Tasty (29 page)

 
124
 
the brain of a young man
: Charles E. Moan and Robert G. Heath, “Septal stimulation for the initiation of heterosexual behavior in a homosexual male,”
Journal of Behavioral Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry
3 (1972): 23–30.

 
124
 
sex with both men and women
: Kent C. Berridge, “Pleasures of the brain,”
Brain and Cognition
52, no. 1 (2003): 106–28, doi:10.1016/S0278-2626(03)00014-9.

 
125
 
what caused it
: Kent C. Berridge, Isabel L. Venier, and Terry E. Robinson, “Taste reactivity analysis of 6-hydroxydopamine-induced aphagia: Implications for arousal and anhedonia hypotheses of dopamine function,”
Behavioral Neuroscience
103, no. 1 (1989): 36–45. To test whether dopamine caused pleasure, Berridge returned to the rodent smile, beginning a strange debate about the inner life of a rat. Roy Wise believed the rats could not possibly feel pleasure without dopamine and that their smiles were a reflex, their brain and muscles carrying out programming in response to a stimulus, with no conscious feeling of gratification. He had a point. Like bitterness, a sweet taste evokes an automatic
reaction: newborn babies smile when sugar is placed on their lips; so do animals with most of their brains removed. But Berridge hypothesized the rat smiles were exactly what they appeared to be: a genuine expression of satisfaction—just caused by something other than dopamine.

He hatched a clever experiment. Anyone who has fallen ill while eating finds the food that made them sick becomes persistently disgusting. This is a learned behavior. If Berridge could do the same for rats, changing their smiles to frowns, it would demonstrate the expressions were not lobotomized reflexes—which resist conditioning—but the real thing. He gave rats a dopamine blocker and a drug that caused nausea, followed by sips of sweetened water. Afterward, they all gaped with distaste at sugar water—now they hated it.

 
125
 
directly cause pleasure
: Susana Peciña and Kent C. Berridge, “Opioid site in nucleus accumbens shell mediates eating and hedonic ‘liking' for food: Map based on microinjection Fos plumes,”
Brain Research
863, nos. 1–2 (2000): 71–86.

 
127
 
over the course of a lifetime
: Wolfram Schultz, Peter Dayan, and P. Read Montague, “A neural substrate of prediction and reward,”
Science
275, no. 5306: 1593–99, doi:10.1126/science.275.5306.1593; Wolfram Schultz, “The reward signal of midbrain dopamine neurons,”
News in Physiological Science
14 (1999): 67–71.

 
128
 
maybe even happiness itself
: Morten L. Kringelbach and Kent C. Berridge, “The Neurobiology of Pleasure and Happiness,” in
Oxford Handbook of Neuroethics
, eds. Judy Illes and Barbara J. Sahakian (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2011), 15–32.

 
129
 
sipping sugar water
: Ivan E. de Araujo, Albino J. Oliveira-Maia, Tatyana D. Sotnikova, Raul R. Gainetdinov, Marc G. Caron, Miguel A. L. Nicolelis, and Sidney A. Simon, “Food reward in the absence of taste receptor signaling,”
Neuron
57, no. 6 (2008): 930–41, doi:10.1016/j.neuron.2008.01.032.

 
131
 
into an insecticide
: Walter Gratzer, “Light on Sweetness: the Discovery of Aspartame,” in
Eurekas and Euphorias: The Oxford Book of Scientific Anecdotes
(Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2004), 32.

 
132
 
contribute to diabetes
: Jotham Suez, Tal Korem, David Zeevi, Gili Zilberman-Schapira, Christoph A. Thaiss, Ori Maza, David Israeli, Niv Zmora, Shlomit Gilad, Adina Weinberger, Yael Kuperman, Alon Harmelin, Ilana Kolodkin-Gal, Hagit Shapiro,
Zamir ­Halpern, Eran Segal, and Eran Elinav, “Artificial sweeteners induce glucose intolerance by altering the gut microbiota,”
Nature
514 (October 2014): 181–86, doi:10.1038/nature13793.

 
132
 
has a bitter edg
e: Caroline Hellfritsch, Anne Brockhoff, Frauke Stähler, Wolfgang Meyerhof, and Thomas Hofmann, “Human psychometric and taste receptor responses to steviol glycosides,”
Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry
60, no. 27 (2012): 6782–93.

