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Comment by codedokode | Hacker News Reader

Why human distinguishes so little flavours? I thought that tongue is like a chemical laboratory detecting hundreds of different substances. Also, why detect sweet or sour taste? Wouldn't it be better to detect energy-rich and useful components (like meat or fat) and poisonous/harmful (like mushrooms)?

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Sweet is energy-rich. And sour/bitter are often poisonous.

Is meat or fat, or cheese sweet? Usually sweet is the harmful, unhealthy food like candies. Because of sweetness children often prefer unhealthy food to healthy and useful.

Fruit is sweet.

Fruits in nature are often not sweet at all. Wild apples are hard, small and sour, for example.

Counterpoint, practically every fruit ending in "berry" is sweet and naturally grows that way without human intervention

Fruit that isn't sweet is less energy-rich and less appealing. That's by design. In the wild, sweet = lots of sugar = evolution wants you to eat this.

Sweet is “the harmful, unhealthy food like candies” in modern times but it’s not like taste receptors only developed 100 years ago based on candy and other modern foods.

Presumably our sense of taste is not adapted to a world of abundance. In a world of scarcity, the problems caused by a diet rich in sugar are a far off concern when you're starving and looking for calories.

Sweet is only unhealthy nowadays because of the sheer quantities of sugar we can consume as of he past 60 years. Before then, sweet stuff was a luxury. Hell, I've even heard that modern fruits are too sweet for zoo animals as we've bred them to have more sugar.

Cavemen did not have candy. Cavemen had fruit. Fruit is energy-dense, easy to harvest, and it keeps longer than meat--it's the perfect food for an omnivore, so we evolved to crave it.

And then we figured out how to make stuff that's even sweeter and more energy-dense than fruit, so it tastes even better and we eat loads of it even though we're not starving hunter-gatherers and don't the extra energy at all. But that didn't play into our evolutionary process.

Of course sweet isn't the only flavor we crave. I don't know exactly what combination of tastes makes meat appealing, but the fact that there's no single "meat" taste doesn't mean we didn't evolve to crave it. It just means that's the chemical pathway that our taste buds happened to follow.

Meats and animal fats taste distinct from lettuce leaves, and the obsessions we have over the former suggest we find them more desirable.

(Sweet things indicate easily broken down sugars, a sub-category of energy rich)

That's what taste kind of does...

The tongue can't, but the nose certainly can. Some recent research[0] puts the number of unique human-discernible scents at around one trillion.

[0]: https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/humans-...

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