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
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.
One thing I haven’t seen in the top comments here which is relevant; your body begins the process of digestion and preparing to digest food at the point you put food in your mouth. So it’s not just your mouth and taste buds which are involved at this point. You’re not feeling satisfied if you spit out that tasty chocolate because you’ve just told your brain and via your brain, your stomach that it can expect to receive some sugary nutrition and energy and it’s started preparing the rest of your digestive system for that bounty.
>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.
There is. It’s called chewing gum. It comes in a variety of enjoyable flavours.
But what you enjoy about junk food, isn’t just the mouth feel, or the taste.
Swallowing itself is “satisfying”, so is the feeling of putting food in your stomach. Not as strong a feeling as the taste, but it’s part of the equation too.
So even if you spat the food out and it wasn’t unpleasant, you’d miss the swallowing/fullness part of the enjoyment.
I once had to work, I mean really work, not this Zoom call, hair going gray from politics BS we call work. When I ingested food I felt alive again. I went from physically drained to ready to sweat my ass off again. I ate a ton and felt light as a feather. Turns out ingesting food made me powerful and capable of doing more work. I literally felt a love for ingesting food.
I think that’s just how it is. You have to ingest it for the effect
Latest Answers