Human food consumption habits globally pose a significant threat to public health and ecological sustainability. Awareness of the urgency for large-scale global changes has recently been growing substantially; yet, overcoming preferences for familiar food flavours in favour of healthier or more sustainable options remains a major challenge. The high intrinsic reward value of taste, especially sugar and salt, is generally blamed for the resistance of humans to change their food preferences. There is, however, a fundamental lack of knowledge about the perceptual and emotional mechanisms that link these reward experiences during consumption to the identification of desirable food items before consumption, which ultimately drive our appetite and our dietary decisions. This project proposes an unprecedented approach that consolidates recent conceptual advances in chemosensory research into a common theoretical framework: I will determine the distributed code by which odours acquire and evoke taste associations, delineate the cortical control mechanisms that facilitate its retrieval, and define the interactions with digestive feedback that regulate this circuitry. Integration of these three nested layers of investigation, which are commonly studied in isolation, will yield a unique research program that promises impactful insights into the human capacity to shift our choices of food, the single strongest lever to optimise human health and environmental sustainability on earth.