Darwinian Gastronomy: Why We Use Spices (1999) | Hacker News Reader

Darwinian Gastronomy: Why We Use Spices (1999)

academic.oup.com

148 pointsmagoghm114 comments

It’s interesting to read this. I grew up eating a pretty limited diet in retrospect. The seasoning was salt and black pepper mostly. The first time I tried Indian food I was about 30 years old. I’ll never forget it. My mouth exploded with the flavor and a glow spread over me. It’s not that it was spicy as in hot, it was simply remarkable. I’ve often thought since that I must have been missing some sort of basic nutrient in the food that my body was deprived of. It was a very strong feeling.

yes, i've always thought that about asian food. luckily, my parents were pretty cosmopolitan in this regard. to anyone that wants to explore it i can strongly recommend madhur jaffery's cook books - mostly simple recipes for great dishes.

madhur jaffrey

There's a Thai place near me that sells a pri king with a delicious, delicious hot sauce that makes me feel the same way. The flavor is just unbelievably good. It's an essence.

Yes to the Indian food! I got a second, even more powerful gut punch about 10 years ago when I discovered spicy Szechuan food. My wife "jokes" that I must have been a Szechuan farmer in a previous life. The weird thing is I stopped being able to eat spicy food in my late 40s because it destroyed my sleep, then in my late 50s Szechuan just turned me around somehow.

Capsaicin (Chili) is a chemical cousin to Caffein and Theobromin (Cocoa), Methylxanthines. I once ate some Cheeköfte with loads of Jalapeños at 9PM, could not sleep till 4AM.

Looking at the structures, I don't see the similarity. Capsaicin is a vanilloid, chemically related to the flavor chemicals found in vanilla, not a methylxanthine.

TIL. Thanks for the correction.

> The first time I tried Indian food I was about 30 years old. I’ll never forget it. My mouth exploded with the flavor and a glow spread over me.

That's funny, I grew up eating very spicy Indian food, and I had the same experience the first time I ate lox ;)

Had some Chicken Tandoori the other day. Didn't feel hungry for two days after. Just one serving.

I'm going to guess you're Western European (French, Belgian, German, that neighbourhood) based on this. Because I had pretty much the same experience, although I was about ~24'ish I'd say.

I can guarantee you that eastern Europe during cold war, or any other heavily oppressed / enslaved region by russia/CCCP never experienced anything from world cuisine, curries including. Even travelling within ruskies sphere of influence was forbidden for most population, you had to 'earn' it as viewed by regime.

Sure, we had 'curry' mix in shops, exactly 1 same mixture, but nobody apart from few lucky mountaineers and diplomats had any clue what curry actually means. And taste of it had nothing to do with anything that can be eaten in Indian subcontinent, just yellow bland bleh.

Not even during the cold war, I've grown up on bland diet, and I've been born in 1993 in Poland.

I've found certain happiness in Indian, Thaic, Mexican, Lebanese cuisine.

You will love this quote from a Chef making Tikka Marsala :

"Here is a french Chef making an Indian dish which was invented in Scotland"

I think its this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MwUCo0imYVM

Beware that masala and marsala are very different (though both are delicious).

Yeah, things like this can be quite funny when you look into them.

One of my favourite staples of chinese food (in the UK) is crispy duck. A dish which consists of duck which has been roasted and then often flash fried to get crispy skin and tender meat, then is shredded and served with fresh cucumber and shredded scallions, hoi sin and/or plum sauce and rice pancakes to wrap it in. A little like Fajitas, it's an interactive meal and you build the pancakes yourself at the table.

I failed trying to find it here in Western Australia, so I did some internet digging and figured out it was quite possibly invented in a hotel London.

(Various forms of chinese roast duck exist everywhere, I just haven't seen this specific setup outside of the UK, where every chinese place serves it pretty much. Note it is quite different to standard Peking duck, it's cooked more like pulled-pork with all the fat rendered through.

I realise this is the internet, and won't be at all surprised to be told not only that I'm wrong, but also where to buy it in Perth ... here's hoping I guess)

It's probably not quite the same as you describe but have you tried Good Fortune Roast Duck House? It used to be so good and melt in your mouth.

You know just after I wrote that comment, I stuck "crispy duck" into google and that place came up.

