If you grew up in an environment where your food choices were limited to olives, mangos, and rotting garbage, you would quickly learn to like the taste of olives and mangos. Since you had the luxury of growing up in an environment with a broader range of edible and nutritive foods, you also had the luxury of developing likes and dislikes for foods that may otherwise be of roughly similar value.
But what are the advavtages of disliking any food that has nutriants? I’m going to not be hungry after my stomach is full anyway, so what is the benefet of disliking any food?
Why does there have to be a benefit; it’s just something you can do, because you live in a land of plenty (so to speak). You might just as well ask what are the benefits of cooking far more than you can eat, then throwing half of it away - there is no benefit, but you can still do it, because of the abundance of supply.
I think perhaps you are looking at the question from the wrong perspective. Our taste buds can sense about 5 different “tastes”: sweet, sour, salty, bitter and glutamic acids. Sweet and salty are generally yummy, so we seek out those foods. Bitter and sour probably originally evolved as defenses: if it tastes nasty, it’s probably not going to do you any good, so it’s best to avoid it.
Brains, however, have very complex wiring, so there will naturally be some variation in how these sensations are ultimately interpreted. This is, of course, true with just about any sensation (e.g., some people like to be touched in certain areas, others find it “oogy”). There are some sensations, therefore, that some folks will find “pleasing”, and others will find “displeasing”. There may well be a general trend (e.g., finding salty and sweet to be pleasing), but it’s unlikely to be universal given the brain’s complexity. Thus, individual tastes will result.
Further, during development, while the brain is still being wired, so to speak, what you eat regularly will likely have an affect on what foods you find pleasing. If you are regularly exposed to certain foods, and have little choice in the matter, you will likely come to find such tastes pleasing. With the large amount of choice in many western countries, the particular foods one might be exposed to as a child will vary considerably, thus adult tastes will likewise vary considerably. I like black olives, but can’t stand green ones. I hate white/red onions, but like green ones. Plus, there’s probably a psychological aspect involved (part of my distaste for red onions, for example, probably comes from being forced to eat them as a child, despite finding them displeasing at that age).
So, really, while evolution played a role in establishing the taste sensations we have, it would be incorrect to say that one’s likes and dislikes are likewise a product of evolution. There does not need to be an advantage or disadvantage for varying tastes; it’s just a by-product of complex brains.
Evolution describes what happens to large groups over time, but it doesn’t describe why you don’t like olives. Personal experience is much more useful for this type of explanation.
Furthermore, science never answers Why questions, only How and What questions. “How did I develop an aversion to olives” is possibly answerable, as is “What edible foods do many people need to acquire a taste for?”
As the mom of a just-now-eating-solids infant, I’m VERY careful in my reactions to her reactions. She makes some “Mom! That is nasty!” faces which are pretty hilarious. But the last thing I want to do is to reinforce her idea of nastiness by laughing, nodding or otherwise indicating amusement. I just nod understandingly and encourage her to try another bite. The “nasties” wear off, and she’ll better accept the same food the second time. But I see lots of moms who teach their kids that foods are nasty when they’re really little by mimicking “nasty face”, laughing at refusal of foods or otherwise reinforcing that natural hesitation babies have to try new foods.
There’s some evidence that breast feeding moms who eat a wide variety of foods have less picky eaters. Dr. Wm. Sears posits that this is because our milk tastes different at different times, depending on what we eat. Unlike formula, which tastes the same all the time.
Not only that, but amniotic fluid apparently changes in taste depending on the mother’s diet, and a fetus is constantly drinking and tasting the amniotic fluid in the womb. Is this nature’s way of “teaching” us what to like, because our mothers survive on it, so it obviously won’t kill us? (Yes, yes, I know nature is not an anthropomorphic force with goals and techniques. I’m being colloquial here.)
So it may indeed go back to even before you started eating. It’s not only what and how your mom offered you as an infant, but what she ate while pregnant and breastfeeding that shapes your preferances.
