(Yes, you might also eat such foods in cases where you do have cutlery and plates, but that’s downstream of their existence, not the vital reason for their existence.)
Hygeine? keeps flies off, less surface area/volume to get your grubby hands on.
Storage: Insulation to keep meat cool for longer. Also keeping germs bugs and dirt out would help this.
Convenient way to save smaller scraps of meat when you don’t have utensils for a stew.
Easier food makes better nourished people: so much easier to eat sandwhich, gyoza, sausage roll than almost any other food. Obviously I give very refined examples, but possibly true for more rough forms too.
I’m going to give a weird answer and say maybe it’s because water is a scarce resource for life. (Especially water not polluted by another organism.)
All life is made up mainly of lipids/carbohydrates and proteins. Humans therefore need to eat proteins and lipids/carbohydrates in large quantities.
Carbohydrates can be dry. Proteins have secondary structure which needs some water content to maintain. Other organisms (such as microorganisms) can compete for that water so it has to be protected. Hence you put the stuff with water content inside a protective case.
In theory, yes we could be consuming those proteins that don’t have much water content. For example human skin has keratin to protect the rest of the water content in our body, again from microorganisms. In theory we could be eating keratin. But enzymes required to break down those proteins tend to require more water and ATP I think. (Requiring ATP means consuming more carbs again.) Humans lack some of these enzymes. We are smart enough to survive in an evolutionary niche without requiring this much water and carbs, by protecting the water we do have.
why is it convergent to invent foods which consist of some form of carbs enveloping meat?
Bypasses the need for cutlery and plates.
(Yes, you might also eat such foods in cases where you do have cutlery and plates, but that’s downstream of their existence, not the vital reason for their existence.)
many of them have a common origin https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s44187-024-00136-1
✨Portability!!✨
Hygeine? keeps flies off, less surface area/volume to get your grubby hands on.
Storage: Insulation to keep meat cool for longer. Also keeping germs bugs and dirt out would help this.
Convenient way to save smaller scraps of meat when you don’t have utensils for a stew.
Easier food makes better nourished people: so much easier to eat sandwhich, gyoza, sausage roll than almost any other food. Obviously I give very refined examples, but possibly true for more rough forms too.
I’m going to give a weird answer and say maybe it’s because water is a scarce resource for life. (Especially water not polluted by another organism.)
All life is made up mainly of lipids/carbohydrates and proteins. Humans therefore need to eat proteins and lipids/carbohydrates in large quantities.
Carbohydrates can be dry. Proteins have secondary structure which needs some water content to maintain. Other organisms (such as microorganisms) can compete for that water so it has to be protected. Hence you put the stuff with water content inside a protective case.
In theory, yes we could be consuming those proteins that don’t have much water content. For example human skin has keratin to protect the rest of the water content in our body, again from microorganisms. In theory we could be eating keratin. But enzymes required to break down those proteins tend to require more water and ATP I think. (Requiring ATP means consuming more carbs again.) Humans lack some of these enzymes. We are smart enough to survive in an evolutionary niche without requiring this much water and carbs, by protecting the water we do have.