You're right I don't think they have exactly what I describe, but it did look good and with a recommendation as well it's probably worth a punt. Thanks :)

> duck which has been roasted and then often flash fried to get crispy skin and tender meat, then is shredded and served with fresh cucumber and shredded scallions, hoi sin and/or plum sauce and rice pancakes to wrap it in

Peking duck [1]?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peking_duck

Not quite, though it appears it may be a subcategory of Peking Duck :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peking_duck#Crispy_aromatic_du...

And in fact that page backs me up, Crispy Aromatic Duck was indeed created in the UK, if a little more recently than I thought.

So, its the SubDucktion Zone? Seems like Turkey falls into that category.

I’m in Melbourne, most places that do duck pancakes smash it through with the cleaver so it’s presented in slices like people expect with Peking duck. There’s a few though where you get the whole or half duck relatively intact and are expected to shred it yourself like London. I think the clue is usually when you order by quantity of duck (ie, half vs whole) rather than just an entree or number of pancakes. Though Melbourne is spoiled by a reasonable Chinatown and similar suburban setups. Hopefully Perth has enough options that you can build an itinerary of indulgent discovery one weekend.

Once spent an evening eating at an Iranian place. At some point I had to stop eating, simply because the food had put too much / too many spices in me. It was a really odd sensation. Just could not eat any more. The only time this has happened. Not hotness/chili, nothing like that. Just a full-body sensation of too much spice.

My spouse and I eat spicy foods. I’ve got a 6-year-old that’s tried it but chooses not to because he doesn’t like the sensation. It goes both ways!

I think there is a lot of truth to it but it's imperfect because too much of a good thing can become poison. For example, sugar would have been very good for our ancestors; they could have eaten as much of it as they could possibly find and it would have helped them to survive... But now with technology, we have access to quantities of sugar which would have been unfathomable to our ancestors; so this good thing turned into a bad thing due to its abundance and unnaturally low cost made possible by technology.

Bitterness is bad for us because it often signals the presence of poison. Spices are good because they help to preserve certain foods and prevent or slow bacteria growth (especially in hot climates were bacteria normally thrive; no coincidence that hot countries use a lot of spice). Slight acidity in flavor is good for the same reason. Our need for diversity of flavors is good because it encourages us to consume a broad range of essential nutrients without having to think too much. Protein is satisfying to eat because our bodies need it.

It's quite obvious if you think about it that our tastes are actually very well calibrated. The only flaws are that we tend to abuse good things... But even then, most of us will feel disgust after consuming too much of a good thing. Some of us are more fine-tuned than others on the abuse side of the equation.

I think that being overly neurotic about eating only 'healthy foods' even when they don't taste good is misguided. As Leslie Orgel pointed out "Evolution is cleverer than you are."

the "coincedence" is that tropical countries are where many spices originate - it might be interesting to ask why this is so. some spices do have antibacterial/fungal effects, but so also do salt and (paradoxically) fermentation, where you replace any pathogenic bacteria with harmless ones. i have a jar of kimchee fermenting in the kitchen as i speak.

More or less every herb, spice, or medically active plant the flavor is a toxin targeted at pests, fungi, insects, bacteria, predators, etc.

well, all plants produce antagonists against predators. but we in the north do not eat oak leaves, which produce a lot, or use them as flavouring. my point was "why are tropical spices so spicy, harmless and tasty to humans?", badly stated. i'm sure there are good reasons.

Most tropical cultures have pretty bland food--tubers, ferns, etc. There aren't that many cultures with a strong tradition of very flavorful cooking, and if you enumerate them I'm not sure they skew tropical at all. The bias would be toward areas which at some point in the relatively recent past had large urban centers that provided economies scale for developing sophisticated cuisines with both ingredients and (perhaps more importantly) cooking methods for enhancing flavor. China and India are archetypes. Notably in China I believe the more tropical regions, e.g. Guangdong (Canton), tended toward less strong flavors as compared to more northerly, colder regions.

i'd like to see some evidence for what you are saying here - the indian subcontinent (much of which is in the tropics), indonesia, malaysia (all of which are). all have highly sophisticated and spiced cuisines.i would not call any of them bland. and i have never heard of any humans eating ferns if they could not possibly get anything else. next time you come across a fern, try to eat it - i guarantee you will regret it.

of course everyone likes tubers - potato, the worlds favourite food. eat avidly in all the areas i mentioned, and everywhere else.

Indonesian and Malaysian cuisines have been strongly influenced by both China and India to the point where the dishes most associated with those regions are about as far from indigenous as you can get.

