One of the more plausible (to an uneducated person like me) theories I've seen in a few places is that we've bred food (both plants and animals) for size and pe

One of the more plausible (to an uneducated person like me) theories I've seen in a few places is that we've bred food (both plants and animals) for size and pest/disease/shipping durability at the direct expense of flavor. Flavor is a key signal for nutrition, so our brain goes "not enough nutrients, eat more to get them!" Here's a Vox review/summary of a book: http://www.vox.com/2015/7/30/9070255/dorito-effect http://www.vox.com/2015/7/30/9070255/dorito-effect > Flavor technology got very powerful in the early 1960s, and it wasn't long after that that we began to see the startling increases in body mass index. > All the good stuff we grow — tomatoes, strawberries, lettuce — has gotten continually more bland. This has been measured. They have become diluted of nutrients, as well. As we selected crops for agronomic traits like yield, shelf life and disease resistant, we never selected for flavor. And we lost flavor as a result. It's reverse evolutionary pressure.