Ordering a meal
When we are really hungry the quickest way for our body to gain energy is surely by eating the kinds of simple sugars found in desserts. So why do we usually eat savoury foods followed by sugary puddings and not the other way around? I have noticed that on aircraft, where all the food arrives together on a tray, people often eat the courses in a quite different order from usual.
鈥� Meals comprising a sequence of courses are arguably unique to civilised humanity. Most animals eat what they can when they can. Given a choice, they proceed from their favourite items to the necessary evils. The more prized the food, the higher the probability of losing it through procrastination and the greater the penalties. Availability is more important than quick energy, so natural selection favours an eye for the main chance, in every species from microbes to hunter-gatherers. Even today, children will go for the goodies first when they can.
Only once humans had achieved security, productivity and the leisure time for multiple-course meals, did they formulate the principle of 鈥渘ever a sweet before the meat鈥�. Long before people discovered that flooding the blood with sugar is an unhealthy habit, they had learned that sweet starters spoil the appetite. This is useful if one needs to discourage guests from overeating, but spoils a good feed and forfeits that pleasant anticipation of treats to follow. Sugary desserts enhance the sense of comfortable repletion and are less harmful at the end of a meal, because diluting the sugar in a gutful of chyme buffers the surge of sugar into the blood.
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Jon Richfield
Somerset West, South Africa
鈥� It鈥檚 only in relatively modern European cuisine that the sugar is reserved for the last course of the meal. In most of the world, sugar is added to meat dishes, such as in oriental sweet-and-sour recipes or Mexican mole.
European cuisine did the same until the 17th century, working under a theory of nutrition 鈥� inherited from ancient Greece 鈥� that sugar was the perfect food. Many meat dishes were sweetened until a new theory developed which saw sugar as harmful and relegated it to a small course served after the main meal, when appetites were lower.
We can still see a remnant of the older cuisine in condiments like steak sauce and ketchup, with their high sugar content.
For more history of this change in European eating habits, see and Rachel Laudan鈥檚 article 鈥淏irth of the modern diet鈥� in the August 2000 issue of Scientific American.
Elsewhere, Laudan has pointed out that many supposedly traditional ethnic dishes are less than 100 years old, and created to please tourists.
Alan Chattaway
Surrey, British Columbia, Canada
This week鈥檚 question
Triple trouble
While visiting the east coast of Iceland last August I saw an atmospheric phenomenon that was new to me: a triple, almost a quadruple, rainbow. I was above the cloud line, with the sun behind me, as I looked over a cliff (see photograph above). What is it and what caused it?
Mike Mann
By e-mail, no address supplied
Concerned consumer
I always use blue toilet paper because it matches my bathroom decor. However, a friend told me that I should only use white, because coloured paper is more damaging to the environment. My local supermarket sells a huge variety of colours with any number of patterned varieties too. Is it true that some varieties are more environmentally damaging? And if so, why? Is kitchen roll even worse than toilet paper?
John Shaw
Driffield, East Yorkshire, UK