/ck/ - Food & Cooking

>>18957021
are those bats? Wtf

>>18957032
Asians are nuts

>>18957032
those would be fish brosef

>>18957032
thats bacon dumbass

>>18957032
have you seen a bat before??

>>18957032
That's bread, you dangus.

Humans evolved associating that smell and taste with nutrition and survival.

>>18957021
I've often wondered this as well, but also cooking food in general. I've just settled with God did it.

>>18957021
>What’s the biological reason why smokiness tastes good?
It doesn't taste good to everyone so the reason you like it might not be biological

>>18957021
Heating things up does a lot of good stuff to food, primarily making it easier to digest by breaking down long molecular chains into smaller, simpler ones. We've probably learned to associate "smokey" flavor with cooking, hence why we think it tastes good.

We actually don't like food that is "too" smokey though. At best, we like food that's kind of just been hanging around in smokey conditions, as opposed to heated to the point where the food itself is burnt enough to produce smoke. We actually enjoy a lot of flavors of things we shouldn't like if used in small amounts, including a wide number of chemicals that plants create to ward off animals from eating them, like mint or chili flavors.

>>18957070
>>18957021
maybe because we spent eons eating shit over a bonfire

People who liked it lived to make babies.

>>18957021
Does there need to be a biological reason? I don't think there was necessarily an evolutionary factor in it, simply that certain flavors happened to work well with our taste bud.
Why would sweet foods generally taste better than more nutritional foods if taste was shaped by evolutionary pressure to consume more nutritious food?

>>18957119
To our cave dwelling ancestors a honey comb would have been a nutritional bonanza.

>>18957062
This most likely

>>18957119
Yeah I don't think smokiness really has any evolutionary reason. It's just a complex flavor that activates a lot of taste buds in a unique way. If anything it should be selected against because it can can increase cancer risk over the long run. Spirits and wines are the same way too

>>18957172
>If anything it should be selected against because it can can increase cancer risk over the long run.
Worrying about things that happen in the long run, when you don't have plans for the short run is foolish.

>>18957172
if it doesn't broadly affect ability to breed it won't be selected against, simple as. nothing that happens when you're old matters evolutionarily.

>>18957185
>nothing that happens when you're old matters evolutionarily.
your acquired wisdom allows the members of your tribe to survive and they have many of the same alleles (flavors of genes) that you do
that's one of the reasons for the evolution of social behavior

>>18957021
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maillard_reaction

>>18957062
This is probably it

Learned association. We tend to smoke things that are calorie dense (= inherently tasty) like meats, fish and cheeses. We don't smoke turnips and lettuce, stuff that's harder to like. So we learn to associate smoke with these delicious foods. If we only smoked cabbages or something, we might not think smoke flavor is anything special.

Same thing with stuff like chocolate. We eat chocolate as kids, which is full of sugar. Initially it's the sugar that we like, not the aroma of cocoa. But we learn this association, so as adults we start to enjoy the cocoa part of chocolate flavor. This also leads to us liking the flavor of dark roasted coffee, because it tastes similar to chocolate. But if we were never fed sugary chocolate as kids, if we consumed cocoa unsweetened like the Aztecs, we probably wouldn't be as into it. Most Europeans hated cocoa when it was first brought to Europe.

people mentioning evolution are fedoras retards

i love those plastic looking flying saucers with extremely refined sugar and sour powder and that shit looks and tastes nothing like anything you'll find in nature

>>18957021
People who ate food cooked over a fire survived much better than people who ate raw food. Simple evolution.

>>18957172
evolution doesn't gaf about you after you've lived a few years past puberty.

>>18957172
What kills the caveman faster, increased cancer risk or a tape worm?

>>18957021
Anon, because it takes you 50 years of repeated exposure to die of cancer due to smoke and one minute of exposure to die of dysentery.
Smoky meat meant warmth and safe food since way back Adam and Steve were running trains.

>>18957021
instinctive reaction is the biological reason. people can dive down all kinds of rabbit hole explanations but the cold hard fact is that when the scent and taste is presented we are going to gobble it up.

