OT: Flavours, Taste, Texture and Evolutionary Biology

[Ray]

That?s not really true of the ones that do the mass migrations in southern africa and north america.

Or to have evolved so that they can eat almost anything like dogs.

[Vir Campestris]

Human colour vision is complete crap. Only three colours, WTF?

Even Goldfish have 4.

And then there's the mantis shrimp, which has a built-in spectrometer and polarimeter in each eye.

Andy

[Jethro_uk]

Compared to most mammals ...

See above

See above

[polygonum_on_google]

It is true that we need to avoid toxins - hence the sometimes extraordinary processes used to de-toxify some plants. Things like choppping up and leaving in a bag held in a running stream for days.

Not clear, though, if taste and smell were able to guide the originators to these processes. Did someone keep sniffing and tasting until a particular flavour/odour disappeared? Maybe then carrying on a bit longer to be sure.

Also seems feasible that our need for the micronutrients was a driver. If we can detect the presence of vitamins and minerals that we need, by a positive "nice" taste or smell, we should be better at obtaining full and balanced nourishment.

Further, the impact of disease on our perception can be profound. Is that in any measure a mechanism for positively changing our intake? Or just a negative impact ofthe disease on our sensory apparatus?

[polygonum_on_google]

They sure can distinguish between them. Even if not needed.

What I end up wondering is why they don't do a jelly-only pouch? Our representative of the felines insists that the jelly is what she wants and only reluctantly eats the rest when she has no jelly left.

(Mind, she is also the only feline I know who insists on our being there, even stroking and cuddling her, before she will eat.)

[Martin Brown]

As omnivores like with rats we originally learnt to eat a little bit and then wait. It is hard wired into our instincts not to eat anything again that has previously made us ill (even if it was just by bad luck).

Most powerful plant toxins are incredibly bitter and/or smell bad. The handful of exceptions to this rule of thumb are thankfully very rare.

Most of the tastes and smells we think of as interesting are really intended as chemical weapons by plants or fungi against their primary threat usually insects, fungi or herbivores.

Another rough heuristic that is usually right is that anything with a latex sap is best avoided. Counter examples are lettuce and dandelion.

Hardly any vitamins taste nice. Vitamin C tastes very sour but without it you get scurvy - hence Limey's as a nick name for British sailors.

If you can't smell then you lose a great deal of information about the food that you are eating and it all tastes about the same.

[polygonum_on_google]

Limey despite lemon being a better source that was used more widely by the Royal Navy. I think I remember much of the vitamin C in lime being destroyed by some process such as boiling in a copper vessel?

Vitamins in high doses might taste unpleasant, but in typical real food amounts, they might well improve the overall appreciation we have. Example, a nice fresh apple with lots of vitamin C might taste better than one with less vitamin C.

Yes - if we have blocked noses and so on such that we have impaired sense of smell, I agree, most things are pretty tasteless. But I have certainly found my choice of food radically changed by disease without any such impairment. Even, I think, enhanced sensitivity such that things that were normally tolerable or enjoyable being unbearable. After a dose of flu many years ago, I could hardly eat for almost two months.

[whisky-dave]

It's because humans buy the food and not the cat or dog.

[DJC]

Fascinating essay on this subject:

>

[alan_m]

Obviously it didn't sell as it now appears on the shelves of pound shops!

[Cursitor Doom]

Yeah, but those vital-for-survival tests are very blunt and need be nothing more. I've still not seen any theories advanced here as to how mankind got from copping a nasty niff from something decaying giving off hydrogen sulphide all the way to "Cynthia's use of just a touch too much oregano cost her the Young Chef of the year Award" all in the space of little more than a century. :-/

[Jethro_uk]

I think that might be how personal tastes developed. If you spread different preferences across a population, it's less likely they'll all cop it from eating exactly the same dodgy kebab. If nothing else, that's what a low level of variance will introduce to evolutionary pressures.

I can't recall the exact details, but the ever affable Jim Al Khalili did touch on how quantum effects must be at play in how olfactory processes work, and enable an incredible level of discrimination based on the shapes of molecules.

[Martin Brown]

Actually as a scavenger or even a hunter gatherer you need all the sense of smell that you can muster to find any food that you are downwind of. The sensitivity of your sense of smell determines how far away from a tasty meal you can be and still find it. Polar bears manage rather well at this task - made even more difficult at low polar temperatures.

There is a very wide variation in the sensitivity of individual sense of smell and taste capability. The best known is the sensitivity to the bitter agent in sprouts (which most people tolerate) but a few super tasters find them unpleasant to the point of being inedible. I think the same subgroup can also taste warfarin too.

Our sense of smell evolved to help us to find and assess the suitability of food in the wild. It so happens that it also allows us to detect traces of interesting flavour molecules in almost any combination. Certain good combinations being far better than the sum of their parts.

Chefs and the people who judge them are typically super tasters with a very highly developed sense of smell refined by years of practice.

There is a podcast by Jim and Johnjoe McFadden about quantum smell.

I think this is the one you mean. (may require free registration) Probably also somewhere on BBC Radio4/Podcast archives too.

[Jethro_uk]

There was a "Rutherford and Fry" podcast that touched on this. Apparently you can buy a kit to test if you are a "supertaster". There's also an interesting suggestion that infants develop an aversion to things bitter (like veg !) as a mechanism to prevent toddlers wandering off and putting poisons in their mouths.

No, it was a BBC4 2-part documentary about quantum physics. Very good (tad overlong, as is the fashion these days). It also touched on the possibility that evolution is driven by quantum effects.

[Andrew]

Or even Glutenous, too much bread.