A review by rogerjpatterson
Delicious: The Evolution of Flavor and How It Made Us Human by Rob Dunn, Monica Sanchez

4.0

The thesis of this brief book is simple:  humans have a genetic taste for flavor that is not explained by the need for nutrition, but may have driven our evolutionary development.  It contains plenty of anthropology, history, and evolutionary biology  ranging from the extinction of mega-fauna to the functions of shared meals.  But the approach is ultimately a bit scattershot, and the simple thesis is neither rigorously supported nor its implications convincingly presented.  In the end, this is a nice meditation on why we pursue flavor, but shows more how much work remains to be done than how much work has been done.