Does the human taste preference for charcoal grilled meats show evolution in action?

[astro]

I mean they just taste so yummy when prepared over charcoal or wood fire. Is the hundred thousand years or so of human fire use enough to wind this into our genome as a taste preference vis evolution?

[Q.E.D]

My inclination is to say “no”, in part because 100,000 years is not really enough time for any significant evolutionary change to occur, in part because taste preferences are not particularly “selectable”, and in part because AFAIK, taste preferences are learned, not inherited genetically.

[Mangetout]

@Q.E.D.

taste preferences are not particularly “selectable”.

I disagree; food poisoning would be quite a significant selective force.

[KP]

I’d argue that even a taste for cooked foods is not particularly strong. It’s probably more a matter of seminal experiences in our youth than genetic heritage. Many cultures enjoyed fresh, raw, dried, or ‘aged’ (e.g. underground) meats that we might find disgusting. Most human cultures didn’t follow this route, because cooking offers many objective benefits (preservation, improvements in texture, conversion of indigestible connective tissue to nutritionious forms of denatured collagen, etc.)

I say this because a relatively few thousand years is probably not enough to change something as important as our fundamental tasste preferences. Other primates enjoy raw meat, and though the aroma of cooking may appeal to many (i’ll get to that in a moment), they often treat cooked meat with suspicion

I believe its quite likely -and this is mere opinion- that if you grew up on pemmican, you’d find it more comforting -“real food”- and though you might enjoy the more labor and resource entensive cooked foods, you’d think of them as delicacies, and not a natural preference. After all, whoever takes the trouble to cook a dish, would probably also take the time to perform additional steps to improve flavor and texture, as well. The result may be tasty, but so is an elaborate French dessert – and most would agree the French cuisine exploits pre-existing preferences (innate or acquired) rather than being a new biological drive.

Having said that, cooking, including the more extreme versions like grilling, do offer several objective benefits in flavor. Cermelization and Maillard reactions create new types of compounds, which we interpret as “complex” or “rich” flavors. Many molecules and fragments are volatilized during cooking and from hot foods, which provide a stronger sensory stimulus to our interlinked senses of smell and taste. Texture is improved, providing more variety and contrast, and releasing more flavors into the mouth in less time. Flavors from diverse materials are combined – some would not please our tastes, but we have selected the ones which please us: our cooking evolved to match our tastes, more than the other way around!

There is, after all, such a thing as bad cooking. If we had an innate for ‘grilling’ per se, we’d probably care less about burning foods and we’d avoid med. rare. Instead, huge parts of human cuisine are simply selected spoiled foods developed to an art (e.g. wine, cheese, beer, sourdough breads, etc.)

Most generalized animals tend to adapt quickly to enjoy cooked foods in a very short tiem. There is no need to presume evolution. (Speculative observation: Dogs, overall, are considered to be more generalized, and cats more specialized hunters. Wild dogs adapt to a cooked diet more readily than wild cats. Nutrition also plays a role: a species’ dietary needs co-evolve with its available diet, so a generalized animal that alternates opportunistically between various lifestyles probably can adapt more quickly than more specialized species)

In the end: fire good. Cooking good. But the reason we find many cooked foods so delectable, is that we deliberately chose the methods/combinations we enjoyed. To truly understand the impact of that, you’d had to have grown up eating my mother’s cooking. She was skilled in many cuisines, but generally ranged from apathy to a painful experimentation born of boredom. Many things that came close to being food graced our table, as well as otherwise luscious ingredients and techniques that even she found utterly discusguting in combination

[tremorviolet]

I don’t know about a prefernce for grilled meats but there are some scientists who believe that humans have a preference for cooked foods that enabled them to become the dominent species on the planet.

Different scholars and popular writers have argued that human beings have “evolved” to be carnivores, herbivores, frugivores, or omnivores, but anthropologist Richard Wrangham says we are “cookivores,” grinning at the neologism. “We evolved to eat cooked foods,” he declares. “Raw food eating is never practiced systematically anywhere in the world.”

Wrangham spent fours years trying to disprove that last statement in a global investigation of current and historical cultures. He looked for the most extreme examples of people eating a pure raw-food diet, but failed to find any, “except for people in urban settings who were philosophically committed to raw food,” he says. One researcher studied several hundred German raw-foodists, who had access to food of “astonishingly high quality” relative to wild raw foods, says Wrangham. Nonetheless, 25 percent of this group was chronically underweight, and 50 percent of the females “were so low in energy that they stopped having menstrual periods,” he says. So even under exceptionally good conditions of superb year-round food availability, people had low energy and were "biologically incapable of appropriate reproduction, " says Wrangham. From an evolutionary point of view, sterility gets you bounced from the gene pool.

The genus Homo appeared about two million years ago, and even “the most skeptical archaeologist” will agree that fire was being controlled in southern Europe between 300,000 and 400,000 years ago, says Wrangham. Sound evidence of fireplaces dating from 380,000 years ago exists, for example, at Terra Amata in France, near Nice; other sites have earth ovens dug into cave floors. “Many regard this as the first evidence of cooking,” he says, “but to me, this is rather sophisticated stuff, and is probably the earliest evidence we have of something that very likely was going on before.”

Wrangham takes an extreme position: he postulates that cooking food over fires began by about 1.6 million years ago, and was an innovation so important that it allowed the evolution of Homo erectus, the earliest hominid to resemble modern humans (see “Primal Kitchens,” November-December 2000, page 13). “Cooking enabled these animals—the very earliest erectus—to acquire their food more efficiently and to get more of it,” he says. “A principal reason was that it made food softer.”

Softer food has many implications. Imagine what a nonhuman, raw-food-eating primate like a chimpanzee consumes in one day. “It’s a great big pile of leaves, seeds, and roots,” Wrangham explains, gesturing with his hands to suggest a mound the size of a small shrub. Humans, with generally larger bodies, nonetheless fuel themselves with a far smaller volume of food. “Compared with other primates, we are evolved to eat foods of high caloric density—meats, roots, seeds,” he says. Cooking makes this possible by changing the brittleness of collagen fiber, softening it and making meat far easier to chew. “People who think that meat dominated the diet of early Homo may well be right,” he says, “but they would have to have spent five hours a day just chewing. Raw meat is very hard to chew, and presumably raw wild meat is even harder.”

Consider again the chimpanzees, who spend as much time eating as one would expect for primates of their size and weight (100 to 120 pounds). “In primates, there’s a nice relation between body weight and the amount of time spent eating,” Wrangham explains. Chimps spend about six hours a day chewing. Humans, who typically weigh more than chimpanzees, should theoretically eat more and spend even more time at it. Instead, data from 15 cross-cultural studies indicate that on average, human beings spend about one hour a day chewing food.

full Harvard Magazine article

[Q.E.D]

@Mangetout

I disagree; food poisoning would be quite a significant selective force.

Yes, that’s why so many animal species cook their food, too. :rolleyes: