“[Evolutionary Misalignment: Human Diets vs Preferences]”, 2024-08-23 (; backlinks; similar):
The most reasonable guess by a true Outsider for which taste a biological organism would most enjoy, given the training cases for biology, would be “gasoline”. Gasoline has very high chemical potential energy; and chemical energy is what biological organisms use, and what would correlate with reproductive success… right?
…You say ice cream has got higher sugar, salt, and fat than anything found in the ancestral environment? You say an Outsider should’ve been able to call that new maximum, once the humans invented technology and started picking their optimal tastes from a wider set of options?…Could you predict that outcome in advance, without seeing the final results? Good luck with that.
But more than that—“honey and salt poured over bear fat” would actually have more sugar, salt, and fat than ice cream! “Honey and salt poured over bear fat” would also more closely resemble what was found in the ancestral environment. It’s a more reasonable-sounding-in-advance guess for the ideal human meal than what actually happened! Things that more closely resemble ancestral foods would more highly concentrate the advance-prediction probability density for what humans would most enjoy eating! It’s just that, on hard prediction problems, the most likely guess is still not very likely.
Instead, the actual max-out stimulus for human taste buds (at 1920s tech levels) is “frozen ice cream”. Not honey and salt poured over bear fat. Not even melted ice cream. Frozen ice cream specifically! [cf. pemmican, Alaskan ice cream]