The past and present
In the evolution of humans, knowing the right texture of food in the past was very important to determine its suitability for eating, particularly for cooked foods. As an example, Austrians like a dish called tafelspitz, which is basically meat boiled to death and then boiled for a few hours longer after that. I had no idea why they would like this dish until someone told me that it was the way they historically cooked old, tough animals and they have simply gotten used to meat ruined by extreme over- boiling.
– in Palaeolithic times, humans ate food primarily for the nutrient content – and if something lacked sweetness, they would eat more of it to obtain more calories. This is not true now as we tend to eat a lot of food for pleasure, mainly because we have so much choice these days. However, the underlying intention is still nutrition and thus if we eat something with less calorific values these days, we tend to require stronger flavours to compensate for the lack of nutritional content, else we would not feel satiated.
Examples are fat- free yoghurts – they tend to have more sweeteners and stronger flavours than normal yoghurts. Similarly, if the calorific content is very high or the flavours are very strong, then we tend to eat smaller portions – examples are greasy bacon or sweets – though this is often not so true in modern times.
5. Food pleasure equation
– if you have read an earlier article, you would be aware that humans actually have two brain systems. The one we are conscious of is the Central Nervous System ( CNS, managed by the brain in your head), while the other hidden brain is the Enteric Nervous System ( ENS) which is a 9m long collection of neurons that start from your throat and encompasses the entire digestive tract.
Part of the function of the ENS is to detect the CD in your food and feed this information back to your CNS so that you would know that the digestive system is happy with the type of food you’re ingesting. The most satisfying CD for the human body is between 4 and 5, which is usually
6. Calorific Density ( CD)
the exact CD found in most junk foods ( 0 is water and 9 is pure fat).
– humans tend to like the taste of emulsions, particularly salt- fat or sugar- fat emulsions. That is why we like the taste of butter, hot chocolate, salad dressings, sauces, ice creams, creamy mashes, etc. One reason is that emulsions tend to concentrate the taste of the hedonic compounds mentioned above into the water component of the emulsion.
This greatly enhances the taste impact on the taste buds ( which tend to mainly process the water- soluble compounds). As an example, ice cream is an emulsified foam made with milk, sugar and flavours.
Being water- soluble, sugar gets consolidated in the water component of milk and when the tongue tastes the melted ice cream, it gets a very strong perception of sweetness from the dissolved ( concentrated) sugar solution even though as a whole, the sugar content may not be very high in ice cream. However, on the tongue the strong sweetness is associated with the rest of the ice cream. The tongue would also get a stronger perception of the flavourings as well if they are water- soluble.
7. Emulsified food
In the distant past, these physiological factors obviously served the human race very well, else we won’t be around now. But that was during times when the quantity and variety of food was strictly limited and often in short supply. These days, we can satisfy practically every gastronomical craving we get and satisfy it almost immediately – and this can become our collective Achilles heel.
As we all know, the modern easy access to junk food is at least a partial explanation as to why diseases like diabetes are increasing and why obesity levels are soaring around the world – but actually, that is not the whole story.