评论
打印
How We Lost Our Sensory Connection With Food—And How to Restore It
我们如何失去了与食物的感官联系以及如何恢复
This is going to sound weird, but I want you to look closely for a moment at your thumbs. See how they flex forwards as well as back. Notice how responsive and grippy the skin is.
这听起来会很奇怪，但我想让你仔细看看你的大拇指，看看它们如何向前和向后弯曲，并留意一下手指皮肤的触觉有多灵敏、抓力有多么好。
The human thumb is not just a device for giving the thumbs-up sign or for picking up dropped keys. It is also one of the most efficient and sensitive tools in existence for determining the ripeness of fruit.
人类的拇指不仅仅是用来竖起大拇指或把掉落的钥匙捡起来。它也是确定果实成熟度的现存最有效和最灵敏的工具之一。
One of the hallmarks of being a hominid is having opposable thumbs: stronger, longer and more flexible than the thumbless hands of a spider monkey or the non-opposable thumbs of a marmoset.
原始人的特征之一是拥有对生拇指：比蜘蛛猴没有拇指的手掌或绒猴的不对生拇指更有力、更长、更灵活。
These opposable thumbs are a trait that humans share with our primate cousins such as chimpanzees. But it has only recently been discovered that our thumbs might have first evolved as a device for measuring whether or not fruit was ripe.
这些对生拇指是人类与黑猩猩等灵长类近亲的共同特征。但直到最近才发现，我们的拇指可能最初是作为一种测量果实是否成熟的工具进化而来的。
In 2016, biologist Nathaniel Dominy studied the way chimpanzees pick figs.
2016年，生物学家纳撒尼尔·多米尼研究了黑猩猩采摘无花果的方式。
Dominy found that chimpanzees use their dexterous hands to give figs a quick squeeze to determine whether they are ripe or not—a technique that works four times quicker on average than the method used by monkeys (plucking figs at random, biting them to check for ripeness and spitting out the unripe ones).
多米尼发现，黑猩猩用它们灵巧的双手快速捏一下无花果，判断果子是否成熟——这个技巧比猴子所用的方法平均快四倍（随机摘下无花果，咬一口来检查成熟度，然后吐出未成熟的无花果）。
Humans also have these incredible hands capable of identifying the ripest fruit from touch alone. But most of us don’t use them that way anymore.
人类也有这样神奇的双手，单凭触摸就能识别最成熟的水果。但大多数人不再使用这种方法了。
If you want ripe fruit, you no longer need to rely on your own sense of touch. You can go into the nearest supermarket and buy a plastic tub of pre-peeled, pre-sliced mango or melon labelled “ripe and ready” or “ripe and sweet” and eat it with a fork.
如果想要成熟的水果，你不再需要依靠自己的触觉。你可以走进离你最近的超市，买一盒去皮、切好的芒果或甜瓜，上面标着“成熟即食”或“成熟香甜”的标签，然后拿起叉子开吃。
One of the most striking things about eating in the modern world is that we do so much of it as if we were sense-blind.
在现代社会，关于饮食最显著的一点是，我们在很多情况下表现得像是感官失灵了一样。
We still have the same basic physiognomy as our hunter-gatherer ancestors, yet much of the time, we switch off our senses when choosing what to eat. Our noses can distinguish fresh milk from sour milk, and yet we prefer to look at the use-by date rather than sniffing.
我们仍然与狩猎采集的祖先有相同的基本面貌，但在很多时候，我们在选择吃什么时会关闭我们的感官。我们的鼻子可以区分新鲜牛奶和酸腐的牛奶，但我们更喜欢看保质期，而不是闻一闻。
Senses, wrote the late anthropologist Jack Goody, are “our windows on the world”—the main tools through which humans acquire information about our environments.
已故的人类学家杰克·古迪写道，感官是“我们了解世界的窗口”——人类获取环境信息的主要工具。
Senses are instruments of survival as well as pleasure. But today, we have relinquished many of the functions of our own senses to the modern food industry—which suits that industry just fine. It suits us less well, judging by the current epidemic of diet-related ill health.
感官是生存的工具，也是享乐的工具。但今天，我们已经将感官的许多功能让渡给了现代食品工业——这正好适合这个行业。从目前与饮食相关的流行病来看，这不太适合我们。
