It's a sort of arms race. Unprepared plain raw organic produce is delicious, if you haven't been eating prepared food covered in salt and other seasoning for years. Once you start adulterating your food with flavor crystals, you require that stuff just to move the needle.
A flavor tolerance develops, similar to drug tolerance.
> Unprepared plain raw organic produce is delicious
Yeah, although I doubt it was as delicious before modern farming. Or even if it was, we didn't have most of it.
But an animal roasted over a fire is equally as delicious; just ask an Alone contestant. One woman ate the gut contents of a rabbit and said it was one of the best things she'd ever eaten.
I don't think so, I think it's more that we grew to live in a "feast famine" environment, but suddenly we are now in an environment with infinite food. It goes against our instincts to not eat food that is there. Instead we have to hope we have the willpower to overcome it with our rational thought processes. Most people, if they are not busy with other things, will want to eat. "Thankfully" we have capitalism and so people are busy and pushed to be even busier. I think without that, if we really had time to sit and relax without those mental pressures of progression, we would be much fatter.
It is just one of the ways that human material conditions has quickly changed way faster than the human animal has managed to evolve for it, and so it is unsuited for such environments. I think we might eventually have a technological solution (everyone on appetite suppressants)
A flavor tolerance develops, similar to drug tolerance.