If your brain is designed to reward you for seeking out salts, sugars, and fats to stay alive, then why do radically different taste palettes between people exist? Shouldn’t taste preferences be similar across the species?
In: Biology
Food palettes and the necessity for specific food groups are very different. You palette develops based on what you are fed and what you feed yourself. Therefor your palette develops based on what food you have available around you. We seek out salts, fats and sugars but find different combinations based on our geographical location and resources available.
Others kind of touched on this, but consider that we agree on a whole host of things being unpalatable (many of them aren’t exactly edible, but it still counts.)
It’s like how humans share something like 99.99% of our DNA, but we’re still remarkably different while also being very very similar in myriad ways that we don’t consciously notice much, whereas our differences are very noticeable to us.
We might disagree on whether an avocado is tasty, but we agree that eating almost any sort of tree bark is not. I suspect we agree a lot more than we disagree.
Many of them are, like the examples you gave. However, taste is also very much cultural and a product of the environment in which we developed. If we’re grow up eating a distinct variety of foods, and all of our dietary needs are met, then our taste is probably going to favor it.
In other words, taste can be variable as long as the nutritional needs are being satisfied. The world is a big place, with huge regional differences in available foods. Accordingly, the human palate is just as varied.
They are. Every culture has desserts and sweets and salty things that are parts of their diets. Those remain the same, but it’s the other foods — that don’t elicit those cravings — that make up the differences.
Theorically “fat” doesn’t have a taste. The oleogustus is described but it’s more about tasting rancid old oil than the taste of fat. Fat is “good” for us because it concentrate flavors.
Now, accross species, tastes are similar. Mice, rats, humans all crave sweets, like salts and don’t really like bitter food. Humans can learn to like the bitter taste by learning and experience (that’s why people like coffee or asparagus).
For taste preference, just because you don’t like cake doesn’t mean you don’t like sugar. Finding someone who really really don’t have any liking for sugar is close to impossible. Maybe they prefer sugar in fruits than refined transformed sugar.
Same with fats. Just because you don’t like deep fried chicken wings doesn’t mean you don’t like fat. Maybe you prefer olive oil cooking or cheese.
Having someone really having no seeking at all for fat/sugary food would be weird. Even in rats experiment you don’t have that. You have some rats in experiment that really are not fond of straight up grease or sugary pellet but sugary water and coconut oil make them go crazy.
So taste preferences are pretty similar accross species, but the “way” to get those taste are not universal.
>Shouldn’t taste preferences be similar across the species?
They are close to the same. That’s how McDonalds, CocaCola, and a handful of others have become world-wide food and beverage empires.
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