Man, Eastwood was great in that.
Bonus question - what’s the difference between sour and bitter?
The difference between a lemon and a cup of black coffee.
“Bitter” is a hard one for most Americans to grasp because really the only bitter most of us ever taste is coffee (unless you’re a crazy weed-eatin’ herbalist like me!). Our diet just doesn’t contain lots of bitter leafy greens, the most common source of bitters.
Have you ever had Angastora (sp?) bitters? They’re made from gentain, probably the bitterest bitter there is. Try just one drop on your tongue and you’ll never confuse sour and bitter again.
Just though of something else: Through evolution, we all develop tastes for different things, because otherwise the competition for scarce resources would mean we wouldn’t survive. If everyone liked mangoes and only mangoes, we’d all kill each other for the mangoes while letting perfectly good pineapple go uneaten.
If some mutation were to happen which excessively narrowed the palatable foodstuffs to one or two items, that person would face a severe disadvantage in times of limited access to those foods. Those born with a version of the genes prefering a wide range of foods would be more successful at finding good food to eat.
Having a varety of tastes as a species means that we’ll each have a better shot at eating something available, and not hunting to extinction only one or two things, which would then become unavailable and cause us to die.
Why did you get the anti-mango hook-up? Who knows. I got it too. But my son is awfully glad we did, 'cause that’s more mangoes for him!
What is this concept called? When there is a question like, “Why is it that we seem to be perfectly suited to live on this planet”, and the answer is, “Because if we weren’t, we wouldn’t be here to ask the question”, does this answer/concept/arguement have a name?
I think that’s the Anthropic Principle, or something very like it.
The Anthropic Principle seems to the inverse of the meme ( for want of a better word) I’m looking for. In fact, the referenced article uses this meme to reduce the Weak Anthropic Principle to a tautology.
Honestly, I doubt it has much to do with genetics at all. Considering the often widely-divergent tastes within a (western) household, much less an entire family tree, I’d say it has much more to do with the factors I mentioned previously.
Also, if we had all evolved only to like mangoes, there simply wouldn’t be 6 billion+ of us at the moment. Either that or mango trees would have been among our first cultivated plants, and they’d be everywhere. The fact that we (as humans) like a variety of foods is more a testament to our adpatations as generalists (and the increased variation that produces) than a specific adaptation for different folks to like different foods.
Ultimately, it is our brains that do the tasting (and feeling…and hearing…and touching; perhaps not surprisingly, a particular taste sensation can be achieved simply by activating a particuar neuron, bypassing the taste buds entirely), so the way our individual brains are wired will determine which sensations we find pleasing or displeasing.
Sour is the ability to taste H[sup]+[/sup] ions (acidic foods). “Bitter” is actually similar to “sweet” in that the molecules bind to the same proteins on the cell surface of the taste buds. The two differ in terms of the actual chemical pathway that is subsequently followed. You can find more technical information here.
At least for primates, the ability to detect sour helps us to identify fruit high in vitamin C (ascorbic acid).
It might be pointed out that the “sense of taste” goes well beyond the signals generated by our taste buds, and relies in large part on aromatic chemicals in food that are detected via the sense of smell. We thus are able to detect a lot more about food quality than we could if we had to rely on the taste buds alone.
And also note that a lot of food aversions aren’t so much to the taste/smell of the food, but to the mouthfeel. Some people can’t stand gelatinous textures, some people can’t stand dry textures. Other people like them. Again, this is probably just learned behavior and personal preference. If everyone around you was telling you how yummy dried jellyfish was, and eating it happily, you’d be much more likely to develop a taste for it.
I know that I’ve developed a taste for coffee in just the last few years. When I first tried it in my 20s, it tasted horrible. Tried after that, still horrible. Then a little less horrible. Then, hey, that’s not so bad. Then, mmmmmmm…coffee!