Rob Dunn
Appearances
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How Flavor Has Guided Human History & The Threat of Pseudoscience - SYSK Choice
Well, the short answer is they've eaten everything. And so if you look across cultures and time periods, it's really variable. And I mean, that's one of the beautiful things about sort of humans and food is we've found ways to live successfully in many different diets.
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How Flavor Has Guided Human History & The Threat of Pseudoscience - SYSK Choice
But if you kind of walk backwards through time, you know, if we think about sort of 4 million years ago, we probably had a diet that was kind of like a chimp diet. So it would have lots of leaves and fruit Would have had a little meat, you know, the occasional colobus monkey leg. It would have had honey. And then as we began to be able to hunt more, we brought more meat into our diets.
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How Flavor Has Guided Human History & The Threat of Pseudoscience - SYSK Choice
It's ferociously debated how much meat. But probably there were periods where humans in particular regions switched to much meatier diets. And then one of the things that happens is that in different places, humans almost certainly hunted out some of the biggest things. And so they would have switched to less meaty diets for a while.
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How Flavor Has Guided Human History & The Threat of Pseudoscience - SYSK Choice
One of the things we don't understand very well is that at some point, our guts change relative to those of other species. And that changes which diets we do well with. And so one of the things is that our intestines get shorter and which makes it a little bit harder for us to eat diets that are just raw leaves because we can't ferment them as well as a chimp can.
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How Flavor Has Guided Human History & The Threat of Pseudoscience - SYSK Choice
Our teeth get smaller, which makes it harder for us to chew some of those things. And then the other thing that happens is that our stomachs get really, really acidic. If you look at a chimp's stomach, a chimp's stomach is almost neutral as far as we understand. And the human stomach is more acidic than sauerkraut.
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How Flavor Has Guided Human History & The Threat of Pseudoscience - SYSK Choice
And I actually think that that reflects a moment, which might have been 100,000 years in our story, when our ancestors switched to eating more fermented meat. And so rather being these noble hunters, they were the ones that ran in after the lion kill, grabbed that piece of leg and hung it up and ate it for a couple of weeks as it continued to rot.
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How Flavor Has Guided Human History & The Threat of Pseudoscience - SYSK Choice
And they may have used their acidic stomachs to help them keep from getting really, really sick. But it's varied is the short answer.
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How Flavor Has Guided Human History & The Threat of Pseudoscience - SYSK Choice
That's a great question, and it's not been studied very well. My personal impression is that once people started cooking food, then they would have become aware that cooking it one way versus another way changed the flavors.
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How Flavor Has Guided Human History & The Threat of Pseudoscience - SYSK Choice
And if you could cook a food two ways and one of them tasted better than the other, so long as you have a modern human brain, which has been true for at least 300,000 years, you're probably going to do what somebody would do today. You'd cook it the more flavorful way. And so I think that's pretty early. What we don't know is when people start spicing things, when people start mixing ingredients.
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How Flavor Has Guided Human History & The Threat of Pseudoscience - SYSK Choice
But I think we'll start to see that in the coming years because we now have all sorts of amazing ways to study ancient food that we didn't used to have. And so I have a friend, Hannah Schrader, who he finds ancient pieces of chewing gum many, many thousands of years old.
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How Flavor Has Guided Human History & The Threat of Pseudoscience - SYSK Choice
And he can find the DNA in that chewing gum and figure out what food people were chewing that's getting stuck in that chewing gum and to give a sense for which ingredients were mixed together in that moment. And so I think we're going to start to see some more pieces of that story. At the same time, we certainly know there are modern cultures where people emphasize the flavor of food much less.
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How Flavor Has Guided Human History & The Threat of Pseudoscience - SYSK Choice
One of the most amazing features of this to me, recent research has shown that when a baby is born, it has already learned to love some smells. And those are the smells of the foods that that baby's mother ate when the baby was in utero.
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How Flavor Has Guided Human History & The Threat of Pseudoscience - SYSK Choice
And so I think it's also interesting to think about, well, why do some peoples decide to eat plain mashed potatoes and not do anything else with them? Why does that occur? That's harder for me to make sense of.
