Tomato template found!
A few years ago I wondered if food choices were explicitly built in.

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Think especially about tomatoes. There's plenty of evidence that humans live longer and better with tomatoes. I've experienced this in my own life. It's a safe bet that we were designed to want and need tomatoes. Did we really get along for a million years without them?

Or did we lose them through bad cultivation or bad weather in the Eastern Hemisphere, while the Western Hemisphere continued growing and eating them?

Bear in mind that the Western Hemisphere people came from the Eastern Hemisphere to begin with.

It may seem strange that we would have specialized connections with certain plants, but why should it be strange? Nearly all animals have specialized connections with certain food sources. We've been smart enough to find and cultivate a huge variety of foods that we like, but that doesn't exempt us from having innate needs and wants before we started farming and cooking.

Putting it another way: Nature doesn't assume that a bee or a crow or a koala will learn which foods to eat through spoken or written transmission of culture. Nature gives those animals a specific sensory template to recognize their proper and necessary foods by sight and/or smell. Since we didn't have spoken or written transmission of culture until rather late in our existence as a species, how did we know what to eat before we had words for things? Only one possible answer. We were given a specific sensory template, just like every other animal. If we didn't have innate standards, WE WOULDN'T HAVE SURVIVED to the point where we used culture.

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Now the template has been found. It's in the amygdala,



Pyramidal cells in the amygdala "form cliques that help us enjoy the total food experience, from recognizing a banana to anticipating its taste and texture, placing it correctly in the category of food and maybe even the subcategory of a breakfast food."

The amygdala is generally responsible for fear vs empathy, with right and left amygdalae playing opposite roles. Food recognition clearly relates to fear and avoidance.

I strongly doubt that breakfast is an innate category; choosing certain foods at certain times of day is an EXTREMELY recent development in a few parts of the world. But the rest makes sense.
  ¶ 12:28 AM