Taste buds by design?

I’m constantly fascinated by the sheer number of simple things that I take for granted everyday. Things like tasting my food! We’ve eaten so much food over so many years, that we don’t really think about it any longer, but it is pretty fascinating! I couldn’t help but wonder recently, why do we enjoy the taste of food? It’s not really necessary for us to. My growling stomach and that feeling of hunger is plenty of motivation to cause me to eat, but then I get the wonderful sensation of taste to top it all off!

But then, the question is raised, is our sense of taste NECESSARY? If it isn’t necessary, then why do we have it?

Let’s start with a world that has no taste. It seems, at first, that without taste, we wouldn’t know that we’re eating something bad! You’d just dig in and munch away on some rancid tasting food. Right? Wrong! You don’t need a lab-coated scientist for this one. First, if you expect that a food might not be good, you inspect it. Is it visibly bad? Then what do you do? SMELL! Pretty much you’re at about a 90% bad food detection rate at this point. It’s pretty rare to actually do a taste-test if the food is bad. Usually, if you’re sampling the food, you’re more than reasonably convinced that it is still good.

Aha! Poisons! You taste foods to make sure they’re not poison! Wait…what?

Well that doesn’t sound right. In nature, things that are poisonous are very commonly very brightly colored. So we’re back to our step 1, vision. I’m not sure that step 2 (smell) comes into play very much with this one as I don’t really go around smelling poisonous foods all day, so cannot really comment there. I also really have no idea what poisonous foods taste like and unforunately a google search didn’t turn up much. Not a lot of people guzzling poisons on a regular basis I guess.

Lastly, I’ve read a few posts that suggest our sense of taste is meant to direct us to eat things that we’re deficient in, or in need of, like our well-known sweet tooth. This indicates that the following foods are meant to suggest the following needs:

• Sweet – carbohydrate.
• Salty – electrolytes.
• Sour – acids.
• Bitter – toxins.
• Umami – glutamate and nucleotides.

A wiki on taste slightly supports this, but the problem I have here is the fact that it feels easy to draw a false assumption here. The truth is, we do in fact have taste buds, and the general consensus is that there are a few basic tastes, like bitter, sweet, salty, etc. Also, these tastes are typically based on how far away we are from a very specific marker, for example, in the case of salty, how far away the item tastes from sodium. The wiki explains it better, check it out. But it doesn’t necessarily mean that we have taste buds so that we’ll want a specific kind of food that we’re deficient in. If I were going to make an argument in favor of evolution for taste buds, it would make much more sense to say that our taste buds evolved over a period of time as a result of the types of foods that we were already eating on a regular basis that our bodies found useful. Oh look, this food gives me energy, think I’ll develop some cool new taste, sensor, thing, for that!

Honestly though, the concept of developing taste buds via evolution is just too much in the realm of fantasy for me.

The idea that our bodies evolve via random mutations just hits some kind of common-sense mental barrier that I have. I just cannot get past it. I think it’s because I’m a software engineer, that I tend to believe things need a lot more design work in order to function properly, so I may be too biased in that direction. I just cannot buy into the idea that a system can move from simple to complex without some design work. In my experience it doesn’t happen that way. If you have a complex system and introduce random variables into it, let me tell you, in my world, the stuff is gonna hit the fan. I’ll leave it at that, as this is already becoming too long of a post. Now…

Back on point, we need to make the distinction here between taste and craving. The article is really saying that we crave foods we’re deficient in, but this is only tangentially related to taste. Your taste buds are not causing the craving, or causing you to desire certain types of foods. They simply transmit yummy or yucky signals to your brain.

Now, it would be fairly easy for me to merely say that our all-powerful creator blessed us with a sense of taste and that evolution has nothing to do with it. However, I try to learn as much as I can about evolution rather than simply discount the theory. I’m not entirely on the g-d created evolution too! wagon, but I’m not against the idea either. I know, I know, Torah says g-d created the world in seven days. But the thing is, Torah isn’t an all encompassing history of the planet. It’s just not that thick of a book. It’s called Torah, not The Unabridged History of the Planet, Math, Science, Physics, and Everything In-Between! It’s a lot shorter to write, “Yeah, so I said exist and stuff existed” than a detailed description of *how exactly* stuff was brought into existence.

So, to summarize, I cannot think of many reasons why taste buds would exist given any of the prevailing theories on the topic, other than that G-d was being nice to us when he thought the idea up.