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Comments (336)
I define it as food I see and eat in my home as well as food in the restaurants. I like yummy food and I see no reason to eat non-yummy food.
You seem to think that any tasty food is super-stimulus food. That's not how most people use the term.
Depends. There's a lot of bad pizza out there. You can get very good pizza but you can also get mediocre or bad pizza.
I don't see why this is relevant. Small children in general also like pasta and even you probably wouldn't consider it a super-stimulus food.
The dose make the poison. In small amounts or consumed rarely, pretty much no food or drink is unhealthy (of course there are a bunch of obvious exceptions for allergies, gluten- or lactose-intolerance, outright toxins, etc.).
With this caveat, I generally consider to be unhealthy things like the large variety of liquid sugar (e.g. soda or juice) or, say, hydrogenated fats (e.g margarine, many cookies).
Or fatty.
Shouldn't pretty much any cooked food be a super-stimulus considering the relevant ancestral environment and why we intricately cook food in the first place?
Super-stimuli could be different for different age groups. I've never seen anyone love plain pasta, they like their ketchup and sauce too.
Not sure about that. Fat makes food more tasty (mostly through contributing what's called "mouth feel"), but it doesn't look like a super-stimulus to me.
Well, depends on how do you want to define "super-stimulus". I understand it to mean triggering hardwired biological preferences above and beyond the usual and normal desire to eat tasty food. The two substances specifically linked to super-stimulus are sugar and salt.
Again, super-stimulus is not the same thing as yummy.
I'm not sure it's that simple -- chocolate is more of a super-stimulus than fruits for most people.
True. On the other hand, take away the sugar and see how many chocoholics are willing to eat 99% dark chocolate :-/
Ever seen a child lick butter off a slice of bread? Don't tell me they would lick off just salt too.
I've seen both. In the case of salt it's lick finger, stick it into the salt bowl, lick clean, repeat.
Ah, now that you reminded me I've seen the latter too, dammit.
Dunno about 99% (though if you set the bar as low as "willing to eat" I probably would), but I do find 85% dark chocolate quite addictive (as in, I seldom manage to buy a tablet and not finish it within a couple days). But I know I'm weird.
A couple of days! :-) That's not what "addiction" means.
I meant it in the colloquial ‘takes lots of willpower to stop’ sense, not the technical ‘once I stop I get withdrawal symptoms’ sense. (Is there a technical term for the former?)
(OK, it does seem to me that whenever I eat chocolate daily for a few weeks and then stop, I feel much grumpier for a few days, but that's another story, and anyway it's not like I took enough statistics to rule out it being a coincidence,)
The verb "like" and a variety of synonyms :-D
Not quite -- I'm talking about the upper extreme of what Yvain here calls “wanting”, though that word in the common vernacular has strong connotations of what he calls “approving”.
Is there something wrong with binging or compulsion? Withdrawal symptoms would imply dependence, but not necessarily addiction.
Did our preferences mostly evolve for "tasty food" or for raw meat, fruit, vegetables, nuts etc? I thought super-stimulus usually means something that goes beyond the stimuli in the ancestral environment where the preferences for the relevant stimuli were selected for.
I don't understand how you draw the line between stimuli and super-stimuli without such reasoning.
I guess it's possible most our preferences evolved for cooked food, but I'd like to see the evidence first before I believe it.
ETA: I don't think there's necessarily anything wrong with super-stimuli, so let's drop the baggage of that connotation.
Well, I actually don't want to draw the line. I am not a big fan of the super-stimulus approach, though obviously humans have some built-in preferences. This terminology was mostly used to demonize certain "bad" things (notably, sugar and salt) with the implication that people can't just help themselves and so need the government (or another nanny) to step in and impose rules.
I think a continuous axis going from disgusting to very tasty is much more useful.
Well, sure. Similarly, a continuous axis designating typical level of risk is more useful than classifying some activities as "dangerous" and others as "safe." Which doesn't mean there don't exist dangerous activities.
So you disagreed with the connotation. I disagree with it too, and edited the grandparent accordingly. I still like the word though, and think it's useful. I suppose getting exposed to certain kind of marketing could make me change my mind.
