At my family’s table, Midwest meatloaf, Bengali dal, South Asian dumplings and Tunisian couscous are all in rotation. These are the foods of our history: they run through the places we’ve lived, the family kitchens we remember, and the stories of what has sustained us. It’s taken years to accumulate these favourites, but now we make them time and again.

Chances are, at mealtime, you hunt for the usual suspects too – familiar foods, favourite flavours. Many of us have default settings when we’re grocery shopping, choosing a place to eat, or scanning a restaurant menu. If you find yourself eating the same foods over and over again, you are not alone. Busy schedules and the comfort of the known can fix certain eating habits in place. But if you have an interest in broadening what you eat – and expanding the joy and novelty you find at meals in the process – you are in luck. Expanding your palate is something that anyone can learn, practise and enjoy.

Being a more adventurous eater is about more than just getting novel foods on your plate or going to a different restaurant for a change. It can mean developing a new relationship with food. You might begin to notice the intrigue of unfamiliar flavours in a way that you haven’t for a long time. You might find new richness in the stories behind ingredients or dishes. Eating a wider variety of foods can also give your body greater access to micronutrients, expose you to different cooking techniques, open up fascinating knowledge of the foodways of other cultures, and offer new chances for connection and warm conversation over food. You can change a little and gain a lot. Doing even one or two of the steps in this Guide will help you refresh your cache of food experiences, whether you like to cook at home, dine out, or both.

It’s never too late to discover new favourites

Our diets and taste preferences are shaped by many factors: upbringing, gender, ethnicity, the types of foods we are exposed to early in life. People seem to be programmed to grow fond of foods that they taste often. We all have our preferences. And yet, there is always room for novelty – any of us can grow our interest in new ingredients and cuisines, and adopt new personal staples. In my own adventures in the world of food, including a career spent writing about food and working on international food projects, I have found that, when you do expose yourself to new foods, your palate becomes more diverse and accepting of different flavours.

For me, one such exposure happened when I was in the Peace Corps in Tunisia, back in 1984. Food is deeply linked to cultural pride, generosity and identity, and I knew that my first dinner with a sweet, economically impoverished family in the area was a wonderful gift. It was also fraught with the possibility for offence.

A large bowl of red-tinted, aromatic couscous sat between us in the middle of the table, and a small, gnarled piece of meat was pushed to my side. I took a bite, made some humming noises to indicate that I liked the taste – but I had a problem. The food was so fiery and biting that I thought my throat might be swelling shut. The family watched my face closely. I managed to swallow, then smile, and the meal went on.

After that day, though, I found myself eating the intensely spiced couscous often. Soon, I could discern the coriander and caraway under the heat. I even started looking forward to the peppery impact. In the kitchens of the women in my area, I also learned how to roll the semolina to make fat grains, how to steam couscous, not boil it, and how pouring a little of the fiery sauce into it gave the couscous its distinctive pale red colour. When I came back to the United States, I made a version of the couscous for my own family members – reminding my mother to ‘try everything at least once’, a phrase she’d used in my childhood. Today, it’s a go-to at my home when we want a quick, delicious and aromatic meal. (Though I’ve reduced the amount of cayenne pepper!)

With this story in mind, give yourself the chance to have your own novel experiences and try the recommendations that follow. It could open new and unexpected pathways on your lifelong journey with food.

Prepare to eat mindfully

As you set out to become a more adventurous eater, there are a few things you can do to enrich your experience with any kind of food. The key to this is to eat mindfully – to slow down enough, and be present enough, to really taste what you are eating. Here are some general tips to return to as you try out new ingredients or dishes:

• Open your mind. We each bring our distinct minds and their attached memories with us to the table. These have a major impact on how you perceive a new food. If you recall positive experiences sitting with a beloved relative when rhubarb pie was served, you will likely enjoy that flavour now. When trying an unfamiliar food that you are less intuitively drawn to, it might be useful to imagine that it has been offered to you by a beloved person in your life. Can you picture the generosity in their eyes as they pass you the plate? If you can, it’s easier to receive the new food with pleasure, setting aside judgment. Another way to overcome your preconceptions is to take a bite and simply consider the flavour – whether it is satisfying, not satisfying, or if you’re indifferent. Just note this, then take another bite. It can sometimes take a dozen or more tastes of a new food for young children to begin to like the flavour. It may take less time for adults, but give your tastebuds a chance.
• Be fully attentive to your food. This means focusing on what you are doing as you select, prepare and serve food, as well as when you’re about to eat. One trick for preparing yourself is to breathe in and out slowly three times before taking the first bite.
• Eat slowly and savour each bite. Take time to chew thoroughly and appreciate the sensory elements of your food. Be curious: what exactly is the texture of this food like? What is the taste like? Can you describe it to yourself? Is it like other foods you enjoy? You can take this reflection further, if you’d like, by writing down your perceptions of the aroma, taste and texture. (Note the sound, too, if relevant: think of sizzling meats over the grill or the crunch of potato chips.) If you sample the new food repeatedly over time, see if your experience is the same after the third try, or after the 10th.

