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Food and Health Fact #124
Fact #124: Sensory deception in processed food
By Matthew Rees
Food and Health Fact #124: Sensory deception in processed food
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This week's "food for thought" excerpt is from The End of Craving: Recovering the Lost Wisdom of Eating Well (2021), by Mark Schatzker.
"For hundreds of millions of years, every one of our ancestors labored to feed itself. Some won, some lost. But when food was obtained, it didn’t tell lies. Fat tasted like fat. Sugar tasted sweet. And only strawberries tasted like strawberries. Food may have been scarce, but once you got hold of it, the game was over. The better it tasted, the more useful it was. When it came to eating, the quest for pleasure was the quest for nourishment. It worked. Then, in a blink of a few decades, we changed food. So much of what we now eat is engineered to mislead the brain. The information we sense as we eat has become unreliable. We react as any animal reacts to uncertainty—by cranking up motivation. We avoid losses and seek the certainty of calories. It is the most significant change in food since the dawn of agriculture."
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