Chapter 6: Gusto and Disgust

 
136
 
butchered for the choicest parts
: Charles Darwin,
The
Voyage of the Beagle
(New York: P. F. Collier and Son, 1909), 86,
http://www1.umassd.edu/specialprograms/caboverde/darwin.html
.

 
136
 
practiced cannibalism
: Ann Chapman,
European Encounters with the Yahgan People of Cape Horn, Before and After Darwin
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 180.

 
142
 
“something which smells bad”
: Paul Ekman and Wallace Friesen, “Constants across cultures in the face and emotion,”
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
17, no. 2 (1971): 124–29.

 
143
 
larger groups than other primates do
: Seth D. Dobson and Chet C. Sherwood, “Correlated evolution of brain regions involved in producing and processing facial expressions in anthropoid primates,”
Biology Letters
7, no. 1 (2010): 86–88, doi:10.1098/rsbl.2010.0427.

 
143
 
precise forms of communication
: For a discussion of the evolution of language, gesture, and facial expression, see Maurizio Gentilucci and Michael C. Corballis, “The Hominid that Talked,”
in
What Makes Us Human
, ed. Charles Pasternak (Oxford, UK: Oneworld Publications, 2007), 49–70.

 
144
 
respond with heightened alertness
: Daniel M. T. Fessler, Serena J. Eng, and C. David Navarrete, “Elevated disgust sensitivity in the first trimester of pregnancy: Evidence supporting the compensatory prophylaxis hypothesis,”
Evolution and Human Behavior
26, no. 4 (2005): 344–51, doi:10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2004.12.001.

 
145
 
endless, changing threats
: Valerie Curtis, Robert Aunger, and Tamer Rabie, “Evidence that disgust evolved to protect from risk of disease,” supplement,
Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
271 (2004): S131–33, doi:10.1098/rsbl.2003.0144; Valerie
Curtis, “Why disgust matters,”
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
366, no. 1583 (2011): 3478–90, doi:10.1098/rstb.2011.0165; Valerie Curtis, “Dirt, disgust and disease: A natural history of hygiene,”
Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health
61, no. 8 (2007): 660–64, doi:10.1136/jech.2007.062380; Valerie Curtis, Mícheál de Barra, and Robert Aunger, “Disgust as an adaptive system for disease avoidance behaviour,”
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
366, no. 1563 (2011): 389–401, doi:10.1098/rstb.2010.0117.

 
146
 
true feelings to the outside world
: Ralph Adolphs, Daniel Tranel, Michael Koenigs, and Antonio R. Damasio, “Preferring one taste over another without recognizing either,”
Nature Neuroscience
8, no. 7 (2005): 860–61, doi:10.1038/nn1489.

 
147
 
labeled the food “delicious”
: Ralph Adolphs, “Dissociable neural systems for recognizing emotions,”
Brain and Cognition
52, no. 1 (2003): 61–69, doi:10.1016/S0278-2626(03)00009-5.

 
147
 
empathetic responses unite
: Bruno Wicker, Christian Keysers, Jane Plailly, Jean-Pierre Royet, Vittorio Gallese, and Giacomo Rizzolatti, “Both of us disgusted in my insula: The common neural basis of seeing and feeling disgust,”
Neuron
40, no. 3 (2003): 655–64,
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/14642287
.

 
147
 
the brighter the insula burns
: See, for example, Mbemba Jabbe, Marte Swart, and Christian Keysers, “Empathy for positive and negative emotions in the gustatory cortex,”
NeuroImage
34, no. 4 (2008): 1744–53, doi:10.1016/j.neuroimage.2006.10.032.

 
148
 
relationships and social personae
: For some discussion, see A. D. (Bud) Craig, “
How do you feel—now?
” 59–70; Isabella Mutschler, Céline Reinbold, Johanna Wanker, Erich Seifritz, and Tonio Ball, “Structural basis of empathy and the domain general region in the anterior insular cortex,”
Frontiers in Human Neuroscience
7: 177, doi:10.3389/fnhum.2013.00177; James Woodward and John Allman, “Moral intuition: Its neural substrates and normative significance,”
Journal of Physiology–Paris
101, nos. 4–6 (2007): 179–202.

