When babies start eating solid foods, they can engage all their senses! Watching your little one experience food flavors, textures, fragrances, presentations, and sounds for the first time can bring incredible joy. So have fun, and enjoy observing your baby taking it all in. (Tip: Seeing the royal food mess as part of your child’s sensory learning process can take the edge off the perpetual cleanup process.)

Some food for thought

In your excitement or rush to help your baby experience solid foods for the first time, it’s great to take on a patient mind-set. You’ll want to balance the process of respecting your baby’s readiness to try new foods with your eagerness to introduce them. 

As we explore the senses, you might think about all the different ways a baby can try food and create memories. Every meal can present a fresh exposure (and thus learning experience), from new spices or ingredients, to new combinations. 

A new cooking method or even presentation can also impact the taste, sound, sight, and feel of various ingredients, changing your baby’s eating experience in small and large ways. Any way you look at it, there’s a lot of learning going on when it comes to introducing solids. 

Taste

There are five main categories of taste: sweet, sour, bitter, salty, and savory (umami). The next time you take a bite of food, think about how the flavors, combined with the temperature, play on your tongue. There is a lot happening, and for your baby—even after tasting various flavors in utero and through your breast milk¹—each new food will present a new experience

Our tongues have about 10,000 taste buds, living on tiny bumps called papillae. How we each experience taste is different: You might have a friend who can eat hot peppers with no problem, while you can’t even lick one. 

An estimated 25 percent to 30 percent of people are “supertasters” who have about 16 times as many taste buds—and experience taste much more intensely than the rest of us. If your child takes more time to get used to new foods, or is a little more particular than a sibling or other children, you might have a supertaster on your hands. If so, be patient. 

“The process can create a bit of a sensory overload experience for these types of tasters, so taking new foods slowly, and introducing them over and over again, will be helpful,” Dr. Panchal says.

Sight

Chefs know that we eat with our eyes first—it’s why good ones put so much thought and energy into presentation. You don’t need to make the food look like a work of art (that’s your call!), but keep in mind that your baby is seeing these foods for the first time. 

Other aspects of presentation are under your control too. There is some research indicating that a child is more likely to eat something if you present it with a smile². Try it. Adults love smiles and good-looking food, so why wouldn’t your baby?

Touch

Babies tend to explore food with touch just as much as sight. In addition to taste buds, we also have lots of nerves in our mouths—not to mention on our fingertips! Your baby will explore the foods you serve, doing things like grasping or squishing them to understand more about their texture. A piece of banana will feel different than a piece of cheese or a piece of avocado toast. Embrace the messes; they’re part of the process. 

Sound

Everyone can hear themselves chew, including babies learning how to use their brand-new teeth. As they learn how to chew harder foods, babies can hear things snap and crunch in their mouths. They register the differences in chewing sounds between every new food they try. 

Smell

Smell is incredibly powerful: Just think of the aroma of homemade chocolate-chip cookies or a roasted chicken³. Some believe the links among smell, emotion, and memory stems from the closeness between our amygdala, the emotional center of the brain, and the hippocampus, the brain’s memory center⁴. And it’s become common knowledge—especially in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic—that smell and taste are very closely tied! Luckily, babies have a strong sense of smell, which can help them engage with new foods. 

Those are the five senses with which we are most familiar, but Nimalil Fernando and Melanie Potock talk about two other sensory experiences in their book Raising a Healthy, Happy Eater⁵:

Balance

The vestibular system is for balance. For babies to really be ready to try solids, they must be able to sit properly and support themselves.

Body awareness

The proprioceptive system manages our body awareness, which basically means that we know where our body is in space. As an adult, this enables you to engage in complex physical activities and movements. And as a baby, it helps you understand that you can bring your hand to your mouth, a basic self-feeding skill.

Bottom line: Sensory experiences create memories

When babies have an early experience with a type of food, they are more likely to prefer that food months and years down the road. Exposures lead to sense memories. Pretty cool, huh?