Why do we have to actually ingest food to enjoy it?

534 views

The other day I was eating some junk food and wishing there was a way I could just enjoy the taste of the food instead of it actually going into my body.

But if you were to just chew it then spit it out, it would be extremely unsatisfying and probably worse then just not putting it in your mouth at all.

In: 67

15 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

We can in some case- you gonna tell me you’ve never really enjoyed the *smell* of a meal cooking?

But for the most part, evolutionarily, we enjoy food as a way to incentivize eating things that we needed to survive as hunter-gatherers. This is why we like foods with sugar and fat and salt so much- they’re harder to find in a natural context, but vital to our development. The fact that, when we have almost unlimited access to these things, we don’t have very good self-control to not eat them until they make us unhealthy was so far beyond the context in which we evolved that it just wasn’t relevant.

You are viewing 1 out of 15 answers, click here to view all answers.