Why does food taste so much better when you are hungry? My family calls it “hunger sauce”.
• That hunger is the best sauce is proverbial in various languages. But remember that many of our ancestors were intimately familiar with famine. Many locally popular delicacies such as olives, chillies and garlic contain poisons and repellents that are repugnant when unfamiliar. So at first such foods would require a special sauce: presumably ancestors under the temptation of hunger, that greatest of all condiments, were driven to try the new foods in desperation, then learned to like them.
One of our most important…
