My tastes changed a lot over the years. I quit liking sweets in my early 20s, I rarely even have sugar in the house.

Sometime in my late 30s I started appreciating more nuanced flavors, including black coffee, but mostly vegetables like green beans, tomatoes, asparagus, peas, carrots. Once that happened, I started realizing how much food is blasted with so much salt that obliterates said flavors.

I assume it's mostly normal, as a kid I found my parents tastes bland...ew who could eat vegetables by themselves with no seasoning? Well, me now apparently...

Same.

There was a time when my diet was consistently full of very sweet things -- in particular, with beverages: More soda? Another mocha latte swimming in sugar? Another quart of orange juice? Yes, please.

But also food: How can a person walk past a selection of fresh donuts without having one?

Eventually, for reasons that initially were budgetary more than anything else, I discovered some coffee that I really liked the natural flavor of at a local place. I started getting that -- plain, black -- instead of a latte, mostly because $2.10 is a lot less than $3.75.

That coffee was Ethiopian Yirgacheffe. This particular one had its own distinct, subtle sweetness that hit the spot for me and was part of a basically-daily feel-good routine for years until their roaster stopped selling it.

But by then, I was a black coffee convert. And I didn't even notice at the time, but I'd also stopped buying soda in bulk -- it became a rare entity in my life instead of a daily fixation.

I also stopped buying things like cookies and donuts. I began to skip the pie at gatherings.

That all happened in my 30s.

Nowadays, motivated only by what I feel like eating or drinking instead of some desire to make healthy choices or something, my intake is good-tasting spring water (the tap water here sometimes tastes of mud), decent black coffee, inexpensive tea, and [of course] beer.

My food has taken a turn for the bland, too.

I buy carrots and celery at the store to munch on, instead of a bag of cookies. Things like rice and beans and fish have an abundance of flavor that I wasn't able to appreciate before. For gatherings, I make a big relish tray full of fresh vegetables -- and I munch on them more than anyone else does.

I seldom buy breakfast cereal now, but I used to eat a lot of it -- and I'd load it up with more sugar. Last year I did buy some store-brand raisin bran but I found that it was too much of a sugar bomb to really enjoy as a meal. I couldn't make myself finish it; most of it wound up in the compost. (I did find some very plain bran flakes that I liked a lot better -- 12-year-old me would not have been impressed.)

This is all a bit weird to describe because the only deliberate decision involved was to try to save a bit of money on coffee-house coffee in my 30s.

But did that decision actually have anything to do with it? Or is this instead a tale as old as time itself, wherein: Tastes simply change?

(But yeah, I do enjoy an occasional sugar bomb. But only literally-occasionally. For instance: A single 12-ounce bottle of Coke is very nice sometimes. I probably drink as many as 2 or 3 of those in a whole year.)