Why do humans enjoy things that taste spicy or bitter when those flavors generally deter other animals from eating something?
In: Biology
To the human mind, pain signals are incredibly similar to pleasure. If you look at scans of human brain activity in pain vs in pleasure you will find they look a lot a like.
You are asking two related but different questions.
*Why do people like eating spicy foods?*
First, humans taste five flavors: sweet, sour, bitter, salty and umami (savory). Spicy isn’t a flavor. What we call spicy is activation of pain receptors that normally respond to temperature. So I am going to change your question to w*hy do people like eating painful foods?*
You know how on a hot summer day outdoor pools can still be really cold? If you jump in and swim around the water is really cold. So cold it hurts! If you get out of the pool you don’t want to go back in, but if you stay in the water you get used to it an the cold water becomes ‘fine’ and you have good time swimming.
Spicy food is like that. Your first bite feels like you burned your mouth. That’s because the same part of your body that responds to heat also responds to spicy food. If you spit it out all you get is the hot feeling, but if you keep eating it eventually your body says hey I should do something to feel better. Your body tells your nerves ‘hey, we aren’t in actually hurt’ let me do something to help you feel less pain. Not just in your mouth but everywhere. It also tells your brain ‘hey, don’t be so stressed we are fine’ let me do something to help you calm down.
Just like jumping into the cold pool is better than slowly wading in, the wanting to keep eating a spicy food after the first bite likely comes from having eaten it in the past. The younger you get spicy foods the more likely you are to eat it when you get older. How young? The spicier a pregnant moms food the more their kids prefer spicy foods as adults. So, that young.
*Why do people like eating bitter foods?*
There are 25 variations of bitter tastes buds and depending upon which ones you have it can make foods taste more or less bitter. Most people like some bitter foods but not others. Some people may not like the taste of whisky but they do like black coffee.
This means that how a grapefruit tastes to me is different than how it tastes to you.
TLDR; we expose kids to spicy foods and the bitter foods their parents are less sensitive to.
Im a human who hates spicy and bitter. Am i sn animal?
I can’t speak for others, but I eat these foods for the flavors they bring.
I don’t just chuck a bunch of peppers in food to make it hot, I put a few in to enhance the flavor of whatever I’m eating. It’s the same as adding any other spice.
We know the difference between sensation and damage. Proto-humans (first 43 trimesters or so) really do avoid these sorts of foods unless they’re raised on them, largely because they’re still animals. Ha ha ha.
But seriously it’s the same reason we like to be afraid on roller coasters. We crave stimulation of many sorts. We know we’re not getting hurt and we’re not likely to get hurt. So it’s fun and tasty and whatever.
The other thing is many of these flavors and foods are factually harmful to certain animals.and some things that deter humans don’t deter animals. For instance caffeine is an insecticide, as are most of the alkaloids found in plants. And skunks eat live bees without being bothered by the sting.
And if you look at the delicacies of the past they are often just freaking repulsive and highly local. Like most westerners would not be fond of eating a blowder egg, which if you don’t know what that is it’s a nearly hatched duckling or chicken boiled in its shell, old beaky and crunchy boned.
humans are crazy, once we know something isn’t going to kill us we’re pretty much down to party.
Does this have something to do with humans being the only species that heats their food with fire? We like eating warm/hot food due to many possible reasons from human evolution. Hot food cooked with fire will have microbes killed and prevent diseases, which could also lead to humans having an increased preference for hot food. Humans that ate cooked, hot food less often may have died to diseases more often. Maybe our attraction to spicy food is based on us liking hot food.