It's the same reason why walking into a Chinese ethnic store makes me want to vomit but the Chinese people working inside can handle the smell just fine

It's just because we associate it with food. The smell of a food you like in general will make you hungry. It literally triggers gastric acid production and salivary glands. It's just an offshoot of our origins. Humans sense of smell is actually pretty good for the animal kingdom. We can pick up about a trillion different scents and some of them over an incredibly long distance. Smelling wood fire from a hundred miles away isn't uncommon.

Catch it smoke it eat it
simple as
smoked meat will last me 10x longer than any other

>>18957318
sugar is god tier for quick energy dumbass, and was super rare. of course you fucking love it

>>18957021
Meat and vegetables roasted over a primitive fireput would taste smoky. I think we spent a long time, on the evolutionary scale, knowing how to make fire and cook, maybe a genetic predisposition towards this kind of cooked food appeared in that time.

>>18957021
We're actually living in the real Hell and we're descended from demons

>>18957021
Man cook with fire, live longer, make more babbies. Man who eat things raw, die more often. Fire produce smoke. Man who cook with fire adapts to like smoke taste from grilling. Man learn to smoke things to preserve them, now man can go into the woods further from water. Allows exploration. Soon, man covers the planet with his children. Many like smoke because it was hard wired in to like it over many millennia.

Burnt shit tastes no good. Burnt shit bad for man. Man who liked burnt shit die of cancer.

>>18957021
Pretty much every carnivorous civilization except the weak peasants eating grain had some level of ash intake in their diet. Humans crave ash.

>>18957032
Those are leaves chief

>>18957172
Man who thinks he smart is incorrect.

Smokiness associated with safe food, so man learned to live with it (if it was bad in the first place). Those that didn't died of parasites and infection early. Smoke does not give cancer. Char does (this is what studies are on). Smoke inhalation gives cancer over very, very long time. So long as man does not burn food often, man live to be very old using this method.

Alcohols are also better short term: safer drink (especially at the low levels it was at in history) than water, especially stagnant water. Helps stop stuff that can give you diarrhea that kills you. It is why grog was a ration on ships. Also lowers social inhibitions which leads to more baby making. Cancer only comes long term after man make many babies. Natural selection is foiled by anything that requires 40-50 years to take effect and kill you.

>>18957021
Wood smoke adds flavour which is not present in the original meat or fish. This, in combination with the low-temp chemical changes in the meat or fish from being slowly cooked by the smoke, impart the material with a far different taste and texture vs.the raw version.

there's actually ancient archeological evidence that we were using fire and the resulting smoke and ash as an insect repellent BEFORE we started cooking.

it probably went

sweat power unlocked relative hairlessness+bigsleep bigbrain -> ants crawling on us in the dark -> fire for bugs -> fire for food -> massively expanded diet due to magic fire -> population boom -> 2023 -> we still won't eat the bugs

>>18957119
>Does there need to be a biological reason?
Nope. This reminds me of those people who think the existence of the uncanny valley implies that somewhere in human evolution there was a creature mimicking humans that we had to be afraid of.

>>18957070
Are you mentally challenged?

>>18957021
Read Genesis. We are a bit fallen, Adam and Eve didn't cook anything.

>>18959667
No, you?

>>18958949
But there is also evidence that hominids ate cooked meat before they mastered fire. It was a lot easier running an animal into a thermal spring where it would die and boil itself why you waited

>>18957119
>Why would sweet foods generally taste better than more nutritional foods if taste was shaped by evolutionary pressure to consume more nutritious food?
Evolution doesn't evolve perfection, it evolves survival. Evidently it was more beneficial for us to seek out the highest-calorie foods than the ones that would make us strongest.
>>18957172
>Spirits and wines are the same way too
Well those taste horrible but we drink them for other reasons.

