Did we evolve to like certain foods?
 

I was smoking meat yesterday. I love the taste of smoky meat. And of course we all love bacon.

This made me think. These has been the basic techniques for preserving food for tens of thousands of years. Nothing much changed until refrigeration.

But cooking meats and some vegetables makes them MORE nutritious. Cooking and smoking meat preserves it to allow a game animal to be used over a longer period of time. Preserving it via salting or curing (bacon). All of this allowed smaller amounts of food to be used by more humans.

But as we did these things, did our taste for the food become ingrained? Is the love of BBQ and bacon cultural or has it become an innate?

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When I was a kid there were some foods i didn't like but I like them now.



That's not what you meant?


Serial, I can imagine that through natural selection those who were picky eaters prolly didn't last long and those who would eat ANYTHING prolly lasted an even shorter time.

My doctor asked me why I drink.

I told him alter thousands of years, we have evolved to not just tolerate but to need beer.

I've never seen him quiet before.

I'll bite.

I'd argue that it's not innate, and if there is an innate component, that it has been pretty irrelevant in contributing to natural selection, as there is still such a wide variety to taste in the world today.

For example- people like sushi. People like steak cooked rare. People eat all sorts of raw stuff. Hamburger meat can be quite dangerous if it's not fully cooked, but it gets served anyway.

I want my cow still mooing, and a lot of people do, but I haven't been naturally selected out of existence.

Something like pork, which can have parasites, should be engrained in our psyche to be burnt to a crisp, but yet we work hard to get it "just up to temp" to kill off the parasites, while not killing off all the juices. 145- 160 as per google. Where did the 145-160 come from? Experience- nurture. Also, if the parasite takes long enough not to kill you before you reproduce, that parasite gets an evolutionary hitchhiking advantage, so it's in the parasite's best interest to be not too deadly too quick.

We should also all want salt on everything, but that comes down to nurture- well- at least I was told by my dad, since he knew everything. All baby food in the 60's etc had salt in it to appeal to the parents, because they were used to it, so as a marketing scheme, salt was added to make things taste right so the children were born into a world of salt.

Beer is an acquired taste, which historically was safer than many water sources, and we should flock to it. If the safety of beer was innate, then young kids would prefer beer over water. I hated the taste of beer when I first tried it around 6-8 years old. Spit it right out. Teenagers prefer it for the cool factor and the cool buzz, but not it's cleanliness over 12th century well water.

Cooking can break down the proteins and improve the taste, but then there's the aspect of charring, which seems to be acquired.

(edit- Maybe I'm the evolutionary e#$f'd up oddball!) :)
I dunno. That's all I got.

That's what I thought too. I think attributing it to evolution is seriously over-thinking it. Tastes change over the years. You try new stuff, get the money to actually afford good food, get over stupid stuff like how food looks and realize that it actually tastes good. Sushi and oysters are two foods that I would have never eaten as a kid but love today. Of course I also could have never afforded them as a kid, so maybe that's the correlation?

Yes

There is zero doubt, none, nada that there is no such thing as a picky eater, just someone that is not really hungry. Go for 72 hours more and you will find that a grubs and insects, earthworms, and other items normally WAY off the menu, are dang good. Well maybe not good, but you will want to eat them.

And James, if the world's entire supply of bacon was somehow just magically gone, I really would not care. Bacon is OK, but I never order it for breakfast. It is good on a home grown tomato for making a BLT. I find it just OK as a condiment.

One of my goals in life is to never have to go for more than 12 hours without food. So far so good!

The secret is in the sauce

Nah. It's not that big a deal to not eat. I've fasted, nothing but water for days. Mostly, you want something more than you need something. It's mostly mental "it's noon, I should be eating lunch." or "it's dinner time" or "I'm at the movies, I should be eating popcorn, etc..."

The interesting thing is that fermented foods have been used for a LOOONG time as a way to preserve food before there was refrigeration, and yet, I think it's innate for us to NOT like foods that taste sour (fermentation almost always causes a sour flavor).

I do know that having a sugar tooth or not is supposed to be genetic. If you get one of those DNA tests, that's one of the things that they tell you. I already know, yeah I like sweets. But then I like darn near everything. Most of the stuff that I don't or wouldn't eat is probably mental, raw oysters, ballut, brains, etc....

Protein is valuable so yes we evolved to want it... I think we also evolved to not waste food so that's why most of us eat everything that's put in front of us and get fat!

Beer is the reason for civilization developing.

Maybe related...my two sons (half Japanese) are crazy about sashimi (sliced raw fish) they fight over the stuff! Me (Euro mix) am not so into it.
But I think humans are able to eat a wide variety of foods and we can adapt to many different types of diets quickly.

If you do something long enough you adapt to it..people eat what is plentiful in their envirnoment. Over time people evolve into eating that way as a natural course of daily life.

I don't think evolution has anything to do with the amount of sugar found in the typical American diet.

No? I think the deal is that most folks have a desire for sugar. Sugar gives us energy. I think that fruit (full of sugar) was vital in times past for having more energy when the days were longer. Unfortunately, once the affinity for sugar had evolved into us, we found ways of providing almost limitless amounts of sugar vs what you'd get as a hunter/gatherer or even through normal cultivation (whatever wasn't damaged or eaten by birds and bugs or rotted).

the problem isn't whether we've evolved to eat sugar, the problem is that because we evolved to want sugar, we came up with a way to provide it 24x7x365.

Maybe not but we do have a need for fat.

As we uncover more DNA connections to regional origins, diet preferences, taste, nutrition, food allergies and and food intolerance (lactose and gluten) seem to be tied to our own ancestry. So yes. If people were lactose intolerant in a regional society that depended a lot on milk products, they simply died out and lactose tolerant individuals thrived. Individuals who loved the taste of cooked meat and could digest it completely thrived in areas that had cooked meat as an important part of their diet.

It is fascinating to me looking at my own regional ancestry and seeing foods that I really like are a mainstay of the diet there over time.

Or salt... back when I was a younin I would do wacky thing like I experimented with cutting out salt and sugar for a month. When I went back to regular food everything was extremely salty and sickeningly sweet.

RE: Picky eaters, I went backpacking for a week, I actually looked forward to those freeze dried meals!

I can't confirm but I think wine may out date beer, and a fruity wine is much easier to take that beer for a young palate IMHO.