These words were favourites of my house master, back in the days when I was at boarding school, whenever he spotted some unlucky pupil who wouldn’t eat part of his school meal.

Given the generally low standard of food – they could even mess up the simplest of meals – then these words were heard quite often, and they were, I have to confess, directed at me on more than one occasion too.

I always did resent this phrase, as it had struck me from an early age that there were some foods that I simply did not like for reasons I couldn’t explain.

I’ve often wondered, since then, why some people enjoy certain flavours and textures of food and others don’t, as we all come equipped with the same basic tools and senses.

However, what got me thinking about this again much more recently was shortly after I moved to America, and acquired, as part of my new family, several dogs.

These dogs have wildly different characters, and yet they are just that – dogs. So, there are no human psychological issues, no baggage from environmental backgrounds and upbringing, no rights and wrongs, no knowledge of where the food has come from or what it should like or smell or taste like, and yet some of our dogs like certain foods and some don’t.

For example, one of our dogs is, how shall I put this, highly food-motivated. He eats practically anything (at lightning speed, too), but there are some foods that he just won’t touch. They’re rare, to be sure, but he won’t go near anything that smells of mint, and he spits apples out with a vengeance.

On the other hand, another of our dogs loves almost all fruit, and has a love/hate relationship with oatmeal, which is their standard fare when we cook them their own meal – some days she wolfs it down, and other she won’t go near it.

And then we have a female Chihuahua who is very picky and won’t touch any fruit at all, and most cakes, breads and cookies.

All of this leads me to the conclusion that our, and dogs’, likes and dislikes when it comes to food are chemically-based, and not the result of some psychological preferences or food faddishness.

There seems to be something in certain foods, whether that be the taste or the texture or, in some cases, the colour (almost nobody can face food coloured blue that is not normally that colour), that reacts with our body’s chemistry and sends signals to our brain that says “this food is bad” or “this food isn’t for me”.

However, I’ve no idea why this should be, what evolutionary advantage is conferred by these differences, if any, and what can be done about it.