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How Flavor Has Guided Human History & The Threat of Pseudoscience - SYSK Choice
So to me, it's the recognition that every species of animal out there is making decisions based on flavor.
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How Flavor Has Guided Human History & The Threat of Pseudoscience - SYSK Choice
so if you watch the crow you watch the house finch you watch a mouse they have taste receptors they smell their food and they choose and and to know that you know yeah each each species sees a different world but each species also tastes a different world and that in there in some way you know and sometimes conscious sometimes not conscious there's a reward system for finding what's good
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How Flavor Has Guided Human History & The Threat of Pseudoscience - SYSK Choice
And so that fascinates me and that we're starting to understand the genetics of that. And so, you know, we can now compare the taste receptors of different species. And so we know that cats, so felids in general, so house cats, tigers, leopards, they don't have sweet taste receptors because they get all of the nutrition they need and the energy from just killing other animal species.
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How Flavor Has Guided Human History & The Threat of Pseudoscience - SYSK Choice
And so their sweet taste receptor was unnecessary and it broke. And so, you know, on the one hand, that's an interesting quirk of evolutionary history. But it also means that, you know, every time you present your cat with something you think it's going to love because it's sweet, it actually can in no way taste that sweetness. And the same is true of dogs.
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How Flavor Has Guided Human History & The Threat of Pseudoscience - SYSK Choice
You know, they have different taste receptors than we do. And so the subtleties of those differences change how they experience the food we give them. And so there's this constant evolutionary part of the story that I find fascinating, too. But the biggest thing for me is there really isn't a field that studies flavor and deliciousness and evolution in a holistic way.
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How Flavor Has Guided Human History & The Threat of Pseudoscience - SYSK Choice
And so, you know, for somebody who's young and just thinking, oh, maybe I'll be a biologist or an anthropologist or whatever. You know, I'm a molecular scientist. Most of what we could discover about deliciousness has not yet been discovered. And that to me is pretty wonderful and fun.
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How Flavor Has Guided Human History & The Threat of Pseudoscience - SYSK Choice
Yeah, I mean, well, the companies that produce those things look at them with great care. And so what they've figured out is how to sort of give a super reward for our taste receptors. And so if you think about a Dorito, a Dorito has been engineered to kind of perfectly suit the taste receptors and to make them happy.
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How Flavor Has Guided Human History & The Threat of Pseudoscience - SYSK Choice
And then it has a very simple smell that we learn to associate with Dorito and we learn to love, right? And that's not an accident. That's a very intentionally produced to take advantage of how our sensory systems work. Interestingly, that also happens in nature. And so there are a lot of species that want to be eaten.
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How Flavor Has Guided Human History & The Threat of Pseudoscience - SYSK Choice
And so fruits want to be eaten so that they're passed through the digestive system and then their seeds are dispersed somewhere else. But some fruits have figured out ways of triggering our taste receptors, but without giving us food. And so there's a fruit across tropical Africa that, that produces a molecule that hits the bottom of the sweet taste receptor, but is not sugar.
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How Flavor Has Guided Human History & The Threat of Pseudoscience - SYSK Choice
And so the plant makes that molecule, it doesn't provide any sugar, and primates go and eat the fruit and eat the fruit and get almost no reward for it, but the fruit itself gets dispersed by the primates. And so in some ways, the Dorito is totally unnatural. In other ways, it's doing the same kind of thing that nature also does.
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How Flavor Has Guided Human History & The Threat of Pseudoscience - SYSK Choice
It's been a great pleasure. I'm going to go eat some lunch now because now I'm hungry.
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How Flavor Has Guided Human History & The Threat of Pseudoscience - SYSK Choice
Every animal, at least, in one way or another, seeks out delicious food. You know, the senses evolved to reward species for finding things that were, on average, good for them. And so the frog in some way or another when it's eating a fly is appreciating the fly. But you're right that we as humans do something a little bit different in our quest, which is that we really...
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How Flavor Has Guided Human History & The Threat of Pseudoscience - SYSK Choice
We try to bring different flavors together. We cook things. We ferment things. And the version of that that we undertake is special, but it has antecedents in other species. And so if you look at chimpanzees, chimps don't mix food, not really in the sense that we do, but they do make tools to find delicious things. And so chimps in some populations in West Africa will break off sticks.
