Animals must be able to find and evaluate food to ensure survival. The ability to associate a cue with the presence of food is advantageous because it allows an animal to quickly identify a situation associated with a good, bad, or even harmful food. Identifying genes underlying these natural learned responses is essential to understanding this ability. Here, we investigate whether natural variation in the "foraging" ("for") gene in "Drosophila melanogaster" larvae is important in mediating associations between either an odor or a light stimulus and food reward. We found that "for" influences olfactory conditioning and that the mushroom bodies play a role in this "for"-mediated olfactory learning. Genotypes associated with high activity of the product of "for," cGMP-dependent protein kinase (PKG), showed greater memory acquisition and retention compared with genotypes associated with low activity of PKG when trained with three conditioning trials. Interestingly, increasing the number of training trials resulted in decreased memory retention only in genotypes associated with high PKG activity. The difference in the dynamics of memory acquisition and retention between variants of "for" suggests that the ability to learn and retain an association may be linked to the foraging strategies of the two variants.