Our team here at Bored Panda has cherry-picked some of the most impactful images from all over the internet where completely inedible things look like food. That sandwich over there? Look closer—that’s a rock. That slice of bacon? A mouth-watering crystal. And, no, those aren’t olives next to that pizza… Scroll down to see some impressive examples of forbidden food.
Warning: you might start getting strangely hungry all of a sudden! Just… don’t end up nibbling on any rocks! Promise?
Bored Panda reached out to Glenn Geher, Ph.D., who shed some light on the food human beings are naturally attracted to from an evolutionary history perspective. Dr. Geher is a professor of Psychology at the State University of New York at New Paltz and a published author. You'll find our full interview with him as you read on.
"For the lion’s share of human evolutionary history, the only foods that existed were natural foods. So on one hand, it makes sense that we would be attracted to foods that have a resemblance to natural foods. Fresh fruits and vegetables are examples," Dr. Geher explained to Bored Panda in an email.
"On the other hand, humans are omnivores. And from an evolutionary perspective, omnivores have an interesting approach to food. Omnivores evolved a curiosity regarding a variety of foods. This is why sometimes an omnivore will taste something that they may have never had before just to see if it tastes good and might be edible," he said.
"I would say for this reason, humans evolved to be open to eating foods with all kinds of visible features. We definitely tend to avoid things that are obviously overcooked or that are obviously rotten. But, again, we are omnivores. So humans are open to eating a variety of foods by nature."
Bored Panda was curious how people have been affected by the fact that, in modern times, they have plentiful and easily accessible food in developed nations. However, in the past, our ancestors lived under very different conditions.
"Humans evolved largely under conditions in which famine was common. Under such conditions, humans evolved to like food that would put fat cells on their bodies so as to help prepare for adverse conditions. We like foods that are very high in carbohydrates and salts because, in combination, these foods do that,” Dr. Geher said.
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"Under ancestral conditions, such food preferences were healthy and adaptive. Under modern conditions, however, the world is not always matched to those ancestral conditions. Today, we have many processed foods that are extremely high in carbohydrates and salt (think doughnuts!)," he explained.
"People still tend to like foods like this because our ancestral tendencies have not had time to evolve in a way to match modern conditions— conditions under which food is plentiful. This is partly why we often prefer foods such as cookies, even if these foods tend to be very unhealthy today. This is a classic example of what we call evolutionary mismatch."
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One of the main lessons to learn from this post is that you should never ever exclusively rely on just one of your senses to make sense of the world. When your senses work in concert, you get a far more nuanced picture of reality than when you’re left using just one of them as a crutch.
Now, pair that up with an instinct NOT to taste anything before fully examining it and you’re golden. (And to be fair, we’re not judging anyone. Many of us have accidentally popped some home decor knick-knacks or potpourri into our mouths, thinking it was candy.)
In other words, before you take a big juicy bite out of whatever tasty treat you’ve found in a decorative bowl at your friends, examine it. Sure, it might look like candy, but does it smell like it? What does the thing feel like? What’s its texture and weight? If you take just a bit of time to examine the thing, you’ll probably quickly realize that it’s not edible at all. In other words, you’ve found an example of forbidden food. Snap a pic and share it online. There are lots of online communities that love things like this.
Many of us have been taught in school that there are five main senses: seeing, hearing, touch, smell, and taste. Then there’s the mystical ‘sixth sense’ that fans of the paranormal mention when talking about intuition. Real life is far more complex than just that.
Our perceptions are very literally in our heads. “You don’t experience sensations with your sense organs. You experience them with your brain,” BBC Science Focus explains.
Truth be told, we have way more senses than we’ve been taught. Those five main senses we’ve mentioned? They’re known as exteroperceptive senses. In short, your exteroperceptive senses provide information about the world that’s external to us.
According to the BBC, your body also has lots of receptors inside that register things you’re generally not aware of. Like the beating of your heart, the expanding of your lungs, what’s going on in your stomach, etc. These get grouped up into what’s called interoception, as it’s related to your interior world (aka what’s inside of you).
The science of sensing is fairly nuanced. Most people don’t tend to think of things like feeling temperature to be a sense, even though we have receptors for this. Meanwhile, some receptors are used for different things.
One example of this would be your retinas. Yes, they’re directly related to your sight. However, retinal cells also let you know whether it’s day or night, which is essential for your circadian rhythm, metabolism, and sleep/waking cycle.
In the meantime, your body’s functions can affect how your senses interact with the world. The BBC explains that when your heart contracts, pushing blood out to your arteries, your brain actually takes in less visual information from your environment. In other words, the beating of your heart affects your sight. Your interior literally affects how you perceive what’s external to you. But that’s not all. Your brain also predicts what you might see before you actually see it based on your previous experiences.
Your brain typically doesn’t rely on just one group of receptors to construct what you know as senses. In practical terms, look at something like the flavor of food. Sure, there’s the gustatory (aka taste) data to consider. But that’s not enough. Your brain also considers olfactory (aka smell) data. Furthermore, it looks at the information gained from touch and temperature to distinguish whether food is wet.
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According to the ‘Sensory Trust’ charity, depending on how you classify things, you can have as many as 21 senses. That’s jaw-dropping! On top of that, if you consider things like hunger and thirst, you could technically have even more.
Among all the different senses, you have things like thermoception (sensing heat), nociception, (perceiving pain), equilibrioception (related to feeling balance), and proprioception (the perception of body awareness, e.g., touching your nose with your eyes closed). Some researchers go even further beyond.
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