"It is likely that the properties present in cooked foods are preferable to most mammals, as rats and cats have both been shown to prefer cooked food or cooked taste," Wobber said, adding that in the wild, chimpanzees will choose fire-toasted seeds over raw ones, a rare instance demonstrating how nature can sometimes act like a chef. Other studies on great apes show they "tend to select foods based on nutritional content, with some indices of taste, in addition to potential visual or smell cues," she added. For example, she explained, "wild primates will choose ripe over unripe fruit, potentially sensing that the ripe fruit is softer." Cooking usually softens food or, at least in the case of meat, makes it easier to chew, and it also can bring out sweetness and umami, the scientists believe. Umami tends to enhance other flavors and is popularly associated with certain Asian foods such as soy sauce. Peter Lucas, a George Washington University anthropologist, recently conducted a study on foods that two early hominids -- Australopithecus africanus and Paranthropus robustus -- consumed, based on teeth wear and carbon measurements in dental enamel. Lucas found that these ancient human ancestors must have eaten a lot of hard, brittle foods, but that roasting tubers gradually lessened the work of chewing and, by inference, the cost of digestion. In short, roasted root veggies became the far more appealing option, particularly for later hunter-gatherer groups. Lucas told Discovery News that the paper by Wobber's team "is intriguing, the experiments are innovative and the results seem very reasonable." In the future, he hopes a follow-up study might more closely "check what the cooking actually does to change food properties, both chemical and physical" before making firm conclusions about what drives mammalian food preferences. Related Links: |
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