The essential difference between primal eating and modern eating is simple: taste. Our ancestors developed an entire mode of life on the urgent spiral of their hunger; hunting and gathering food to fill their bellies, taste mattered not at all to them. Most of us have a memory of some National Geographic special or museum diorama depicting these creatures -- these people? -- huddled around a fire, gobbling fistfuls of raw and bloody meat torn from the dead animal behind them. Pillowed in our modern food snobbery, we shudder at this picture and say to ourselves, "Well, I guess you can make yourself eat just about anything if you're hungry enough." "Hungry enough" was not a term that had even formed in that long-ago society's rudimentary language; just plain hungry was hungry enough.

Hunger's overwhelming authority -- the engine that used to power everything else -- has been diminished by the contemporary luxury of listening first to the sundry whims of the tongue. The stomach is relegated to serving merely as the receptacle for the food that pleases the tongue. How much trouble this has gotten us into, we are told on a daily basis. We are all overweight. We don't exercise enough. We eat too many fatty foods. If we ate only when we were truly hungry, and then only to appease that ache, we would be far better off. Instead, it appears that we have acquired fluency in the dainty language of taste while losing our facility with hunger's crude patois.

Hunger alone drove our long-ago ancestors, and gave flower to all the things desirable: love (if someone fed you, they must have cared about your well-being); success (having enough to eat); intelligence (which aided the hunt with the development of crude weapons); life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness (in short: food, the freedom to find it, and the eating of it). Our current catalogue of desirable life accouterments is so far removed as to be almost surreal: a high salary, a nice car, a degree from a good school -- these have nothing whatever to do with what keeps our bodies going day in and day out.

So what's different about us today? We still get hungry; we still eat to assuage that hunger. The difference bears repeating: it is taste. Seasons no longer dictate the availability of most foods; witness the modern supermarket, its aisles brimming with every conceivable edible, each usually available in more than one form (raw potatoes, potato salad, potato chips, frozen potato-filled pierogies, instant potatoes, frozen home fried potatoes -- you can do this little exercise with dozens of other foodstuffs). Our tastes can be indulged -- indeed, overindulged -- with the merest whisper of effort it takes to get to the grocery store. Some stores even deliver, making that most minimal of trips unnecessary.

Today we can afford to cook with an ear to the desires of our tongues, not our bellies. Sometimes we circumvent the belly altogether -- witness the modern predilection for dessert. Nobody needs dessert; we eat it only because it tastes good, or because it finishes the meal with style (especially true if the meal has been a disappointment). Because dessert comes at the end of a meal, so much has been eaten before it that, in terms of feeding hunger, it is completely unnecessary. Hunger is fast asleep by the time dessert comes to bed.

We will ourselves to hear only the shrill mosquito buzz of the tongue; after all, hunger has more depth than mere craving, and so stilling true hunger demands more time and effort. We might reach for the cookies, or the microwave popcorn. While our stomach is filled with empty calories, our tongue is calmed by the immediate animal gratification of sugar and fat. Although we might be less hungry when we are done, what we have really done is to bend before the whip of taste, not hunger. We have taken the easy way out.

A nutritional study was supposedly done in the early part of this century, using as its participants children in an orphanage. Two tables were set up in the cafeteria. One was laden with bread, meat, vegetables, and fruit. The other held all manner of desserts. The children were taken to the cafeteria for each meal and were told to select whatever they wanted to eat. Naturally, they each ate nothing but desserts for several days. Gradually, though, their diets began to curve back toward healthy moderation, and they ended the study eating mostly from the first table and only a little from the second table.

The story may be apocryphal, but it illustrates hunger's power to dictate not only when and how much to eat, but what the body needs. The tongue is a tireless and spoiled master, fancy piqued by any passing chocolate concoction or steaming plate of something-greasy-with-gravy; the stomach is fairer and smarter, really, signaling fullness and allowing rest. The tongue cares little for rest; it has all of the pleasure of eating and none of the work. The stomach rumbles need; the tongue, master of subtlety, purrs want.

Isn't one of the things that makes us civilized our ability to eat something for the sole purpose of enjoying it? It is, and few of us would give up such a delectable privilege. It's sobering, though, to contemplate how much has changed in the way we circle our hunger without actually knowing -- most of us, thank God -- how horrifyingly cruel it can be.

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