Open your fridge.  If you’ve lived with that fridge for a while, there’s a good chance it looks something like mine does.  Shelf upon shelf of half-used bottles and jars of long-lasting meta-foods.  Condiments, salad dressings, jellies, beverages, chutneys, nut butters, salsas, pickled vegetables, etc.  We expect our fridges to be full of food, so this doesn’t in itself challenge the evolutionary principal of selection.  But taking an inventory shows that there is a strong bias towards foods we don’t actually like.  In fact, the typical selection process for foods in our refrigerators tends to concentrate foods we don’t like, thus running backwards to what should intuitively evolve towards a selection of our favorite foodstuffs.  But for a couple very understandable reasons, that just doesn’t happen.

Consider salad dressings.  Most of us like to have some choices when we’re topping our raw vegetables.  So when we’re at the store, we don’t just buy the one salad dressing we like, but will often try a new variety.  There’s a documented psychological principal called Variety Seeking that encourages diversity in buying because people want to explore different choices.  But what happens when we buy a variety we don’t particularly enjoy?  Like that orange blossom vinaigrette or the honey mustard that’s just a bit too thick and sweet.  We try it once, form an opinion, and the next time we have salad we go for the old-reliable Goddess dressing.  So it lingers.  But we don’t throw it away.  Because there’s nothing WRONG with it.  Besides, one day when we have guests over they might prefer a syrupy honey-mustard dressing.  Or maybe we could dip chicken knuckles into it or something.  Plus the combination of preservatives, low-temperature and food that doesn’t promote bacterial growth in the first place means it can stay edible for years.  So their continued presence provides some small marginal benefit of choice.  The only real alternative is throwing them away  (which makes us feel guilty) since there’s no secondary market for used condiments.

Beyond choice, they do provide marginal benefit in terms of ballast for heat capacity.  Refrigerators run more efficiently when they’re full since there’s a larger thermal mass which is more stable.  But this assumes the fridge has ample space for the food that is being cycled through and consumed.  In many households the need to find space for food you’re actually going to eat creates a selection pressure to remove such undesirable foods.  But the door of the fridge is a niche environment that isn’t very well suited to large, short-lived main courses and thus things like eleven different varieties of mustard tend to thrive.

What’s the take-home lesson here?  How do we fight this scourge on our pallets?  Actually I don’t think it’s that big of a problem.  When we need space in the fridge, we find it.  But otherwise we collect things like Mang Thomas All Purpose Sauce, and pickled cherry peppers.   If clutter bothers you, resist the temptation to try something new and stick with something you know you’ll use.  Heck, get a really big bottle.  Or look for similar reverse-evolutionary processes in your medicine cabinet, liquor shelf, or office supplies, and be conscious that you have the power to change things.  Or just accept that sometimes human nature tends to concentrate our surroundings with things we don’t actually like.

But as communist governments age they tend to become corrupt and dictatorial.  Why?  Unchecked power.  Without elections or a free press, there is essentially no way to remove a bad leader.  Highly secretive control structures like the politburo tend to select for leaders that can amass and wield power by any means possible.  These traits tend to become much more concentrated than any traits related to good governance.  This was the undoing of the Soviet block and hopefully soon will dismantle North Korea.  How China managed to avoid this state I won’t ponder here.

Despite what the US State Department would like you to believe, Cuba’s government has not (yet) devolved to this state.  Cuba is still highly egalitarian where top government officials only earn twice what a factory worker might make — not the wretched excess of a corrupt system.  They probably get to drive cars, but are required to pick up all hitchhikers since really it’s the people’s car.  For the most part Cubans trust their government and with good reason.  Cuba is not corrupt.  Of course if you’re smart and ambitious you have much more to gain in a capitalist system which leads to justifiably frustrated opponents.  While their lifestyles are anything but luxurious, Cubans are generally fairly happy, healthy and well educated.  Happiness is subjective, but statistics clearly show Cuba to be on par if not better than the US for healthcare and education in most measures.  It’s not a bad place to live.

The success of Cuban communism should not come as much of a surprise considering what we’ve discussed so far.  Castro was idealistic when he led the revolution, and he’s still on power.  Corrupt leaders have not been able to take control yet.  A problem with communism is that what happens next will depend very strongly on one individual.  Will they be more like Fidel or Kim Jong-Il.  We’ll have to wait to see.

There’s an evolutionary advantage to cooking food — it kills parasites, bacteria and other food-borne diseases while doing little to decrease the nutritional value of the food.  So it makes sense that we would have evolved a predisposition to eating cooked food, and it seems likely this happened in the form of liking the taste of smoked food.  The genome helped to encourage food-safety rules for us that our brains hadn’t yet worked out.  The fact that smoky food is carcinogenic is a little sad.  I’m guessing it points to the fact that we’ve been subtly encouraged to eat this food for maybe only a couple hundred of thousands of years, which isn’t long enough for our digestive systems to learn how to render safe the multitude of different compounds found in smoke.  That and the fact that most cancers like this happen so late in life as to be essentially irrelevant from an evolutionary standpoint — once you’ve had your kids and raised them, it doesn’t much matter what happens to your body.

This also hearkens back to a time when humans knew how to use fire, but had not fully mastered it.  I’m convinced this is why we love to stare at a fire for hours on end. It is pacifying in a lizard-brain kind of way.  (How many times have you watched that chicken go around just now?) There almost certainly was a time when humans knew how to use fire, but not make it.  They gained benefits from it through cooking or heating, but had to get very lucky to capture it from the wild say  after a natural lightning strike.  As such, it was extremely important to the whole tribe that somebody was always watching the fire to make sure it didn’t go out.

If you’d like to follow along the antics of cooking large mammals over open flames, I’ll be posting regular updates to my food and recipe blog, Add Garlic.  There’s also a “recipe” for spit-roast chicken here.