I did not expect to be impressed by Delicious, with its grandiose subtitle and opening chapter that bragged about how well traveled their families were while researching the book. But I quickly discovered that the book was full of interesting tidbits of information that I didn't know, such as why MSG tastes so good:
The taste of umami is a taste that rewards us for finding nitrogen. Umami taste, triggered by glutamic acid, leads us toward our necessary amino acids. But umami taste is not triggered by glutamic acid alone. Subsequent studies by other Japanese researchers would show that in addition to glutamic acid, inosinate and guanylate, two ribonucleotides, can also trigger umami taste. These two ribonucleotides are not found in the dashi’s kombu, but instead in the fish flakes. When inosinate or guanylate and glutamic acid are experienced together, they produce a kind of super umami. Glutamic acid and inosinate are experienced together in dashi. Dashi is rich with super umami, a flavor that is both deeply pleasing and indicative of the presence of nitrogen. (kindle loc 367)
The authors further tell us that cats have no sweet taste receptors:
an animal that only eats other animals will tend to have in its diet about the right concentration of nitrogen and phosphorus. It also ends up with enough energy, in the form of fat and sugars in its prey’s cells, to carry out its daily activity. Cats with sweet taste receptors are no more likely than those without to survive and flourish; if they spent too much time sipping nectar and too little time eating prey they might have even been less likely to survive. As a result, when the sweet taste receptor of an ancient cat broke, that cat survived nonetheless. It did more than survive, as Xia Li (at the time also a researcher at the Monell Chemical Senses Center) recently showed. It begat all modern species of cats. No modern cat species have functioning sweet taste receptors.[15] Forests of sweet fruits and nectar are not delicious to cats, not even a little. If you give a cat a sugar cookie, well, it really doesn’t care. It does not experience any pleasure in the cookie’s sweetness; the cookie, to the cat, is not sweet. (kindle loc 501)
Other cool stuff in the book describes how humans decide whats tasty and what's not, and why certain animals are almost never eaten, while many others simply taste like chicken:
Muscle flavor derives from the mouthfeel of the muscle combined with the aromas from sulfur compounds in the protein. Unfamiliar meat often “tastes like chicken,” in part because the dominant flavors in chicken are these simple, somewhat bland, muscle flavors. “Tastes like chicken” really means “tastes like muscle.” Muscle flavor is easy to complement with sauces or herbs, or bread batter and oil, but it is relatively nondescript on its own. (kindle loc 1624)
There's a description of why certain animals have pleasing flavors, and it comes down to the ineffectiveness in the animal's guts:
Animals with guts that are less effective at digesting food and breaking down toxins are more likely to have meat that bears the flavors of what they have eaten. The list of such animals, with less complete digestion, includes many more species. It includes species with hind guts (guts that occur after their stomach in the gastrointestinal assembly line), species with small foreguts (in which food stays too short a time to break down completely), and a variety of special cases. If animals from this second group of organisms eat foods with pleasing flavors, such as fruit and roots, their meat often strongly tastes of those flavors...Most of the preferred meats of the Mayangna and Miskito are from species whose meat bears the flavor of what they have eaten and that tend to eat foods with pleasing flavors. The Mayangna and Miskito rank the two peccary species they hunt, both of which feed heavily on roots, fruits, and seeds, as the tastiest of wild mammals. So too do hunters throughout the Americas. What is more, they prefer the peccary the most when it has been eating the bulbs of particular plants, peccary with a hint of allium, for instance, or wild hyacinth. Similarly, the Hadza hunter-gatherers of Tanzania find warthogs, distant relatives of peccaries, to be delicious.19 If the warthogs have been eating the roots of wild ginger (which they often do), the roots lend a spiciness to their meat. (kindle loc 1668-1684)
You might have heard of the theory that the mega-fauna of North America were driven to extinction by human beings' hunting and consumption of their meat. Apparently those mammoths were pretty darn yummy. What you probably didn't hear about (and I certainly didn't even think about it), is the evidence left behind by such extinction --- there were fruits that had evolved to be dispersed by those mega-fauna, and the authors describe how to identify them:
Each of these undispersed fruits had its own aroma, taste, and shape, its precise and unique biochemistry of attraction. Some, like mangos and avocados, had enormous seeds at their centers, hard to bite and often toxic. Others, like papayas, had many tiny, soft (and sometimes slippery) seeds. Some had fatty pulp, others had sweet pulp, still others had fleshy and somewhat bland pulp. In short, the fruits varied. And yet nearly all were big, indehiscent (they didn’t break open and release their seeds on their own), and aromatic. These fruits seemed to imply big, missing dispersers. Tellingly, the fruits looked to Janzen liked the sorts of fruits eaten in Africa by elephants and other large mammals. (kindle loc 1949)
This is great stuff. There's the question as to how these fruits could have survived even after the mega-fauna had been hunted to extinction, and the authors describes how monkeys would throw some of these fruits down onto the ground and waited until they softened and became fermented before eating them. It's also likely that humans did the same thing, and there's an entire chapter on human discovery of fermentation. It's also likely, of course, that the fruits that weren't tasty to humans also didn't survive once the mammoths were gone.
There's a chapter on spicy food, where the authors describe papers that test one of the theories I ever had, which was that spicy food evolved in hot places as a way to keep food free of pathogens. Unfortunately there's no definitive study taht proverd this:
We would expect spice use to be common where conditions are hot and wet and pathogens grow quickly. This prediction is easy enough to make, but harder to test well. Sherman and a student, Jennifer Billing, tried one approach. They compiled recipes from around the world and then compared the mean number of spices in different recipes. What they found is that the hotter a region is, the more kinds of spices are found in the average recipe, as they had predicted (figure 6.3). However, there are other reasons this pattern might be expected. For example, it is possible that more kinds of plants with the potential to be used as spices can grow in warm, wet places. In theory, it should be possible to statistically distinguish these two explanations, but no studies have done so, as of yet. (kindle loc 2301)
As you can see from the quotations this book far exceeded my expectations and I enjoyed reading it far more than I thought I would. There's more descriptions of fermented cheeses, alcohols, and what drives people to work on those foods when there are easier ways of getting those calories into your body. All in all I can highly recommend this book. Just be careful not to over eat while reading!
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