This Isn’t Rocket Recipes

This article is a good dive into the sense of smell and eating, but it isn't telling us anything new, is it?

We cook food to smell good because we already know about this link. Diners will eat something that is aromatic in a good way before they’ll eat something that smells like a rotted carcass. We’ve grown to learn that anything that smells really delicious, is likely to be delicious and nutritious.

Fact: A chunk of carcass was a gamble for an early hominid – yes, loads of protein, quick and concentrated nourishment. But if it was too spoiled, that hominid might find themself being abandoned by their group while they slowly perished of food poisoning.

Then we discovered that foods we cooked gave us more energy because more of the food’s nutrition became bioavailable to us. It lasted longer. Cooked foods had much of the bacteria in and on it sterilised by the heat so it had fewer pathogens.

And it smelled – delicious – to us, after a while. Cooks to this day capitalise on this – the rule in almost every kitchen is “fry some onion and garlic while you decide what to feed the family.” Aroma does its job, people begin to salivate, and whatever meal you end up cooking will get eaten with gusto.

So to act surprised when this link is found in the brain to hardwire that behaviour into us, is a bit naive. In the past, it conferred a survival advantage because people having the behaviour were more motivated to eat, making the most of scarce food resources. I’ve no doubt that the people referred to in that article will also have a more sensitive sense of smell, on average. Because these things were useful.

And yes, it now makes the person who has this link far more prone to obesity and the attendant comorbidities like heart disease and strokes, but having food freely available in such quantities is a relatively new development in our evolution. We seem to develop certain genetic traits relatively quickly, but it will still take generations for us to be able to ignore those hardwired signals.

There are two ways that this could work out evolutionarily – our bodies could lose a feature that we developed over millennia for survival and later for enjoyment, or we could find that people with a capacity to temper their appetites might pass that new gene on to future generationas while poor impulse control breeds out.