Something You Should Know
How Flavor Has Guided Human History & The Threat of Pseudoscience - SYSK Choice
Sat, 15 Feb 2025
Modern kitchen freezers are actually cruel to ice cream and other frozen foods. This episode begins by explaining why this is and why there is often ice crystals on top of your ice cream and how to prevent them. Source: Professor Richard Hartel author of the book Ice Cream (https://amzn.to/3jNcVrY). Unlike other animals, we humans have gotten really good at figuring out how to take food and make it taste even better. Why do we do that? And what is it that makes some food taste better than other foods? Is it just our personal preferences or are we all programmed to like the taste of certain foods? What is flavor exactly? All these are questions I discuss with Rob Dunn, an evolutionary biologist and professor at North Carolina State University. He is also the author of the book, Delicious: The Evolution of Flavor and How It Made Us Human (https://amzn.to/3RPAIUM). Medical quackery is when someone touts the benefits of medical cures or treatments with no actual evidence to support it. While you might think you can spot a quack a mile away, it is actually harder than you think. And while some quack theories may be harmless, others can be dangerous. Dr. Joe Schwarcz has spent his career exposing medical quackery and pseudoscience and he joins me to reveal some common forms of it. If you believe Vitamin C can cure your cold or that herbs can effectively treat cancer, you need to hear this conversation. Joe is Director of McGill University’s Office for Science and Society, and author of the book, Quack Quack: The Threat of Pseudoscience (https://amzn.to/40JILGO). Yes, it is called a DISHwasher but it can do so much more than wash dishes. Listen as I reveal several other things you can wash in there that you may never have thought of. https://www.womansday.com/home/organizing-cleaning/tips/a5539/10-things-you-can-clean-in-the-dishwasher-115717/ PLEASE SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS!!! FACTOR: Eat smart with Factor! Get 50% off at https://FactorMeals.com/factorpodcast DELL: Anniversary savings await you for a limited time only at https://Dell.com/deals SHOPIFY: Nobody does selling better than Shopify! Sign up for a $1 per-month trial period at https://Shopify.com/sysk and upgrade your selling today! HERS: Hers is changing women's healthcare by providing access to GLP-1 weekly injections with the same active ingredient as Ozempic and Wegovy, as well as oral medication kits. Start your free online visit today at https://forhers.com/sysk INDEED: Get a $75 sponsored job credit to get your jobs more visibility at https://Indeed.com/SOMETHING right now! CURIOSITY WEEKLY: We love Curiosity Weekly, so listen wherever you get your podcasts! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: Why are there ice crystals on your ice cream?
But there's a problem. You see, your freezer regularly goes through a frost-free cycle, which means the temperature actually warms up in there, as high as 45 degrees. During that time, the frost melts and evaporates, and that prevents the frost and the ice from building up. The problem is that your food starts to melt too, and then it refreezes, and that causes problems.
This is a big cause of freezer burn, and it's why you get ice crystals on your ice cream. In fact, one food science professor calls frost-free freezers ice cream destruction machines. What happens is, as the temperature goes up and food starts to thaw, the water from the food escapes into the air.
As the temperature drops again, the water wants to re-enter the food, but it can't because the food is still mostly frozen. So the water sits on top of the food and freezes into ice crystals. And this happens over and over and over again and can ruin some of the food in your freezer.
One way to prevent or minimize the damage is to keep as little airspace as possible between the food and the package it's in. This will help prevent the water from escaping out of the food because it will have no place to go. And that is something you should know.
One of the things that makes modern humans different from other animals, it seems, is we don't just seek out food to nourish and satisfy us. We seek out really tasty, delicious food to nourish and satisfy us. From the way we prepare food and cook it and spice it, we want food to taste good. And even when it does taste good, we sometimes try to make it taste even better.
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Chapter 2: How has flavor influenced human evolution?
So why is it that some food tastes good and other food doesn't? Why do you find some food delicious that I may find horribly distasteful? Here to talk about all this and why we find food so enjoyable, as well as how the pursuit of flavor has guided the course of history, is Rob Dunn.
Rob is an evolutionary biologist and professor at North Carolina State University, and he's author of a book called Delicious, The Evolution of Flavor and How It Made Us Human.
Hey, Rob, so even though other animals don't, you know, they don't cook or spice up their food a whole lot, I imagine that other species have taste preferences, that some of what a tiger eats tastes better than other things that that tiger might eat.
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...
Chapter 3: What makes certain foods universally appealing?
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.
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.
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.
Why do we have this kind of oddity in that a lot of foods that are, quote, good for us as humans are not foods that we really like, and a lot of the foods we really like are not good for us? How is that when you would think it would be the other way around?
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.
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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Chapter 4: How do humans learn to enjoy different flavors?
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.
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.
And we just made too much of it so that what we used to need is no longer what we need.
Is there anything that is universally tasty that everybody likes? Or as you just said, a lot of this is learned. Or is there a food that everybody that eats it loves it?
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.
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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Chapter 5: What role did cooking play in human development?
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.
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.
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.
So let's define some terms here. What is the difference between taste and flavor and then how much of those things is actually smell?
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?
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.
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.
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.
It would seem that in order to survive, humans have had to basically adapt to be able to eat and to some extent enjoy whatever they could get their hands on because... because that's the only way you can survive. And as you pointed out, everybody likes salty and everybody likes sweet, but some people like more, some people like less.
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Chapter 6: What has been the historical diet of humans?
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.
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.
So I imagine that in the history of flavor and taste and food and eating, the day somebody said, you know, if we cook this, it's going to be a lot better, had to be a pretty important day.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
We're talking about taste, flavor, and deliciousness. And my guest is Rob Dunn. He is an evolutionary biologist, and the name of his book is Delicious, the Evolution of Flavor and How It Made Us Human.
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