What is the purpose of taste?

[farntfar]

Or more specifically what is the purpose of things tasting nice?
I can see that evolving a sense of taste, in order to warn ourselves that a piece of meat is going off etc., is a useful function; similar to a warning given by a rotting smell, but more sensitive.
We taste a rotten foodstuff and spit it out, even when our sense of smell hasn't raised a red flag.
But it's the positive side of taste that doesn't seem to have a purpose.

A positive smell might lead us to a field of strawberries perhaps, of an animal that we're trying to hunt, or even a cow that we can milk, I suppose.
But what is the evolutionary advantage of the pleasure in eating a delicious meal, and even more so some fancy chef's recipe?
Mostly, we explain our attributes and abilities as coming from some advantage they give us over some other creature, which allow us to be more successful than them.
How does liking a Burger King more than a Big Mac help with that?

I suppose a wider question is what is the purpose of pleasure?

Anyway. A stupid question that occurred to me as I was eating a toasted cheese sandwich for lunch. And I thought that some of you might like to play with it.

I've put it in Science and Nature, but I don't expect many very learned replies.

 

[Foxbat]

When it comes to the smell of strawberries, I'm thinking if an animal is attracted by a pleasant smell and eats the fruit, it will also spread the seeds in its droppings. So, perhaps taste is involved in a plant reproducing and spreading. Likewise, the smell of rotten meat attracts flies to lay their eggs. This way their larvae have a food source.

As for ourselves.....we all get cravings for certain things and some think this craving is connected to a lack of a certain vitamin or mineral so maybe that's where our pleasure in a good meal comes from.

Just my completely unqualified and unlearned thoughts

 

[Venusian Broon]

I am not very learned in these matters.

I know that taste and smell are somewhat connected (taste has a component of smell really....) but I think smell (and sight probably) is more related to your "rotten" musings. I rarely come across rotten food that does not smell or look bad.

I think taste, in its basic form, is more related to identifying 'astringency', sweetness or umami, i.e. is it bitter and perhaps poisonous/toxic, is it sweet and therefore more likely to be edible*, or umami and meaty i.e. a good source of protein.

As for the more positive leanings....well I think eating is way more complex than just loading up on calories and nutrients to make us function: Babies will put anything near them into their mouths out of mere instinct, because it is expected that they will be feed completely by adults. I believe when they grow older, children become much pickier about food, partly because they are able to eat by themselves, so evolution has given them a behaviour to 'stick with what they know' and not be too adventurous. Being young and ill-informed of most of their environment they might go off and just put everything in their mouths to eat it, including all the poisonous and non-edible things.

As you grow to be adult you are able to digest things slightly differently - i.e. you can build up a salt tolerance for example, and can learn/build up to like more bitter and odd tastes - even ones that fundamentally poison you. Adults consumption of alcoholic beverages, say, might easily overwhelm a small child and even kill them.

As for the evolutionary advantages...isn't it well known that consuming food triggers serotonin production and just makes you happier? When our ancestors found a food source they then had a feedback system that make them crave it and consume it all. Having a full belly with nice food is better than starving for a week, no? Food sources would have been much more random and variable for our ancestors way back, so when something was found, our bodies were geared to want to eat it. (We would also evolve to have a certain taste pallet that corresponds to the stuff that we like to eat, that seems to make sense to me. Grass and leaves that sheep or goats eat doesn't really work for us as a viable food source and doesn't really taste that nice for us. I'd bet you sheep probably love the taste of grass leaves!)

Over time we have experimented with all sorts of food, so we can now really focus in on various combinations of taste, smell and texture to increase our pleasure - hence our increased pleasure in a delicious meal or a fancy chef's recipe. Puddings and desserts are augmented with sugars, fats and other nice flavours that enhance the tasting, meat can be cooked in ways to increase it's flavours. Of course this is subjective, depending on your history, culture etc. Highly spiced food might be highly prized by some, completely avoided by others.

(And this experimentation with fire, boiling, fermentation, preservation techniques - who'd have thunk turning milk into cheese would have been so good! - different flavours etc. has made us highly successful as animals from an evolutionary viewpoint, as it's widened the range of things we can eat dramatically!)

Finally there's a whole thing about eating and being social, as we are social animals - either in family groups or feasting, giving food to others as gifts etc. that also colours our use of food and is very important. Going out to a fancy restaurant and eating it's chef's hot dish of the month is probably loaded a bit more with social cues and signals than the actual food consumption per se

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* what I mean by this is we probably evolved eating large underground tubers or fruits/nuts as our main carb load, plant material that would have been largely indigestible when not fully ripe or cooked. Sweetness is a way of telling us that this was the optimum time to eat these foodstuffs. Honey is something different, being a 'pure' form of sugar (well, as best your going to get in the natural world at about 80% sugar), but then I guess that honey was not a daily treat.

 

[Robert Zwilling]

Sense of taste appears to drive appetite to make sure we eat. Perhaps a mechanical like function. Part of an automatic mental checklist. If you lose sense of taste you can also lose your appetite to the point where you become undernourished. I would have thought no taste meant a neutral taste but a neutral taste means not as strong as it could be.

 

[paranoid marvin]

Originally yes; things that tasted bad usually were bad and vice versa.

obviously we have to remember that most things made today have been artificially manufactured to look, smell and taste appealing. There's very little out there that hasn't had its taste artificially altered for commercial purposes.

 

[Robert Zwilling]

Engineered to taste good so you keep on coming back for more is probably the same reason food tasted good way back in time, getting rewarded for eating food by getting a good taste sensation. Starting from scratch, the evolving brain builds up a list of foods over time that produce prosperity and procreation. Eating those foods elicits a good sensation, providing an instantaneous, reliable, and reproducible method of determining what should be eaten. It was a good system when you had to work to get the food and there was usually no surplus food stored up. Working to get money to pay for food does not count towards working to get food. Now much of the food is engineered to taste and look good, so tasting good has become pretty much meaningless, as it is no indication of helping to achieve prosperity and procreation.













Motivation to keep eating. If that's the case. How far into the animal kingdom does food tasting good so it will be eaten go.

 

[Swank]

Taste is what separates us from the working class.

 

[HareBrain]

Innate pleasure in food is probably focused on certain tastes that are advantageous to survival and not that abundant in nature -- sugars, fats and salt. (Food manufacturers' discovery of the potency of that combination is now contributing to so many issues, of course.) So there's your evolutionary advantage. Beyond that, I think it just has the same drivers as art -- part culturally learned, and part based on stimulating the eater's interest. If that weren't the case, we'd probably have the same taste in foods our whole lives.

 

[paeng]

Check out The Physiology of Taste.

 

[paranoid marvin]

We also have to consider the influence that advertising and peer pressure have on the things we like.

Our brains can be trained to like or dislike something. For example over indulging on a foodstuff to the point of being sick, or eating something we enjoy that makes us ill, can sometimes make that thing that we enjoyed so much repulsive in future.

Also once I remember going on a diet. Before I started it, I loved the taste of white bread, milk chocolate and sugary drinks. Afterwards, I found the taste of white bread to be doughy, milk chocolate to be far too sweet, and full-sugar drinks to leave a sickly aftertaste.