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Grognor comments on Adaptation-Executers, not Fitness-Maximizers - Less Wrong
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A long time ago I read a newspaper article which claimed that a Harvard psychological research project had women chew up chocolate and spit it out, while looking in a mirror and connected to some sort of electrodes. They claimed that after that the women didn't like chocolate much.
I tried it without the electrodes. I got a 2 pound bag of M&Ms. I usually didn't buy M&Ms because no matter how many I got they'd be gone in a couple of days. I started chewing them and spitting them out. Every now and then I'd rinse out my mouth with water and the flavor would be much more intense after that. I got all the wonderful taste of the M&Ms but I didn't swallow.
I did that for 15 minutes a day for 3 days. After that I didn't much like chocolate, and it took more than a year before I gradually started eating it again.
I think the esthetic pleasure of chocolate must have a strong digestive component.
Most of our taste buds are actually in the part of the tongue that food only reaches after swallowing.
I'd hazard a guess that this is also where most of the positive reinforcement circuitry eventually happens, but that might be inferring too much based on what I know. I wish I had a psychoanatomy textbook handy. It might also be that the negative reinforcement circuitry happens mostly on the pre-swallow taste buds, which would handily explain your temporary aversion to chocolate -and- the "taste test" phenomenon wherein humans taste something once and, prior to swallowing, proclaim a permanent dislike of that flavor.
A caution: anyone who reads this comment should not take either J_Thomas's hypothesis or mine as actual evidence. I provided one to illustrate just how reasonable the exact opposite of what he said sounded, i.e., that nothing about digestion provides reinforcement.