Virtually every other animal avoids spicy food and cannot use fire for hot food, [and coincidentally, only two known animals like spicy food.](https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/2018/07/tree-shrews-pain-chili-peppers-news/)
From [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catching_Fire:_How_Cooking_Made_Us_Human):
>Humans (species in the genus *homo*) are the only animals that cook their food and Wrangham argues Homo erectus emerged about two million years ago as a result of this unique trait. Cooking had profound evolutionary effect because it increased food efficiency which allowed human ancestors to spend less time foraging, chewing, and digesting. H. erectus developed a smaller, more efficient digestive tract which freed up energy to enable larger brain growth. Wrangham also argues that cooking and control of fire generally affected species development by providing warmth and helping to fend off predators which helped human ancestors adapt to a ground-based lifestyle. Wrangham points out that humans are highly evolved for eating cooked food and cannot maintain reproductive fitness with raw food.
Also, food that went cold (like raw food) is less appealing to eat, and it should have the same nutrients even if it were warm. However, we still would prefer to reheat it.
The answer to your question is possibly based on the evolution of humans which means we can’t have a decisive answer. (Also, I’m not an expert so this could be very wrong. Take it with a grain of salt).
Edit: ~~I might be able to add that hot food cooked with fire will have microbes killed and prevent diseases, which could also lead to humans having an increased preference for hot food. Humans that ate cooked, hot food less often may have died to diseases more often. Again, maybe our attraction to spicy food is based on us liking hot food.~~
Edit 2: Had to move around or add a lot of information.
Humans typically use a certain ingredient with a variety of other ingredients that give it a more palatable flavor. Yes humans eat onions where as other animals won’t eat them but how many people do you know that just take bites out of an onion? Especially on a consistent basis. Well, you cut up some onions, throw some carrots in there followed by some celery and some oil! Damn son you just made mirepoix! One of the most well known bases in culinary history. Point being I’m sure early man tasted a lot of terrible things but those things weren’t really liked until it was adapted into some type of “recipe.”
I would like to add that centuries of agriculture have led to us preferentially breed foods that have a tolerable spiciness. This varies by the culture and environment you grow up in.
The spicy foods you eat today are not by random chance but selection. A long time ago, someone said “I like this” and they grew more of it and grew more of what they liked from that, and so on.
How did we first decide to eat the painful fruit? I don’t have an answer for that, but my best guess would be: plants evolved aldehydes and such to keep them from being eaten. So with some plants, we would eat and die. No good. But with others, we might only have an unpleasant tingle or “heat” in our mouths. And if you’re hungry enough, where you’re depending on gathering to survive and something is edible but doesn’t kill you, you can opt to eat the lesser spicy fruit.
We don’t all have the same tastebuds and tolerance to spicy foods, but it might be likely for some groups that if they could tolerate it, they could eat more. I’d say nature has favored humans as generalists, for the most part.
It has a lot to do with how we evolved. Way back in cave man times getting enough food meant finding things that don’t want to be eaten and figuring out if they were edible or not.
Plants that are poisonous are almost certainly bitter, but not all bitter plants are poisonous. So, they would test bitter plants by chewing them for a **long** time without swallowing and see if there was any harmful reactions to it. This means being able to at least tolerate bitter taste was an evolutionary advantage.
Once you had food that you knew was safe to eat, preserving and protecting it would ensure the supply lasted as long as possible. Spicy plants decay much slower and are repulsive to most creatures so adding them to anything would preserve and protect the food from scavengers. This is why spicy foods tend to originate and prevail in hot environments where natural refrigeration was not an option. Learning to like the spices and/or spice the foods in a way that was tasty again was an evolutionary advantage.
It’s not so much that we ‘like’ spicy or bitter foods (eating a raw jalapeno or a mouthful of oregano is not nearly as fun as eating a spicy taco or spaghetti), but rather, that we learned to use them in a way that was at least tolerable and preferably enjoyable because it helped us survive historically.
Simple. Those defense mechanisms also prevent mold and bacteria from growing on them so humans started to use them as a conservative. Eventually we got used to the taste and learned to like it. Because we didn’t have refrigerators back then we had to save food in other ways. And it’s far more common for spicy foods to exist in hot climates (think India southeast Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa) because food spoiled much faster. So they used more of it. As for temperate climates we still had cold winters and temperate summers so we used other types of preservatives (such as salt and smoking food).
TLDR because food spoils and spice stops that
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