quickly than we think.

• Start with noticing. Pause with a piece of fruit or a simple vegetable and really taste it — the crunch of an apple, the tang of a berry, the sweetness in a roasted carrot. Awareness alone begins to shift what we value.

 

• Turn down the volume. If we’re constantly blasting our taste buds with sugar, salt, and artificial flavourings, real food will seem flat in comparison. Gradually reducing extremes gives subtler flavours the chance to shine. Yes, we are talking UPF here.

 

• Play with variety. For kids especially, turn it into a game. Try something sour, something bitter, something earthy, something tangy. Curiosity builds confidence.

 

• Repeat, repeat, repeat. New tastes can take time to win us over. Children often need a food offered a dozen times before it’s accepted. Adults can also grow into flavours with persistence. Think of how many people only start liking coffee or dark chocolate after repeated exposure. Olives are another example… once you remove the inside voice that they taste of seawater they can become quite a hit.

 

• Make it joyful. Rewilding isn’t about cutting out pleasure; it’s about rediscovering it in places we’ve forgotten to look. Herbs, spices, texture and freshness all bring as much satisfaction as engineered flavour, once our senses catch up.

  
  

The key is patience. Every small experiment helps reset the baseline, so that over time, “ordinary” foods stop seeming so ordinary.

A vision for re-wilded taste buds

I often think back to that history lesson and my teacher’s exasperated ode to the tomato. We all laughed at the time but now I see how sad it is to live in a world where a tomato no longer feels exciting.

Re-wilding our taste buds isn’t about saying no to chips forever. It’s about saying yes to rediscovering the magic of real food, and understanding why it matters.  

As a parent it’s about giving children the chance to grow up with palates that can delight in berries, vegetables, herbs, and grains, and not just blaze in the neon lights of Big Food.

Imagine a generation for whom a tomato does get a standing ovation. Where natural sweetness is enough. Where variety isn’t a chore but an adventure, and where the benefits are truly felt,

Realistically this is still more of a dream than a reality. The humble whole foods have been backed into a dark corner by big brands, but it doesn’t make it right.

It's hard for many of us, but small efforts are rewarded, and every vote for a whole food over a synthetic one is a step in the right direction.

The rewards? That’s the real win. They might not be as immediate as the sugar rush or salty hit, but they’re deeper, longer-lasting, and far more powerful. Good food is the epicentre of our health, energy, joy and resilience. It isn’t an obvious transaction, but those rewards are always there for the taking, and worth it at any age. So maybe it’s time we all gave the humble tomato another look.