IF YOU thought that breast milk must taste rather bland, think again. Human milk provides a veritable cornucopia of different flavour combinations that may prime a child to try new foods later on.

Previous studies suggested that what a mother eats can affect the taste preferences of her child. For example, the infants of mothers who drank carrot juice during pregnancy or breastfeeding seemed to prefer carrot-flavoured cereal.

To get a handle on how flavours from a mother’s diet get transferred into her milk, Helene Hausner and her colleagues at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark asked 18 lactating mothers …