I've eaten native dishes on the island of Borneo--it's comparatively bland (which isn't to say it wasn't tasty), just like the vast majority of cuisines everywhere in the world.

Africa is the one continent I haven't traveled to, but while no doubt there are many good indigenous dishes, much noteworthy sub-Saharan African cuisine is actually heavily influenced by India (both directly and indirectly, through Arabia and Persia), with which it has had heavy contact for millennia, even before Britain brought over hundreds of thousands of Indian workers in the 19th century.

Ah, but fiddlehead ferns are delicious!

https://www.google.com/search?q=fiddlehead+fern

You do want to make sure it is the right kind of fern:

> The fiddleheads eaten in North America are from the ostrich fern (Matteuccia struthiopteris). Other ferns can be toxic, so never forage without an experienced guide.

And cook them properly:

> The most important thing to remember when it comes to fiddleheads is that they need to be cooked. Fiddleheads have been linked to cases of severe food poisoning caused by what is believed to be some sort of toxin in the fiddleheads. Although the exact nature of the toxin is unknown, cooking seems to render it harmless. Fiddleheads need to be cooked thoroughly, as undercooked ones are believed to be just as dangerous as raw ones.

https://www.thespruceeats.com/all-about-fiddlehead-ferns-221...

I use oak often to flavor food. Oak makes exceptional flavor when smoking food and brings out many flavors. Great whiskeys are also aged in oak. So although not a spice, oak is used to flavor food and drink.

While you don’t eat the oak leaves, they do add a nice flavour to kashiwa mochi. And of course oak is very popular for flavouring wine and whisk[e]y.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kashiwa_mochi

Also, as a similar oak flavoring, there is a California native bar-b-que style that uses oak to smoke the meat. IIRC it's called Santa Barbara style bbq.

Don't tropical ecosystems tend to have high biodiversity? If tastiness+nontoxicity to humans occur randomly at some frequency in plants, I think the tropics would be the place to look for them, statistically speaking.

I hate the word spicy in the english language. It can mean a number of completely different things:

- High in capsacin

- Creating some sort of pain or funny sensation when consumed

- Containing "spices" depending on which definition you use

- Being strongly seasoned/flavourful

- Tasting good

The noun "pepper" is pretty badly overloaded too.

And then "bland" is used as the opposite of "spicy"...

I am French and we have the word "piquant" which means "the painful kind". We unfortunately also have the word "épicé" which is like "spicy" in English, there are several meanings.

I usually resort to saying "piquant" when I want the painful version and "épicé, mais pas piquant" ("spicy but not the painful kind") when I am talking about the flavour.

- High in capsacin

Hot or spicy

- Creating some sort of pain or funny sensation when consumed

Spicy

- Containing "spices" depending on which definition you use

Spiced

- Being strongly seasoned/flavourful

Spiced, Seasoned

- Tasting good

None of these.

Im not saying that one can not differentiate these things, but people absolutely use spicy/spiced to refer to all of these

This is interesting, but doesn't address a crucial question: yes, spices seem to give practical antimicrobial benefits in food preparation, but why do we enjoy spiced food more? Did it start out as something practical until we evolved a taste for more flavorful food due to its advantages (co-evolution)? Or do we like spiced food just because we're used to it (enviornmental)?

not answering your question at all, but animals tend to eat things in their pure form, while humans gained the ability to combine ingredients. Even if we like the smells and tastes of herbs and spices, we don't consume them straight either. I guess I don't know what other species even have the ability to smell-taste. Dogs for example, have much more sensitive smell than we do, but doesn't seem to influence what they eat much. We might simply be creating flavor profiles that remind us of better foods, like aromatic smells of ripe fruit instead of unripe.

> Dogs for example, have much more sensitive smell than we do, but doesn't seem to influence what they eat much.

I'm not sure. Raw potato? Not interesting to a dog. Boiled plain potatoes? They'd eat them if hungry but meh. Fried, salty potatoes? They love them as much as humans do. I think dogs distinguish those primarily by smell. Similarly, while a whole raw apple or carrot won't interest my dogs, they are into them if they're sliced up (presumably from the release of the scent).

Perhaps it's a side effect of our desire for different flavours, that would encourage us (in a wild environment) to seek a diversified diet that provides multiple types of nutrients.

Hmm. I wish this analysis accounted for availability of spices in different regions: I would expect onions and garlic to be more prevalent in Scandanavian dishes than cinnamon and ginger simply because those are easier to grow in temperate climates.

