As animals, wouldn’t we prefer raw foods? What makes the smell and taste of slow cooked brisket so much more enjoyable than the prospect of offal in a slaughterhouse?
And if dogs or other animals feel the same way, why?
I can think of an evolutionary reason why we’d prefer cooked meat: It’s much safer than raw.
Apparently, a quarter of a million years is enough to instill an evolutionary taste preference:
“Preparing food with heat or fire is an activity unique to humans, and scientists believe the advent of cooking played an important role in human evolution”
Also, it apparently gives us easier access to nutrients:
“Wrangham suggested that by cooking meat, it acted as a form of “pre-digestion”, allowing less food energy intake to be spent on digesting the tougher proteins such as collagen and the tougher carbohydrates. The digestive tract shrank, allowing more energy to be given to the growing brain of H. erectus”
It takes substantially less energy to digest cooked foods than raw (the cooking does a lot of the work before we eat it.) Since we have big brains that know how to make fire, we evolved to have a taste for cooked foods which are more nutritionally efficient.
I think that’s mostly it. No other animal is able to make fire, so it wouldn’t be much of an evolutionary advantage for them to develop a taste for cooked meat.
That is not to say that we tamed fire in order to cook meat. In fact, probably not. It was probably some other reason, originally (like protection from the cold or from predators) and then cooking came later.
One article I read said we evolved as meat eaters by starting a scavengers, raiding the carcasses when the big predators had finished with them and walked away. “aged” meat is softer and more easily cut, chewed and digested - apparently some enzymes get to work on dead meat too. (Many places still “age” their steaks).
When we first began killing our own meat, humans discovered that cooking over a fire accelerated the process and helped process the meat. (One can imagine the discovery being related to finding carcasses after a brush fire…) Thus fire became a safer and quicker substitute for bacteria, enzymes and the sun, and waiting for the lions to leave. A million or more years of eating meat cooked meant we do not now need the digestive capability to easily chew and process raw meat, just as a million years of tools mean we don’t need the teeth to strip carcasses, even if the meat is tasty.
(So when your annoying vegan acquaintance starts in on you, you can point out that we were evolved to eat dead animals, especially if the meat was no longer fresh.)
Gunner the Great Dane seems to love cooked meat, especially hotdogs and cheeseburgers. In fact he won’t eat a hotdog unless it’s been cooked to his preference.
So on a biological level, do animals detect that the food has been “predigested” for them?
My Bernese Mountain Dog isn’t especially fond of hot dogs (sometimes I suspect it might just be the name! ;)), but cheeseburgers, steaks, roasts, and grilled chicken and the like he will devour with gusto. It’s kind of heartwarming to see a Bernese salivate with unselfconscious abandon when the aroma of sizzling barbecue hits his canine nostrils as I bring it into the kitchen and start cutting it up for him. Clearly, dogs love the aroma and taste of cooked meat and appreciate its appeal as much as we do. If they could operate a gas grill, they’d probably be at it night and day! 
Andy, my old black tomcat, also prefers cooked meat.
He prefers cooked chicken to chicken-based soft cat food. And he’ll practically leap into your lap at the table if you have cooked pork. Beef he likes, but he’ll just meow at you from tableside for that. You don’t have to forcibly restrain him like you would for a bit of pork roast.
That’s the prevailing theory. It may have been that we used tools to crack open the larger bones and get at the marrow. Of course, our closest relatives (chimps) hunt occasionally, so it may have been just an expansion of an already developed behavior.
This is just off the top of my head, but I’d wager that at least part of this is because cooking meat gives off just MORE smell in general. The heat causes a lot of odor molecules to be volatilized, and off they go through the air. You can smell cooking meat from much farther away than cold raw meat, after all. So it could involve quantity as much as quality.
I would argue that this is more “nurture” than nature. Growing up in a strict vegetarian household, the smell of cooking meat would make me gag. Cooking fish has actually caused me to retch and get a headache.
I think this has a great deal do with it. Cooking doesn’t produce new chemicals until you are into the browning phase. Until then it denatures proteins, causing coagulation and ravelling of strands. Cells break down, and the meat inherently starts to shrink as the force of the protein strands tying up pulls the overall structure inward - forcing liquid out. This liquid includes what was inside cells, and is going to be a rich cocktail of stuff, stuff that you would not usually manage to liberate unless you somehow managed to macerate the meat enough to rupture the majority of cells - whereas in the course of the normal killing and eating of meat only a small number of cells will be ruptured.
I well remember my previous cat going utterly nuts when I had a piece of roast chicken warming in the microwave. He actually stood on his back legs in the middle of the kitchen to get a better view of what was going on. Ironically he didn’t actually like the roast chicken when I gave him some, but he was almost beside himself at the smell.
I doubt your singular experience proves things either way. I’d like to see some kind of actual study on this before writing things off as nurture.
It’s all a matter of smell and taste. For example, sugar tastes good to you and cardboard does not because one is nutritionally useful and the other isn’t. At a biological level, there’s no understanding that a simple change in glucose bonds is the difference between cellulose and plant starch. It’s just as simple as: guy A likes to eat sugar and grows strong, with many kids; guy B likes to eat cardboard and dies of an intestinal blockage. So A’s preference gets passed along.
To some extent, you can see that in action with cilantro preference in humans. Some portion of the population (including myself) thinks cilantro tastes like soap, while most people like the flavor. Scientists have discovered that this is mostly an inherited trait, not just a learned one. Since there’s no particular survival advantage to cilantro, it’s not likely that either trait will breed out of the population, but something like a preference for cooked meat does have a survival/reproduction benefit.
I think an awful lot of our pleasures in life are determined by genetic predisposition that allow us to survive even when we’re not consciously aware of the advantage. For example, I’m spending inordinate amounts of time taking care of my yard and maintaining a koi pond. I do it because I like it, but maybe I like it because a cave man who likes farming and fishing will have better-fed kids than one who just loved sitting around staring at the clouds.
I guess I worded that poorly. I grew up in a family of vegetarians and an extended social circle of vegetarians. That’s not difficult considering the vegetarianism was due to religious beliefs. (BTW Hinduism predates Jainism - and the Brahmin caste was vegetarian).
So my sample size ran into the thousands. And I cannot recall a single instance of anyone finding the smell of meat appetizing. On the other hand, reactions were pretty much like mine.
I would suggest the alternate theory that the nurture vs. nature principle is affecting the behavior of those who have chosen to be vegetarians, not the natural behavior of carnivores. My earlier example of my dog’s attraction to the smell of grilled meat is typical and exhibited by wild animals, too, it’s not something learned.
In most cases (not all) vegetarianism is a choice, not something innate. Some would argue it’s a commendably moral choice, and far be it from me to disagree, but we are by nature omnivores and innately attracted to both vegetarian and carnivorous diets.
I agree. The idea that we are naturally repulsed by the smell of grilled food does not make much sense, evolutionarily speaking. Why would have we have to learn to like the food that, pretty much, made us who we are? It’s more likely that if you’re brought thinking meat is unclean or sinful or whatever, then it’s not too surprising if you find it unattractive.
As usual Horizon did an episode on this very topic sort of. Did cooking make us human?
its worth the watch.
A lot of that is just dumb luck though. Like the glue and ink in new books smells pretty good. Yum! (inb4 Q reference)