Why Michael Symon And Alex Guarnaschelli Are Adventurous Eaters Today

While the more comfortable approach to eating might involve never straying far from tried-and-true favorites, you can train your taste buds and learn to appreciate trying some very unconventional foods. The Unconventional Route points out that your sense of smell and even your age can affect the way your meals taste, meaning the same food might not taste the same to different people (or even to the same person over time). Forklift & Palate recommends that anyone looking to expand the range of food they enjoy should cut down on sugar (which the site says makes a palate less sensitive), try new meals and spices, and make sure to slow down when eating.

Experiencing new tastes and aromas can give you a greater appreciation for new flavors over time. But do chefs have to go through this process on their journeys to becoming culinary pros, or were they born with it? It might be easy to imagine that they have an innate ability to appreciate the finer points of every dish, but as Michael Symon and Alex Guarnaschelli show, even chefs have their own stories of how they learned to love trying new foods.

On Twitter, user Teresa Umbarger posed a question to chefs Michael Symon, Alex Guarnaschelli, and Bobby Flay. Noting their own limited exposure to different foods as a kid and dislike of variety in adulthood, Umbarger wanted to know how the chefs came to embrace variety. Did they learn to do it in culinary school or beforehand? Symon tweeted, "I've always tried everything." This wasn't necessarily the way he always wanted it, though. The chef explained, that there "wasn't option for us as kids .. which helped make me@an adventurous eater." Nowadays, he'll try any food. In 2017, Symon told Philly Mag, "I've eaten everything at some point in my life. I've eaten balut, which is gross and horrible. Testicles. Ants. Bugs. That snake urine thing." And if a food disagrees with him, he'll just avoid it in the future. 

In her Twitter reply, Guarnaschelli said that for quite some time, she loved a good cheeseburger and didn't want to eat anything else. She explained that going to culinary school allowed her to try new food and getting older encouraged her to experiment with new flavors. So in that sense, being a student of life helped develop her palate. Though judging from this demonstration shared by the Food Network (via YouTube), Guarnaschelli still enjoys a good cheeseburger.