According to what I read in Scientific American, the human digestive system has evolved to require cooked food; humans can't survive on what chimpanzees and other primates eat.
Oh God! Please never utter those two words in the same sentence where an Italian can hear you. I was about to barf on the keyboard! :-)
Then again, people (other than me, at least) don't usually binge on flat bread without toppings, either.
Are you saying that plain pasta and bread without toppings are super-stimuli for you? Are you not even using oil? :)
I can understand the bread part if it's fresh, but as far as I'm concerned pasta doesn't taste much like anything. Perhaps I've just eaten the wrong kind of bland crap.
When I was a kid, my grandmother had some trick that caused her bland spaghetti (possibly with some oils and stuff, but mostly things that weren't visible after it was prepared) to be the best food that I knew of. If not superstimuli, then close to it.
Unfortunately she's no longer alive, and she never passed the trick on to anyone else, so I can't say whether I would get the same pleasure out of it as an adult.
Do you know if it was fresh? I hear that fresh pasta is comparable to fresh bread.
Interesting. Links or stories? I am very much aware of the difference between fresh-baked bread and "plastic bread" from the supermarket. It's huge. Are people claiming freshly-made pasta is different to the same degree?
It appears not. [1] [2] [3] Fresh pasta has a more pronounced flavor, and is generally made with a superior variety of flour (that doesn't keep as well), which means less of the flavor work is done by the sauce.
(I don't think I've ever had fresh pasta, and so don't have any first-hand reports. I do think fresh bread is worlds better than supermarket bread, though.)
Also, in America at least, making fresh pasta is a very grandmothery thing to do, and so my prior was high enough to be remarkable.
Hmm... I am getting curious. Not yet to the degree of making fresh pasta myself, but I recall that there is WholeFoods nearby that sells it...
On the other hand pasta is basically boiled wheat dough and I generally find dough as bread to be yummier than dough as pasta.
No, unless I misremember terribly it was ordinary market spaghetti.
Hmm. Well, you can vary the taste by throwing salt into the pot, but I've never found a level of salt that I thought would raise the quality more than a point on a ten point scale. Adding spices while boiling, like powdered garlic, will alter the taste somewhat but I think they're more effective in sauces / applied afterwards, and are often visible.
If someone wants to experiment, my starting point would be this:
Take some good olive oil (extra-virgin, first cold press, etc.) and grate fresh garlic into it. Stir and let it stand covered for an hour or so. Once your pasta is ready, drain it, and then toss with the garlic-infused olive oil.
Apparently my mother tried to make some spaghetti according to my grandmother's instructions, but it never tasted the same to me. So either it was something really subtle, or there was a placebo effect involved (or both).
ETA: Though now that I think of it, I'm not entirely sure of the "bland" thing anymore - there might have been a sauce involved as well. Damn unreliable memories.
Olive oil, lots and lots of it. Thank me later. I have been drenching food with it and getting compliments on my cooking skills for years, and I also use to say it's a secret given my GF would freak out due to high calories. (disclaimer: I weight 260 pounds)
No, I eat pasta with sauces other than ketchup. And I do eat much more plain bread than the average person e.g. when I'm at the restaurant and I'm waiting for the dishes to arrive, but I think it's more got to do with boredom and hunger than anything else -- it's not like I have to refrain from keeping any bread at home whenever I'm trying to lose weight lest I binge on it, the way I do with cookies.
Anyway, my general point was that comparing pizza with toppings to pasta without toppings (in terms of how much people, in particular small children, enjoy them) isn't a fair comparison.
I binge on (fresh) bread without toppings, but I find pasta much more enjoyable with ketchup or some sort of spice.
Yuck!
It's ok! I'll prepare a tomato, garlic, and basil sauce with some Merlot cooked in, stat!
Do you still believe that fatty equals not good for you? Plus who the hell puts ketchup anywhere near pasta?
No. Why would you think that?
People who torture kittens for fun. Both are an acquired taste.
I suppose I just expect from people, even intelligent people on LW.
The reverse correlation doesn't work because I torture kittens too.
It doesn't?
Probably depends on how much you eat it, and what kind. Let's not oversimplify things.