Post #5: Chapter 16

Out of all of the readings we have done in this book, I found chapter 16 one to be one of the most boring and hard to understand sections. I appreciated the part that discussed the various kinds of eaters, and the specialized ways that omnivores have learned how to eat over many years. As mentioned in the beginning of the chapter, rats use their digestive tracts as a laboratory, by nibbling on a tiny piece of new food, and depending on how their body reacts to it, they save it in their memory as either edible or not. Humans do this in a certain way, trying new foods to decide if they like them or not, but as far as tasting something to see if it's edible, humans usually just buy stuff from the store that they know is okay.
The part that talks about the various sensory and mental tools omnivores use to sort foods that we can eat and are healthy, from the foods that are not edible to us, or that we shouldn't be eating. We can obviously use our taste buds the majority of the time to tell us if the milk we are drinking is expired or the apple we just took a bite of is rotten. Our taste buds are so important because if we suddenly taste something bitter, we almost automatically know that we should be taking caution of what might be in that bite of food. Without taste we could go on eating things that on the outside looked fine, but inside were lethal doses of toxins that could hurt our bodies and immune systems. The practice of cooking and heating food has also helped give humans more ways of knowing what is okay to eat and what is not. However, it has made the decision of what to eat for dinner a lot harder.