system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: How does our brain decide what foods we like or dislike?
gpt
A large part of it is genetic. Before we started manipulating flavors with cooking, selective breeding, and modern science, things that taste good tend to be good to eat, and things that taste bad are tended to be bad to eat. Just as a result of evolutionary pressure. If someone ended up with a mutation that made them think, say, spoiled food smelled delicious they're probably not gonna last too long.

Then you have things like acquired tastes, where something might taste bad at first but begins to become a preference later. Or if you grow up eating it from a young age. Which is useful because clearly whatever you are eating hasn't killed you yet/has kept you alive, and is probably worth continuing to eat even when you have other options. And if you feed it to your kids they pick up that acquired taste and pass it to their kids and so on.