Enhancing your ability to note sensory details is a delightful practice that can motivate more food exploration. Though some foods may not appeal, it can still be intriguing to note why that is so – was it the taste, the texture, the smell? Did it surprise you? Did it bring up a memory you’d rather avoid? How intriguing to know these details about yourself. For the novel foods that do appeal, they’ll be all the more rewarding when you let the details really sink in.

Consider what flavours you already like

In seeking out novel food, it’s often helpful to start with what you already like. Recognising these likes, you can branch out from there to identify other foods with a similar profile. For instance:

• If you find lemonade delicious, with its tart-sour flavour, you might like rhubarb and strawberry pie or sour cherry pie – desserts that are described in similar terms.
• If you enjoy milky coffee or tea for its full, round mouthfeel (without the bite of bitterness), you may also enjoy buttery sauces, shortbreads and the like.
• If the umami or savoury taste of meat is satisfying in the way it stimulates the roof and back of your mouth and makes you salivate, you might try different types of mushrooms, grilled or made into delectable sauces, to get that same savoury fullness.
• If the tomato sauce in pasta is appealing, with its acidity and sweetness, roasted red bell peppers (capsicums) or roasted carrots offer a similar sweetness profile – especially when blended with a little vinegar in a salad, for instance, to mimic the acidity of tomatoes.

Take some time to contemplate and perhaps even write down some of your favourite flavours, and keep these in mind to help orient you as you seek out new ingredients and dishes.

Pick a new cuisine to explore

Have you always heard positive things or felt curious about a certain culture’s food, but never got around to trying it? This method of trying new foods not only exposes you to cultures less known to you, but is also one of the fastest ways to expand your food world. How about Thailand and its culture? Or Morocco, Peru, or someplace else? Look up some of the classics of that country’s cuisine and pick out a dish you’d like to sample. If you cook at home, this gives you an opportunity to try making something new; you might even learn new cooking techniques in the process. Or, outside the home, see if you can find one or more restaurants that serve food from the country you pick, and sample an array of options there.

If you don’t like the first dish of a newly tried cuisine, sample another with a different base sauce. If you find that, even then, it’s not for you, it’s OK to move on – though circling back to see if your taste has shifted after a few months might yield another result.

You can also go to your local library and check out a cookbook featuring dishes that pique your interest. If you are unfamiliar with Thai food, but you’re intrigued by what you see, you could try out a restaurant first, then pull an ingredient such as coconut milk into your kitchen, along with some rice noodles and red curry paste, scallions and shrimp… Open up that book and you might be surprised by how manageable some recipes can be.

Food is closely entwined with cultural identity, influenced by local ingredients, climate, history, religion and more. For example, the use of spices in my home culture, India, reflects the ancient use of food as medicine and the lush environment that the herbs and spices thrived in. Peruvian food showcases Indigenous, Spanish, African and Asian influences, as well as the abundance of the rainforest. You learn a lot about what’s important to each country – in addition to what its land is like, whether it has a rich fishing or dairying heritage, and more – through its foodways. If you’re liking a particular cuisine, consider reading an article about the history of a popular dish from that cuisine or picking up a book about that culture’s food to give you more insight.

Experiment with new ingredients

When grocery shopping, rather than sticking to your usual stops, wheel over to items you typically bypass. Trying out new ingredients is another way to add more adventure to your routine, whether it means tweaking familiar favourite recipes or trying something that seems radically different. It also opens up new pathways for exploration, as finding more ingredients or combinations that you enjoy will encourage you to try dishes that you otherwise might have skipped.

Here are some examples of how you might shake up the ingredients you use at home:

• Add soothing pumpkin or tart rhubarb to pancakes.
• Use sweet potato for pies or muffins.
• Cook with marinated tofu or jackfruit in place of meat.
• Try out couscous, quinoa or cassava instead of rice or potatoes.

Another option: if you’re out at a restaurant and scanning a menu, pick a dish that uses an ingredient that you don’t usually eat.

