While on the raw food diet I had some strong cravings for cooked food (meat in particular) and I wanted to find out why. My research lead me to believe cooked food is addictive. It’s like a drug, but almost no one realizes this because we eat it every day. It’s like drinking coffee every day. Little by little you grow accustomed to it. There aren’t any serious symptoms, so you don’t really see any adverse affects for decades. Thus, you don’t realize you are addicted to it until you try to stop.
Cooked food works similarly to coffee. It is the main reason I had and from time to time still have such strong cravings. I’m addicted to cooked food. I’ve been eating it for 27 years and it’s hard to give it up in one month. I tried doing it cold turkey, but that did not prove to be as easy as I had thought.
I read a couple of research studies on the imprinting of food preferences in humans. From what I’ve gathered in the articles, it seems that most of our food preferences were determined in the short period after we were being weaned off our mother’s milk. It’s a short period of around 3 months where we form a strong imprint in our mind of what is acceptable to eat. It’s during that time that we focus more on our mothers and look to them for guidance on our own future food choices. If you believe in evolution, then you can see that having this imprinting ability gave children with the ability an advantage over children who lacked it. The children with the imprinting ability would just look at their mothers and learn what food was acceptable to eat. Thus they would not be as likely to get sick or die of food poisoning. On the other hand, children without the ability would not pick up on what was safe to eat and would often eat anything, including poisonous plants or foods, thus eliminating themselves out of the gene pool.
I’m living proof of the above example, not only because I’ve made it this far, but also because of my own food preferences. When I was little I lived on a farm and I was raised by my mom for the first three years of my life. I don’t remember her eating fruits around me, but she told me that while I was little she always used to pick fruit off of trees and bring them to me to eat. She would peel some and eat some herself while at the same time feeding me.
Today, I love fruits! I asked her if she did the same with vegetables and she said yes, but that she didn’t do it too much with green vegetables (see, it’s all her fault I don’t like them). I guess you could argue that it’s genetic, but even though I don’t like green vegetables my mom is fine eating them. I checked with my dad and he loves green vegetables. I on the other hand feel like they are a chore to eat, so unless my grandparents hate them (which I would assume they don’t because they too live on a farm and farm mostly vegetables), then the genetic theory is out the window.
I believe it’s tied to our taste buds and what they are most exposed to during that transition period. For example, some of my friends like spicy food, while others can’t stand spicy food but love sour condiments. This could be a personal preference, but I believe it goes deeper than that to when we were babies. Basically we grow to like what we are exposed to, so if your culture as a whole loves spicy food, then chances are that’s the food you’ll be most exposed to.
Imagine it like designing your own dietary fingerprints when you are young. At first you are a blank slate (you have been breast feeding on milk all this time). Then you start being exposed to either healthy foods (fruits, vegetables, etc.), processed foods, fast foods, cooked foods or a mixture of those foods. Based on what you eat during that critical 3 months, that is what you will prefer in the future. It’s like you are creating a path that you will walk down for the rest of your life. Walking the same path day in and day out imprints it in the grass, a way is parted, and you gradually pave the way. Your path becomes smoother and easier to walk each day. That’s how eating habits or habits in general are formed.
I can’t say imprinting is solely responsible for my strong addiction to cooked food, but from talking to my family, I didn’t just eat fruit when I was little. I was told that I was also a ferocious little meat eater. If you are undergoing this experiment or are planning to, I would check with your family to see what you ate around that critical period or what your food preferences were like. If you know what to look out for, you can better prepare when the cravings hit. And believe me, they will hit.