Would be interesting to look at which spices have 'broken into' a cuisine despite being not agriculturally viable in that region. How does this set of spices differ from the broader set? More antimicrobial?

When extrapolating from modern cuisine, or even what we consider “traditional local cuisine”, you need to take into account that most of this is quite new. Germans famed love for potatoes? Only a few generations old. So spices that became “traditional” may well have been brought in by traders, of which Scandinavia had plenty since it’s all accessible by sea.

Yeah, and further confounding is the timelines for connection to trade for different cultures also vary significantly.

I would love to see a good visualization of the history of commodity trade.

Over on mastodon someone posted this interesting find about spices on a 15th century Norse shipwreck https://hcommons.social/@bojacobs/109854101759930123

Anything with chilies of any kind -- hot peppers, bell peppers, what have you -- none of that was available outside of what is today Mexico/Central America before 500 years ago. So the "traditional" foods that have these are also quite young.

Also tomatoes.

Rule of thumb for me - if nobody from the first people that tasted it is no longer alive it is traditional.

Traditional is what my grandma cooked. That is how it is.

I noticed this too. They seem to avoid the alternative hypothesis that it's harder to grow certain plants in different climates. After all Scandinavia isn't known for it's native citrus fruits.

> Cookbooks generally distinguish between seasonings (spices used in food preparation) and condiments (spices added after food is served), but not between herbs and spices.

huh? people in everyday speech frequently blur herbs and spices, and the "official sources" can say what they want about what's an herb and what's a spice, but cookbook style in western cuisines,

the things we add to savory dishes tend to be herbs, fresh or dried green leaves, things like sage, rosemary, tarragon, and thyme.

And spices tend to be non-green frequently ground to powder things we add to desserts, like cinnamon, nutmeg, and cloves. In ancient times "the spice trade" brought spices from the near and far east, but herbs we grew ourselves.

seasoning might have a more generic meaning ("italian seasoning" or "seasoning for stuffing"), but in practice it's salt and pepper that you adjust just before serving food, "season to taste"

>> Cookbooks generally distinguish between seasonings [...] and **condiments** [...]

>huh? people in everyday speech frequently blur **herbs** and spices [...]

Emphasis mine. Thyme, basil etc. are herbs; ketchup, mayo etc. are condiments. At least acc. to what most people would call them.

The excerpt is correctly saying that people see stuff like ketchup, mayo etc. as intrinsically different from paprika, cloves etc.

> but not between herbs and spices

it said that herbs and spices are not distinguished, and I pointed out that they are. I didn't mention condiments; I did offer a detailed qualification of seasonings.

Ah, nevermind. Your focus was on the last part of the quote.

My bad.

Wonderful news, this chocolate eclair is healthy for me!

Sugar - sadly - isn't a spice.

The title is implying tasting good = healthy.

My point is that there's room for a little more nuance than that; "your body likes X because it's good for you" doesn't imply a universal rule, just a specific correlation.

It's really more like tasting good = evolutionarily useful.

Which is true for sugar. It's good if you get a few grams of sugar while running around the forest all day. It's not good to get half a pound of sugar from big gulp softdrinks while you're sitting in traffic.

Not necessarily, even in the evolutionary biology model. Something can taste good to humans entirely by accident, and be evolutionarily neutral (or even a small amount negative). Just like the reason men have nipples.

This is probably more true of sweet-tasting poisons like lead diacetate than sugars.

This is one of the dangerous concepts pushed by the “Intuitive Eating” pro-obesity folks.

When in doubt: Paracelsus!

“All things are poison and nothing is without poison; only the dose makes a thing not a poison.”

The ingredients probably are, the quantities possibly not

When food was scarce? That eclair would absolutely improve your chance of survival.

And to the ripe old age of 30 years!

This is a misconception about life expectancy statistics. For most of human history, if you survive past early childhood, you can expect to live a pretty long life. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-scientific-funda...

"Life expectancy at age five" (or 4 or wotevs) seems much more useful, but it is rarely seen nowadays. No idea why.

This is a thought I just finished having. Right alongside a bowl of canned soup, that (with the help of spices) turned out to be a five star meal. Food is medicine, as it is said.

I always put black pepper and cayenne pepper in my soups.

Warms me up and is healthy.

And a touch of garlic powder!

Not for FODMAP sensitive people.

> Prediction 2. Use of spices should be greatest in hot climates, where unrefrigerated foods spoil especially quickly.

