EVER WONDERED WHY some animals walk or fly for miles in search of salt? Or what drove our ancestors to create better and better tools and learn to tame fire?
Some of the most interesting stories of evolution, according to professor Rob Dunn from the Department of Applied Ecology at North Carolina State University, can be told from the perspective of taste and flavour. Dunn’s upcoming book on the subject – Delicious: The evolution of flavour and how it made us human, co-written with Monica Sanchez – suggests that pleasure is nature’s way of ensuring animals get what they need.
“Pleasure leads us to the food we need, towards sex and reproduction,” he says. “It’s a reward for doing what will keep our species and lineages going. So, every time you taste something, you can think of your tongue as offering you two roads – the road to pleasure, towards what you ancestrally needed, and the road towards danger you should be avoiding.”
Dunn believes research into taste and flavour could lead to fundamental discoveries that are both immediate and
