Some of this selection has taken place through natural selection: wild animals choosing to eat fruits they find tasty (and disperse their seeds). In this case, because the animal consumer is also evolving, it’s likely to end up favoring (and thus propagating) fruits that are actually nutritious too. After all, an animal that chose to eat foods that were bad for it, would be less likely to survive and prosper. So wild animals’ tastes and their food plants’ properties coevolve into something resembling an equilibrium, where the fruits are adequately tasty and nutritious.
But once modern humans come on the scene, artificial selection takes over — and once industrial capitalism arises, that selection is accelerated massively. To have a profitable food industry, the foremost goal of selection is not nutrition but rather marketability: being able to sell the food to other humans. This selection process runs much faster than the evolution of taste. So we end up inventing candy, cake, cocktails, and other hyperpalatable foods that are “bad for us” but sell well because they’re tasty. We breed fruits to be big and sweet, and then we squeeze them for sugary juice and discard the fiber.
(And poky slow evolution doesn’t breed out our taste for sweets, because candy isn’t so bad for us that it kills everyone who eats it right away.)
Many foods have been selected for palatability.
Some of this selection has taken place through natural selection: wild animals choosing to eat fruits they find tasty (and disperse their seeds). In this case, because the animal consumer is also evolving, it’s likely to end up favoring (and thus propagating) fruits that are actually nutritious too. After all, an animal that chose to eat foods that were bad for it, would be less likely to survive and prosper. So wild animals’ tastes and their food plants’ properties coevolve into something resembling an equilibrium, where the fruits are adequately tasty and nutritious.
But once modern humans come on the scene, artificial selection takes over — and once industrial capitalism arises, that selection is accelerated massively. To have a profitable food industry, the foremost goal of selection is not nutrition but rather marketability: being able to sell the food to other humans. This selection process runs much faster than the evolution of taste. So we end up inventing candy, cake, cocktails, and other hyperpalatable foods that are “bad for us” but sell well because they’re tasty. We breed fruits to be big and sweet, and then we squeeze them for sugary juice and discard the fiber.
(And poky slow evolution doesn’t breed out our taste for sweets, because candy isn’t so bad for us that it kills everyone who eats it right away.)