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J_Thomas 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.
Seth Roberts' diet was really about this insight.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shangri-La_Diet
Another possibility is that there's something about chewing things and spitting them out that tends to make them less appealing. (E.g., the whole thing looks and feels kinda gross; or you associate spitting things out with finding them unpleasant -- normally if you spit something out after starting to eat it it's because it tastes unpleasant or contains unpleasant gristle or something like that.)