I used to think that it was because fried foods are so high in fat and humans are genetically programmed to prefer these sorts of calorically dense foods.
This seems to make a lot of sense, but today I was having some canned sardines as a snack and I noticed that something like two thirds of the calories come from fat.
They tasted pretty good, but they didn’t have that awesome, addictive taste which you get from, say, french fries which apparently have 40 to 50 percent of their calories from fat. Or a piece of fried chicken which is something like 50 percent of calories from fat.
The percentage of Calories that come from fat is a useless measure, since it doesn’t tell you anything about how many total Calories there are. If you put a drop of oil in a gallon of water and shake it up, you’ve got something that is extremely low-fat, but still gets 100% of its Calories from fat.
Yes, that’s a good point. But still, one can ask why some foods taste pretty good and some foods taste absolutely awesome to the point where they f*ck with your mind.
Pure fat by itself has no taste; flavors come from other stuff in the food (or vegetable oil, lard, tallow, etc), so it is the chicken itself and/or the breading that makes it taste so good; of course, the fat itself does contribute to modifying the flavor and texture and your body recognizes the feel of fat as meaning something loaded with calories, thus the reward system kicks in.
Probably also relevant to the taste of fried foods are the products of Maillard reactions, which involve combining sugars, proteins (or amino acids anyway,) and heat.
I was going to say…deep fried Brussels sprouts are awesome. I still prefer them roasted for health reasons, but damn they’re good deep fried. They may well be my favorite vegetable.
Most fried foods are starchy to begin with (french fries, potato chips, etc) or coated with starchy batter. That probably contributes a lot to the taste and texture.
100% fat would just be gross. You wouldn’t eat a chunk of lard or drink a cup of canola oil, right?
For the OP: fried foods do hit all the buttons for our taste buds - fat, starch, salt. This is clearly part of the answer.
However, I think it does go deeper than that - boiled potatoes coated in oil and salt are good, but not as good as french fries. I’m not sure looking to natural selection is a good explanation. It’s just a combination of things that all happen to appeal to us, so we keep doing it. In particular, frying is the only way to get very even application of the Maillard reaction, and it has a unique texture that you can’t duplicate any other way. It’s like asking for the reason Japanese like raw fish; there’s not going to be an evolutionary answer except at a very basic level.
Yes, I guess there are a couple different questions here.
First, what is the exact mechanism by which the human body evaluates food for fat content and how exactly do fried foods stimulate this mechanism so effectively.
Second, why did this mechanism evolve the way it did.
Yes, why do we like the flavors produced by the Maillard reaction? It seems odd, since the chemicals produced by the reaction do not themselves appear to be nutrients (important ones, anyway) and the reaction in fact destroys small quantities of actual nutrients (sugars and amino acids). Furthermore, the reaction appears to depend upon cooking.
Is it possible, I wonder, that the liking for these flavors is something that has evolved since humans began to cook food, and is perhaps adaptive because it encourages us to cook things? (Cooked food does, I suppose, tend to be more nutritious and digestible for humans than uncooked.)
I like that hypothesis. It’s interesting that food cooking in oil smells terrific. If you define fried food broadly as food cooked in oil, it seems likely that man has had access to fried foods for at least a couple hundred thousand years – game animals cooked in their own fat.
What is normally referred to as “fried food,” (i.e. deep-fried food) is arguably a special, extreme case of food cooked in oil. So perhaps that explains why deep fried food would act as a superstimulus.
Here’s a question: Is fried food a superstimulus for cheetahs? For chimpanzees? If not, it’s good evidence for the cooking hypothesis.
