[zx16 (OP)]

Doesn't the range of foods eaten by modern humans seem extravagantly wide?  I mean, this morning I ate a breakfast which consisted of the following things:


- a chicken egg
- a rasher of bacon
- a dollop of baked beans
- two slices of toasted bread
- some butter (on the toast)
- a bowl of cooked porridge oats
- some sugar (on the porridge)
- a glass of apple-juice.


Now while I was preparing and cooking all this stuff in the kitchen this morning, I saw, outside on the window-ledge, a pigeon which regularly roosts there overnight, and was now waking up and getting ready to fly off, to find its breakfast.


The pigeon's breakfast, I suppose, would be some bits of grain, in the form of grass-seeds, or discarded bread-related fragments which it would find in the street, and peck up.


That seems very monotonous and lacking in nutritional variety.  Yet it evidently sustains the pigeon, because it's always back roosting each night. Manifestly in robust health, with handsome plumage, and proudly bowing and cooing at the lady-pigeons.


So I wonder whether my complicated breakfast was really necessary.  Why can't I emulate the pigeon, and just eat grain?

[Pseudoscience-is-malarkey]

No, of course. All North Koreans (at least those allowed to eat) eat kimchi.

[syhprum]

zx16 I would certainly enjoy such a breakfast on occasions  if I was on holiday but I know better than to eat it every day I normally settle for porridge with a little unsweetened fruit juice on it as my weight escalates if I eat as much as my appetite indicates.

[zx16 (OP)]

Thanks syphrum, what I was getting at was why we eat so many different kinds of food. I think you've answered this. Wouldn't daily porridge and bacon be enough, with fruit-juice, and lettuce, plus a banana?

I mean, why eat lobsters?

[alancalverd]

I understand that you can live indefinitely on a diet of Guinness and oranges. In fact the combination of stout and orange juice (a "wasp sting") is quite delicious, though some authorities contend that it lacks calcium.

The reason we eat a wide range of foods, have sex for fun rather than procreation, fly around the world, and kill each other in the name of a nonexistent deity, is Because We Can.  Apparently this is the best that evolution can achieve. 

[zx16 (OP)]

It's as you say.  We do it because we can.

[evan_au]

We have a need for trace amounts of certain vitamins and minerals in our diets. If you have a varied diet, you are likely to gather all you need, even without having heard about vitamins and minerals. For example:

• Fresh fruits are good for vitamin C; early British sailors on a restricted diet suffered from scurvy
• Brown rice is good for vitamin B; early Japanese sailors on a restricted diet suffered from beriberi
• Seafood is good for iodine; residents of the French Alps suffered from goiter

But it does seem that humans have specific sensors for water and salt, although we have so much of both that we have rarely ever smelt water while we are dying of thirst, or had a desperate need for salt.

I do know a child who used to persist in eating dirt, despite anything her parents said. She was diagnosed with an iron deficiency, and eating dirt stopped once treatment began.


As omnivores, we are able to switch between various food sources in different seasons. (And I think pigeons are more omnivorous than you give them credit for...)

[Colin2B]

I think pigeons are more omnivorous than you give them credit for

Yes, pigeons eat a very varied diet. Not only grains but berries, fruit, acorns, seeds, green shoots and buds, plus caterpillars insects and worms. Feral pigeons seem to follow the human trend of fast, easy food.

[Bored chemist]

By eating a varied diet we not only increase the chances of getting all the nutrients we need, but we reduce the chances of getting overloaded with potentially toxic materials present in some foods such as the oxalic acid in spinach or the cyanide in manioc .

[Colin2B]

............such as the oxalic acid in spinach or the cyanide in manioc .

..... or the mercury in fish, or the arsenic in rice, ...............