Our current cultural obsession with food is undeniable. But, while the advent of the foodie may be a 21st century phenomenon, from an evolutionary standpoint, flavor has long helped define who we are as a species, a new book argues.
In Tasty: the Art and Science of What We Eat, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist John McQuaid offers a broad and deep exploration of the human relationship to flavor.
"Flavor is the most important ingredient at the core of what we are. It created us," McQuaid writes.
That's a pretty big statement to make. What's McQuaid's argument? Well, billions of years ago, when primitive life forms were floating in ancient oceans, those creatures needed "to sense what was going on around them, and to chase it down and to devour it," McQuaid tells NPR's Rachel Martin.
"And so this is kind of a basic motivational hinge that drove evolution," he says, "because in order to out-compete your fellow primitive creatures, you needed sharper senses." And, "if you had sharper senses, you also needed a bigger brain in order to process those senses."
When it comes to humans, scientists have argued that those bigger brains emerged as we started eating meat – which is packed with calories and fat, compared with the fruit, leaves, tubers and other raw foods our earliest ancestors ate.
The thinking (which some challenge) is that all those extra meat nutrients helped fuel the growth of our brain, which, as NPR's Chris Joyce has reported, uses about 20 times as much energy as the equivalent amount of muscle.
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