Taste Aversion

Taste Aversion

Conditioned taste aversion, also known as Garcia effect (after Dr. John Garcia), and as "Sauce-Bearnaise Syndrome", a term coined by Seligman and Hager, is an example of classical conditioning or Pavlovian conditioning. Conditioned taste aversion occurs when a subject associates the taste of a certain food with symptoms caused by a toxic, spoiled, or poisonous substance. Generally, taste aversion is caused after ingestion of the food causes nausea, sickness, or vomiting. The ability to develop a taste aversion is considered an adaptive trait or survival mechanism that trains the body to avoid poisonous substances (e.g., poisonous berries) before they can cause harm. This association is meant to prevent the consumption of the same substance (or something that tastes similar) in the future, thus avoiding further poisoning. However, conditioned taste aversion sometimes occurs in subjects when sickness was merely coincidental and not related to the food (for example, a subject who gets a cold or the flu shortly after eating bananas might develop an aversion to the taste of bananas).