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How Flavor Has Guided Human History & The Threat of Pseudoscience - SYSK Choice
They'll make them just the right length. And then they'll use them to pound into the ground to get at these bee nests that are up to nine feet underground, just so they can get that honey, not because it's nutritious or what they need, but really because it brings them pleasure.
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How Flavor Has Guided Human History & The Threat of Pseudoscience - SYSK Choice
And so if you look across species, we see examples like that, where species have figured out ways of finding things that are extra tasty.
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How Flavor Has Guided Human History & The Threat of Pseudoscience - SYSK Choice
Well, it's partially because good for us is dependent on our context, right? And so from almost all of our evolutionary history, for example, we needed more calories than we could usually get. And so in that context, you know, finding sweet things was definitely good for us. It was a ready source of calories.
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How Flavor Has Guided Human History & The Threat of Pseudoscience - SYSK Choice
And so our ancestors evolved sweet taste receptors to reward us for finding sugar so that we didn't die. And so in that context, sugar was good for us. But what changed is we developed the ability to produce near infinite quantities of sugar. And then in that context, sugar is no longer good for us.
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How Flavor Has Guided Human History & The Threat of Pseudoscience - SYSK Choice
And the same could be said for most of the things we really enjoy, that in the context in which we evolved, they tended to be things that were relatively rare and that we needed more of. But in our current context, that shifted. And in some ways, that's because what we've made of the world is kind of the mirror image of our tongues.
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How Flavor Has Guided Human History & The Threat of Pseudoscience - SYSK Choice
And so if you look at the foods that we produce industrially at huge scale, if you look at what you can find in the processed food aisles of the grocery store, it's basically all rewards for your sweet taste receptor, for your umami taste receptor, for your salt taste receptors. And so we created this whole world of foodstuffs that that supplies that pleasure.
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How Flavor Has Guided Human History & The Threat of Pseudoscience - SYSK Choice
And we just made too much of it so that what we used to need is no longer what we need.
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How Flavor Has Guided Human History & The Threat of Pseudoscience - SYSK Choice
All humans have the innate tendency to like sweet things. We all have sweet taste receptors. They're tuned a little bit different in different people. And so for some people, really sweet things are less appealing than they are for other people. But everybody is born liking sweet things. Everybody is born liking savory things. So umami, it's a hard to describe taste, but it's in tomato soup.
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How Flavor Has Guided Human History & The Threat of Pseudoscience - SYSK Choice
It's in Parmesan cheese. It's in miso soup. It's what gives some of their great taste to meat. And everybody in... is born instinctively liking umami. Salty tastes, everybody likes. And again, that taste receptor is a little bit tuned. There are actually two salt taste receptors, one that says, ooh, that's enough salt. And the other that says, ooh, that's too much salt.
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How Flavor Has Guided Human History & The Threat of Pseudoscience - SYSK Choice
And so the tuning of those is different from person to person, but everybody likes a little salt. And then you can learn through time to modulate those a little bit. And so as you get older, you're preferences change, but you're born liking all of those things.
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How Flavor Has Guided Human History & The Threat of Pseudoscience - SYSK Choice
And we've studied sour taste a fair bit in my lab, and all humans seem to have the propensity to learn to like sour taste, but how much you like it seems to vary person to person, and we don't understand yet how genetic that is versus how learned that is.
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How Flavor Has Guided Human History & The Threat of Pseudoscience - SYSK Choice
But then whether you like the food that has those things in it really depends on what the aromas are associated with the food, and that's learned.
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How Flavor Has Guided Human History & The Threat of Pseudoscience - SYSK Choice
So it's different in different languages, but in English, flavor is this encompassing word. And so if you talk to people who work in the senses associated with food, for them, flavor is taste. It's mouthfeel, which is the sense of touch inside the mouth. It's smell, which has two components that I can come back around to. It's the astringency. Does the food make you pucker?