That's seems backward to me. I'd expect more issues with food spoilage in cold climates, as food had to last through winter. People we're eating slowly rotting salted pork.

I would expect more spices in hot climates simply due to their being a greater diversity of plants. The odds that one tastes nice randomly is higher.

My back porch hasn't been warmer than my refrigerator for more than a couple hours since November.

I think you understimate how quickly things go bad in a hot humid climate.

Which means people are less likely to try to preserve meat for long periods, because they know it won't work.

Not sure if that follows. Just because preserving is more difficult, doesn't mean it has less value.

The father of a friend of mine (an intellectual medical doctor) has a theory that most of the fine foods in french cuisine and other cultures, are so prized because they have the same smells and microorganisms of the genitals. Really gross, but I think the evidence bears out- I forgot the foods that were mentioned, other than the cheeses, but there were several unexpected ones.

well, we can all make up nonsensical stuff like that. i can't say what he was smelling, but i can guarantee there are no genital commensal organisms in say, a coq au vin.

if you are not making a joke, you've sure cocked up your comment.

well, what do you think?

Truffles and durian are other foods that comes to mind that smell like crotch.

Yeah! The only other one I can think of off hand is fish sauce

seems more likely that food smells remind us of eating which we need to do several times a day, and less likely that they'd be using their charms to distract us from procreating.

He didn't say anything about procreating, but that we were attracted to the smells. It could be that there is a similar argument to the article (that he didn't make), that we are attracted to the smells because it is good for us (not because it reminds us of genitals and sex). I.e., eating foods that are cultured with the same microorganisms might replenish and balance our own microorganisms, and thus keep our junk healthy.

Makes sense. Menthol (mint) is a vasoconstrictor, capsaicin is a vasodilator. Children will have no idea what this means, but they still know innately they're opposites of each other. Our instincts guide us when we listen.

Menthol is also a kappa-opioid agonist and can cause pretty intense dysphoria.

Menthol feels cold, chilli feels hot. Kids can notice at least that much.

Mint and chili go great together: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larb

> Our test assumes that traditional meat-based recipes were developed before widespread refrigeration. We cannot directly evaluate this assumption because the cookbooks we examined rarely discussed the history of individual dishes. However, the assumption seems reasonable because any recipe that has been around for more than five generations (approximately 100 years) would pre-date electrical refrigeration. Most of the recipes we examined probably were at least that old.

I'm sure this works, it's just funny to see it in a science publication.

I’ve long heard that there are five basic tastes that the human tongue can detect: sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and umami. I find the umami (savory) category of dishes to be the most flavorful but I can’t always put flavors into these distinct categories. If taste is musical notation, maybe there are more root notes than just five, or spices create major and minor chords.

nit: This article should have (1999) in title.

Interesting read nonetheless.

Added. Thanks!

When I became a parent, I learned another reason we spice our food: to protect parents’ meals from tiny thieving hands.

I’m serious. I think there’s a slight evolutionary advantage to liking spiced food in adulthood.

You're supposed to feed children, not deprive them of food.

First feed yourself, then feed your dependents.

They are dependent on you; If you starve, they too starve.

Same goes for safety procedures on air flights, etc.

The reason for that rule on airplanes is due to hypoxia, not quite the same as the food scenario.

I was specifically referring to times of hypociba.

You don't have enough food for the both of you?

Again.

I dont think this thread is describing starving situation. It describes family tug of war about flavored chips and seasoned piece of chicken in a table full of other food.

"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Yes, you should take that rule into account. GP can easily be read in a humorous tone.

Can we stop doing that? No, he is not starwing his children.

You know what? Sometimes parents want some food for themselves. In a house full of food, this is the one food they really like and want to have whole meal out of it without someone trying to eat bites out of it. It might even be crackers at a time.

And you know what? It does not even mean that kids are spoiled or parents cant control them or yadda yadda.

I love this paper! I first read it years ago in college. The Botany of Desire is also a great read if you're into the study of plants and civilization

>Spices are plant parts.

That made me think, are there animal-derived spices? Obviously there are some mushroom ones (truffle salt), but animal? Maybe some insect?

Bonito flakes?

It seems animal products are slightly differently used. Still I could consider broths or bouillons as spices, maybe fond as well.

Milk gets interesting, is cheese like parmesan a spice? At least if just added on pasta or pizza after cooking? And then buttermilk and yogurt? Ingredients, but kind of bring spice in food?

And so does nutella and peanut butter.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com