>>18957070
>dumb eggheads consulting an eggspert
I wrote that last year or so

>>18957119
The evolutionary pressure for most of human existence was to get all our calories in, not to have a balanced diet

>>18957119
>Why would sweet foods generally taste better than more nutritional foods
Plants being sweet is their way of saying "okay, I'm all set to reproduce! Come and get it!". If we liked bitter, underripe plants our hunter gatherer selves would eat them to extinction. By giving the plants time to signal their ready, we ensure year after year of a consistent, safe source of food, which is probably also nutritious. Remember that in nature, sweetness is rare and only happens at peak seasonality. It's not like Grug 12000BC had access to the amount of sugar we're used to, and none of it was pure. If you only ate sweet whole foods you'd probably be pretty healthy, assuming you also eat animal products in proportion.

>>18957021
Human. Fire = warmth, light, safety. Smoke Meat Smell = warmth, light safety, food.

This not hard. Animal help brain develop, hard to get all amino acid hunter gathering plants. Grunk seminar over.

>>18957172
>Cooking food was beneficial so people that liked the smokiness flavor from cavemen cooking food were eating more safe food, therefore surviving more
>Alcohol makes it easier to have sex so people that liked alcohol reproduced more
Both traits increase your chance at surviving and/or reproducing, therefore there was an increase in these traits popping up as the generations went on an on.

Now that we live in a world with safe food and no scarcity, liking smokiness is a negative trait

>>18957032
God's highest iq co/ck/

>>18957032

>>18961316
>Alcohol makes it easier to have sex so people that liked alcohol reproduced more
Alcohol also signifies that something is ripe, which means you're going to get more calories out of it. But if we're going to use lazy calorie estimates for things: proteins 4, carbs 4, alcohol 7, fats 9. Even the signal telling you there's a lot of sugar there is high-octane fuel.

>>18957021
it doesn't
>>18957119
gayvolutionary psychology is a vehicle for pseuds to sound smart by attributing everything to some ancestral history

>>18957032
Wuhan fish

>>18958949
>>18960990
It was fallen angels.

>>18957021
Same with caramel and furans, etc.

>survive a forest fire
>walk into what remains
>find cooked corpse of deer
>cut it open
>meat is succulent and delicious
>fewer people in your party get food borne illness
>start seeing dem gains
>next time you hunt you decide to put a fire under what you kill
gee i wonder

>>18957040
Those are CLEARLY smoked bananas
You guys are retreaded

>>18957021
yes, cooked meat was far safer to eat than raw meat, and back in the days they used campfires to roast their meat. we developped to like the smoky taste because the ones that liked it survived more than their raw-meat-eating friends

>>18957032

>>18957086
it's this. we evolved to find things cooked over a fire extra tasty

>>18957183
>>18957185
This. Your genes only care about you surviving long enough to pass them on.

>>18957242
>assuming my tribe members would actually listen to me

>>18957308
>liking the flavor of dark roasted coffee, because it tastes similar to chocolate
Bruh, if I had never come within 100 miles of a cocoa bean in my life, I'd still rate roasted coffee beans as one of the best smells and flavours on earth.

>>18959659
Huh. I hadn't heard that one. Implausible but fun to believe; potentially great campfire story

>>18957032
huh wat u mean

>>18961450
deliciouss brainlet seethe

>>18957032
it's clearly chicken

>>18957021
I don't know if liking smokey food is biological and not cultural, it might be an aquired taste.
Do children like smoked stuff?

>>18957032
>are those bats?
ARE THOSE BATS? HAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAAAAAAAAAAHAAAAHAHAAAAAAAAA

>>18959659
>Nope. This reminds me of those people who think the existence of the uncanny valley implies that somewhere in human evolution there was a creature mimicking humans that we had to be afraid of.
What if this post was written by either a shill who doesn't want us to trust our instincts or by an mimic creature.

It's the concentration of flavor. The smoke flavor is part of it, sure, but basically it's like a quick dry aging that greatly reduces the moisture content of the food without rendering out any of the fat content. Most of cooking is about reducing water content and concentrating flavors, imo.