Butterscotch September
I’ve recently developed a taste for toffee, eating a lot of Heath and Skor bars, about six over the past two months. (For me, that’s a lot.) I find that, the older I get, the more I enjoy toffee, caramel, and butterscotch, candies I had always associated with old people, largely because both my Grandpas, but especially Grandpa Roth, liked butterscotch.
My developing taste for toffee surprises me. Not because it implies I’m getting old—I know I’m getting old. But I never ranked butter candies particularly high, and never expected that taste to change significantly with age.
Other foods have shifted a bit in my appraisal. This is not surprising; it’s nearly a universal. As we age, and our taste buds become less sensitive, we grow more tolerant of strong foods (although our guts ironically become less tolerant at the same time). Especially, we grow more tolerant of sour and bitter flavors; coffee is a grown-up taste, as are grapefruit. Alcohol takes some getting used to, and we appreciate vegetables a lot more. In a similar vein, we grow less interested in sweets. Many sweets, and especially sweetened cereals, I enjoyed as a kid nauseate me now. Bubblicious is simply vile. There’s also a tolerance for familiarity; we are hard-wired not to experiment with foods as children, because a reluctance to eat something in the ages between learning to stuff dangerous things in our mouths and learning what’s safe has survival value. Two-year-olds, especially, have a crazy aversion to strange changes in their food: cut the sandwich vertically instead of diagonally, and it’s inedible. This is the result of a particularly strong aversion to food novelty when children, first leaving Mom’s watchful eye for minutes at a time, need it most. Later, we learn to experiment, and to appreciate novelty for its own sake.
So I’m not surprised to discover my taste in candy is changing. But why on earth butterscotch and toffee?