You can also facilitate your food adventures by stocking up on herbs and spices. Having seasonings from different cuisines on hand makes it easier to try their foods, and reduces your use of processed sauces. If you never eat foods with cardamom, for instance, you might pick up some and try out a recipe that includes it. While you’re at it, you can add other spices used in Indian cuisine, such as turmeric, coriander, cumin, mustard seeds, cloves and cinnamon sticks. If you are expanding into Korean flavours, you’d want to stock up on red pepper (chilli) flakes, ganjang (Korean soy sauce), fermented soybean paste, fermented red pepper paste, and sesame seeds and oil. Keeping a good stock of herbs and spices sets the stage for food adventure, and packs more flavour and health benefits into what you eat.

Growing your own food is another way to get excited about ingredients you don’t typically use. If you think this is the suggestion you can’t manage, start with intriguing-to-you herbs in pots, such as thyme or sage or basil or rosemary. With success, a vegetable garden may be in your future. When you’ve tended something and watched it grow, trying it out with a meal is all the more satisfying. My gateway vegetable was kohlrabi. It grew in my garden with such zeal that I became a forever fan. Now I grow it where I can – in the middle of my flower bed, in a pot, anywhere. Its mild taste and turnip-like texture make it a wonderful substitute for potatoes. I like it pan-fried with cumin and other Bengali spices. It’s great in soups. I learned from a food-adventurous friend that she grates it into a slaw. I am still finding all the ways it is delightful. Pick a vegetable or herb that speaks to your curiosity, and give it a try.

Eat different versions of new foods

Let’s say you don’t usually eat olives, and you’ve decided to try them as part of your food exploration. Why stop at the first kind of olives you get? You could start with the green olives called Manzanilla, stuffed with pimento, that are common in most grocery stores; then try Greek Kalamata purple-black ones, or the apple-green-hued Castelvetrano olives from Sicily. You might eat a few every day, and work back around to the Manzanilla olives. When you return to where you started, ask yourself: has your perception of the flavour changed? Similarly, you could try eating the same vegetable in various ways – fried, stewed, sautéed – and see how your perception shifts as you go through the different versions. Perhaps stewed tomatoes are unappealing to you, but sun-dried tomatoes on toasted crostini might score five stars.

Try different versions of the dishes you discover, too. In the same way that, say, not all cheese pizzas are alike – the type of cheese might vary, the crust might be thick or thin, it may have a spicy tomato sauce or a pesto one – recipes for dishes in the unfamiliar cuisines you try will vary, and restaurants will create their own spin. Sample several to see which versions suit your palate.

Trying out different versions of foods can be very useful if you have an aversion to certain food attributes, such as textures. If you dislike gelatinous foods, for instance, there are ways to prepare a food that will eliminate that texture. Battered, fried okra eliminates the stringy texture that okra sometimes has in soup and the Cajun stew gumbo. Patting the okra dry before cutting it, or soaking it in lemon, can also help with this. If you dislike the texture of cooked spinach or other greens, you can try incorporating them into soups instead. And if mushrooms are trying for you, they grind up well for use in delicious sauces.

Connect with others who love food

Is there a local-produce market near you? Seek out a farmer and ask them which vegetables are best this week, and why. If you have the opportunity to speak with a chef, perhaps when visiting a small restaurant, ask them about when and why they choose the ingredients they do. Ask them about a particular ingredient: do they have a picture in their mind of the perfect dish that one could make with it? Ask a food-adventurous friend what their favourite combinations of ingredients and dishes are, and what they know of the origins of their favourite recipes.

Conversations such as these allow you to learn more about the origins of foods and people’s favourite ways of preparing them, and they might help you replicate those methods at home. These conversations also have a way of revealing warm details about the life of the person you are speaking with. When you taste the food in the future, the memory of those conversations – the care of the farmer, the vision of the chef, the excitement of your friend – will help you see the story behind the food on your plate: not just its ingredients, but also the people who grow it, cook with it, or choose to eat it.

I once asked a chef about his blackberry-based dessert and I received a story about his grandmother, a bucket that hit his leg as he walked, and the hot sun on the day he picked them with her in Louisiana as a child. He was creating a dish, but also recreating a memory. Suddenly, the flavour of the sauce meant much more than immediate, lip-smacking gratification or how much I personally liked blackberries. I was with him among the brambles, with a clunking bucket in my hand.

Food stories can reveal a world of unseen labour, in fields and transportation, and the many cooks in kitchens across the world and through time who have created the tastes of their home. Knowing more about the story of a food enriches every bite.

