Consider the following comments on taste.
I once mistook my preferences for standards and called everyone who differed wrong.
Taste is the quiet pride of believing your likings are better than another's.
There is no accounting for taste.
Proverb
Half of what I call my taste is simply what I was surrounded by before I could choose.
Learning to love something difficult changes the person who learns it.
Write a reflective piece in response to one or more of these comments. Your essay will be assessed on the quality of your thinking and the way you express it.
A way into this prompt
A reflective thesis is that my taste, which I long experienced as the truest expression of who I am, turned out to be largely inherited, borrowed and quietly used to set myself above others. Open with a particular memory, a thing I once scorned and later loved, a moment I judged someone for what they enjoyed. Then explore the tension between taste as genuine self knowledge, the real and personal pull toward certain music, food or beauty, and taste as social signalling, a fence I used to mark who belonged on my side of it. A useful structural move traces how a taste I had to work to acquire changed me, suggesting taste is less a fixed identity than something cultivated. Caution: avoid the tidy relativism that all taste is equal and arbitrary, since that conveniently excuses me from ever growing beyond what I already happen to like.