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How Flavor Has Guided Human History & The Threat of Pseudoscience - SYSK Choice
And it's even, for some people, it's even the sort of visual presentation of the food, that that also goes into this sort of overall experience of flavor. And so flavor is this encompassing thing. Taste is just the sensation triggered by your taste receptors. And so that's primarily on your tongue. It's a little bit trickier than that, but that's more or less the main story.
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How Flavor Has Guided Human History & The Threat of Pseudoscience - SYSK Choice
And that's those key senses. That's sweet, salty, umami. But it's not fully understood yet. And so scientists are discovering new senses of taste as we speak that are not fully understood. And so, for example, it's thought that humans might be able to taste calcium, but we don't know what that feels like. There's a new taste that's been proposed called kukumi. but we don't know how that's sensed.
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How Flavor Has Guided Human History & The Threat of Pseudoscience - SYSK Choice
And so taste is for sure the tongue, but the full dimensions of that experience remain to be studied. But taste is that narrow piece.
Something You Should Know
How Flavor Has Guided Human History & The Threat of Pseudoscience - SYSK Choice
One of the most amazing features of this to me is that recent research has shown that when a baby is born, it has already learned to love some smells. And those are the smells of the foods that that baby's mother ate when the baby was in utero.
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How Flavor Has Guided Human History & The Threat of Pseudoscience - SYSK Choice
And so there are these great French studies showing that if a mother eats anise, like anise-flavored candies when she's pregnant, and you hold up a little Q-tip with an anise smell on it, that the mother who ate the anise, that that baby will make like a nursing face. in response to the anise smell.
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How Flavor Has Guided Human History & The Threat of Pseudoscience - SYSK Choice
If the mother didn't eat the anise, the newborn baby will make a sad face in response to the anise smell. And this is true for garlic. It's true of the smell of fermented fish. It's true of the smell of some cheeses. And so, you know, on the one hand, this seems like just a quirky feature of our biology.
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How Flavor Has Guided Human History & The Threat of Pseudoscience - SYSK Choice
But if you think about our ancestors moving over some hill into a new climate and a new region where there are new plants, new animals, What this offered them is that in one generation, newborn babies could already be learning to love the new foods. And so babies could be primed for what the important cultural foods were already at birth.
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How Flavor Has Guided Human History & The Threat of Pseudoscience - SYSK Choice
And what we can learn to love in different cultures is really varied. And so I work with a Greenlandic colleague, and she works a lot on fermented Greenlandic foods. And a lot of those are fermented meats that are really quite stinky and I think off-putting to some people.
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How Flavor Has Guided Human History & The Threat of Pseudoscience - SYSK Choice
But for Greenlandic people who grow up with them, they're some of the most delicious foods that anyone could ever imagine because of that amazing olfactory learning process.
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How Flavor Has Guided Human History & The Threat of Pseudoscience - SYSK Choice
If we think about our evolutionary history, there's a point about 1.9 million years ago when our brains at that point were already larger than those of other apes. But they went through this bigger transition when the brains became even bigger and teeth became smaller to sort of accommodate that big brain, jaws became weaker.
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How Flavor Has Guided Human History & The Threat of Pseudoscience - SYSK Choice
Paleoanthropologists love to fight over just what happened during this period. What was it that allowed this evolutionary transition, which would then set the stage eventually for language, for building houses, for making clothing? And they disagree about almost every feature of what happened in that period. But they agree on two things.
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How Flavor Has Guided Human History & The Threat of Pseudoscience - SYSK Choice
One is that somehow our ancestors were able to obtain more calories because they needed more calories for those bigger brains. And they also seem to agree that they were getting more calories by finding ways to make food easier to eat and more delicious. And that might have been through fermenting food. It might have been from being able to access more muscles.
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How Flavor Has Guided Human History & The Threat of Pseudoscience - SYSK Choice
And so imagine sort of an oyster-y early human. It might have been from finding new ways of getting honey. But one of the main arguments is that it was through beginning to cook food. Because once you could cook food, more of the calories in the food became available. More of the flavors became available. It was easier to chew.
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How Flavor Has Guided Human History & The Threat of Pseudoscience - SYSK Choice
And it was this radical moment when we were remaking the world so as to make it more pleasing. And so whatever happened in that moment, I think it's a pretty amazing time.