As you connect more with people about new foods, you could even start your own adventurous-dining club. Invite a friend, or a group of friends, to join you on a step-by-step ‘journey around the world’ at eateries in your area. Try out new flavours together, and watch the connection and conversations grow.

The act of opening up to new foods is your first big step and, from there, as you can see, there are many ways to become a more adventurous eater. Perhaps the best advice I’ve ever received, however, was my mother’s, or maybe it first came to me from Dr Seuss’s Green Eggs and Ham: just give new foods a chance.

Whether curiosity about an ingredient’s or dish’s backstory prompts you to learn about its history in particular cultures, how it ended up on your plate, or why the chef prepared it in such a way, it all adds up to heightened interest in new foods and, often, receptiveness to their tastes.

Tasting a seafood stew one day at a table full of family in Bengal, India, I marvelled at its fresh taste and the crispiness of the greens, and realised I had never had Indian food like that in the US. It ultimately led me to a greater understanding of the alluvial plains of Bengal, the many rivers, and the absolute love of freshwater fish and light textures in the culture there. I went to fish markets, cooked some small bony fishes in mustard sauce, cooked a large white fish with a steak-like texture and cut it into stew. I also learned that the foods of Bengal were held close to the vest under colonialism, a kind of kitchen resistance that, even today, means you don’t often find those favourite dishes in restaurants. That one meal led to an entire year of research and my book Green Chili and Other Impostors (2021), which explores the rich heritage flavours of Bengal, and traces those tastes back to the source.

If you are beginning to think that, whenever I taste a new-to-me flavour, I am compelled to uncover its story, you may be correct. Another project started when I became curious about how a classic treat of the US Midwest – crispy rice cereal sweetened with marshmallow cream and peanut butter – came to appear at scouting meetings, little league games and coffee-shop counters across the country. The version made with an added chocolate layer, called scotcheroos, often gets swoony responses, particularly in the Upper Midwest. The full story, which appears in a podcast I created with the Missouri School of Journalism, follows rice from paddies and street foods and family dinners in Asia to treats in the US, and involves African farm knowledge, a World’s Fair puffing gun, and an early Camp Fire Girls campaign.

If you’ve never had a scotcheroo and want to try the chewy, crispy sweet treat yourself, give this recipe a shot – one more low-key way to explore something new.

Peanut butter scotcheroos
Makes about 20 squares

1 cup honey
½ cup granulated sugar
1 cup creamy peanut butter
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
6 cups crispy rice cereal
1 cup semi-sweet or bittersweet baking chocolate
1 cup butterscotch morsels
1 tablespoon butter

Line a 9 x 13 inch (23 x 33 cm) baking pan with parchment paper and set aside. In a large saucepan, combine honey and sugar and bring to an easy simmer – not a hard boil – over medium heat. After one minute, remove from heat and stir in the peanut butter and vanilla. Stir in the crispy rice cereal until coated. The mixture will be stiff. Transfer the mixture to the baking pan and spread with a spatula. Gently press the mixture into the pan, but do not pack it down.

In a small saucepan, combine the chocolate, butterscotch and butter. Heat and stir over medium heat until melted. Spread the mixture over the bars.

Cover and refrigerate for two hours and up to two days. Cut into squares. Store scotcheroos at room temperature for up to three days or in the refrigerator for up to a week. Best eaten immediately.

To learn more about training yourself to like different foods – and what a supertaster is – check out this brief article from BBC Food: ‘Can You Train Yourself to Like Foods You Hate?’

My book Biting Through the Skin: An Indian Kitchen in America’s Heartland (2013) explores cultural connections to Indian food in the US Midwest. It includes more than 50 easy and authentic family recipes and the stories behind them.

For an extensive demonstration of the many tasty ways you can eat a single ingredient – sweet and tart, in drinks, desserts or savoury mains – check out my book The Pocket Rhubarb Cookbook (2025).

I explore people’s interconnections through food in the podcast Canned Peaches. Its title is a tribute to how the delectable Asian peach, and other beloved flavours, came to be in kitchens across the US.

If you’d like to help your children be more adventurous eaters too, you can read the book Raising Adventurous Eaters (2022) by Lara Dato, or the article ‘6 Ways to Encourage Kids to Be Adventurous Eaters’ (2025) by Vanessa Grant in the magazine Today’s Parent.

Two previous Psyche Guides can help you expand your gustatory world on other fronts: Jessica Easto’s Guide on ‘How to Enjoy Coffee’ (2020) and Natasha Hughes’s Guide on ‘How to Choose a Bottle of Wine’ (2020).