Aroma plays a big part in the taste of food and garlic has big aroma which in turn tells us the food tastes good. In Italian restaurants the aroma of garlic can be really prevalent which causes us to like the food. In fact there is more aroma than taste (imo).
As a sidebar most Asian markets stock containers of fresh peeled garlic cloves in pints or quarts and they are great. No peeling and no garlic paper all over the floor… just grab and chop, roast, saute - whatever!
This is a good point, though I’ll point out that nowhere in my original question did I assume that we must have evolved to like garlic. It seems more likely that we either evolved to like something that garlic satisfies (but is not necessarily garlic), or that it’s primarily a function of culture.
That said, it seems unlikely that the only reason is that garlic has a strong flavor. So does ginger, which is of course broadly popular, but I’ve never heard anyone tout ginger with the fervor some people have for garlic. Or onions.
But I’d certainly believe that the answer boils down to “it’s got a good flavor profile and it’s easier than most other spices to cultivate” – though I’d like more evidence for that, too.
My WAG is that we like garlic because there are few things that taste like it. When cooked it’s sweet but also sulphury and that is a relatively rare combination.
This is just it. It is a hypothesis. It’s not necessarily a bad hypothesis, and it could even be a good jumping-off point for the start of some poor grad student’s PhD thesis. My objection is not with speculation. It’s with not labeling speculation clearly as such. I don’t mean to pick on any particular post here, but when someone answers “why does XXX happen?” with “Oh, it happens because of YYY,” it implies that that is a known and certain answer, or at least that there’s some evidence to back it up.
I have no problem with people saying, “perhaps it could be reasonable to think that YYY could be part of the explanation,” but that rarely happens. People have a tendency to jump straight to the end and present their own ideas as fact. Even if those ideas are reasonable and even likely, in a format such as this, I think it’s important to separate fact from possibility.
And I also admit that since I have studied some of the complexity behind evolution of complex behaviors, I have a bit of an aversion to the very simple “X evolved because of natural selection because of Y” explanations. The truth is often far more complex than that. There are a LOT of factors that go into evolution.
Yeah, I agree with that.