 
148
 
primitive form of morality
: H. A. Chapman, D. A. Kim, J. M. Susskind, and A. K. Anderson, “In bad taste: evidence for the oral origins of moral disgust,”
Science
323, no. 5918 (2009): 1222–26, doi:10.1126/science.1165565.

 
149
 
nearly half of adults did
: Paul Rozin, April Fallon, and MaryLynn Augustoni-Ziskind, “The child's conception of food: The development of contamination sensitivity to ‘disgusting' substances,”
Developmental Psychology
21, no. 6: 1075–79, doi:10.1037//0012-1649.21.6.1075.

 
154
 
hairy beast
: Nick Hazelwood,
Savage: The Life and Times of Jemmy Button
(New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000), 338.

 
154
 
“Teheran ape-child”
: Lucien Malson,
Wolf Children and the Problem of Human Nature
(New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972). Also contains the text of Itard's “The Wild Boy of Aveyron.”

 
157
 
Fame shopwindow
: Laudan,
Cuisine and Empire
, location 295.

 
159
 
predictable and reliable
: William H. Brock,
Justus von Liebig: The Chemical Gatekeeper
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 216–29.

Chapter 7: Quest for Fire

 
163
 
more vivid and pleasurable
: McGee,
On Food and Cooking
, 394–95.

 
163
 
obscures these sensations
: Bernd Nilius and Giovanni Appendino, “Tasty and healthy TR(i)Ps: The human quest for culinary pungency,”
EMBO Reports
12, no. 11 (2011): 1094–101, doi:10.1038/embor.2011.200.

 
165
 
bland chilies than to hot ones
: David C. Haak, Leslie A. McGinnis, Douglas J. Levey, and Joshua J. Tewksbury, “Why are not all chilies hot? A trade-off limits pungency,”
Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
279 (2011): 2012–17, doi:10.1098/rspb.2011.2091; Joshua J. Tewksbury, Karen M. Reagan, Noelle J. Machnicki, Tomas A. Carlo, David C. Haak, Alejandra Lorena Calderon Penaloza, and Douglas J. Levey, “Evolutionary ecology of pungency in wild chilies,”
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
105, no. 33 (2008): 11808–11, doi:10.1073/pnas.0802691105.

 
167
 
jalapeño, ancho, serrano, and tabasco peppers
: Linda Perry and Kent V. Flannery, “Pre-Columbian use of chili peppers in the valley of Oaxaca, Mexico,”
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
104, no. 29 (2007): 11905–9.

 
167
 
ancient craze to rival the modern one
: Linda Perry, Ruth Dickau, Sonia Zarrillo, Irene Holst, Deborah Pearsall, Dolores R. Piperno,
Richard G. Cooke, Kurt Rademaker, Anthony J. Ranere, J. Scott Raymond, Daniel H. Sandweiss, Franz Scaramelli, and James A. Zeidler, “Starch fossils and the domestication and dispersal of chili peppers (
Capsicum
spp. L.) in the Americas,”
Science
315, no. 5814 (2007): 986–88, doi:10.1126/science.1136914.

 
168
 
“loaded each year with it”
: Christopher Columbus,
The Log of Christopher Columbus
, trans. Robert H. Fuson (Camden, ME: International Marine Publishing, 1987).

 
169
 
the name “calicut” pepper
: Jean Andrews,
Peppers: The Domesticated Capsicums
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 1984), 5.

 
169
 
ports of call around the world
: Michael Krondl,
The Taste of Conquest: The Rise and Fall of the Three Great Cities of Spice
(New York: Ballantine Books, 2007), 170.

 
169
 
wrote a song
: Ibid.,
172.

 
170
 
25 times the size it was fifty years ago
: UN Food and Agriculture Organization data.

 
170
 
That number has more than doubled
: USDA Economic Research Service data.

 
173
 
it's broad and flat
: Paul Bosland, interview.

 
175
 
chili burn was a form of pain
: T. S. Lee, “Physiological gustatory sweating in a warm climate,”
Journal of Physiology
124 (1954): 528–42.

 
176
 
serve the emperor's court as eunuchs
: Arpad Szallasi and Peter M. Blumberg, “Vanilloid (capsaicin) receptors and mechanisms,”
Pharmacological Reviews
51, no. 2 (1999): 159–212; Mary M. Anderson,
Hidden Power: The Palace Eunuchs of Imperial China
(Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1990), 15–18 and 307–11.