savanna, from meat scraps on an animal
carcass to nuts, fruits, leaves, and tubers. They
relied on taste and smell to judge whether a
new object was edible — sweetness meant
nourishing sugars, bitterness toxic alkaloids,
foulness dangerous decay — and to help
identify and recall the effects of objects they
had encountered before. And they ate a varied
diet that probably included several hundred
different kinds of foods. They had a lot of
flavors to keep track of.
When humans developed agriculture
around 10,000 years ago, they traded their
diverse but chancy diet for a more predictable
and monotonous one. Now they lived largely
on wheat, barley, rice, and corn, all
concentrated sources of energy and protein,
and all relatively bland. They had very few
flavors to keep track of. But they still had
their senses of taste and smell.
Spices Haven’t Always Gone with Foods