Ignore your pleasure center
Suppose we didn’t enjoy food. By then man would have been extinct long ago. In order to tempt prehistoric man to eat, food had to not only fill the stomach, but also stimulate the pleasure center. And that is why man is now too fat.
Food is in fact nothing more and nothing less than a source of building blocks for the body’s cells and a supplier of energy. We die without food. But we associate the word ‘food’ with ‘tasty’. ‘Tasty’ was an unknown factor when it came to food millions of years ago. But that changed during human evolution.
Food was not nice
Food has always been important, of course: it provides the energy to maintain the body and to think and move. But in the distant past, food was scarce: people still had to hunt or search for it for days, which took a lot of energy and time. When the food was finally found, it also had to be put in the mouth and swallowed. That was not always fun: because prehistoric man couldn’t cook well yet. To overcome all those hurdles, evolution invented a trick. A center has been built into the brain that provides a sense of pleasure when stimulated by the right molecules. These molecules come from food (and nowadays also from drugs and alcohol). So that feeling of pleasure gave ancient man a reward for food: he nourished the body and received a feeling of satisfaction as a present.
Disastrous mechanism
Today we no longer have to hunt for days for a piece of meat, fish for hours or search for a fruit. The pleasure center can therefore easily be abolished, because even without this mechanism we will eat to stay alive. In fact, we would only eat to maintain the body. But unfortunately, in evolution, a mechanism doesn’t disappear overnight, it takes tens of thousands of years or it doesn’t happen at all. Our system will therefore continue to look for incentives for pleasure for the time being. Result: we like to eat and we eat too much. We don’t stop eating, even if we’ve already absorbed too many building blocks and energy.
Addicted to tasty
We want more and more pleasure, beyond biological function. And then we also prepare our food in a way that makes the pleasure stimulus stronger. We call it ‘nice’. In the course of time we came up with preparation methods that had nothing to do with feeding per se, but only with the extra stimulation of the pleasure center.
Nowadays almost everyone participates: we watch TV programs about cooking, purchase cookbooks from top chefs so that we can also put culinary highlights on the table ourselves. Cooking is no longer about food preparation, but about eating. Food that – like drugs – provides pleasure. The excess of food and flavors is dangerous: it causes us to overeat and gain unhealthy weight. That we become addicted to food. Food shouldn’t be tasty at all, as long as it’s good for health. So we have to go back to basics, perhaps by very consciously ignoring our pleasure center.
