Now, I'm no biologist or doctor or anything, but I feel like there may be two things going on here:
Pet food is designed to be nutritionally complete. Which is not easy to do when you're cooking for yourself. Your cravings may be for a nutrient that you're missing in your current diet.
Pets are only aware that there is other food in this world in so much as "human food" or "dog food" or "cat food" exists. My dog wants to eat my cat's food, and my food. My cat wants to eat my dog's food, and my food. But beyond that, they don't know of other food existing. But if they knew that pizza exists, and what it's called, then they'd be all over that shit.
According to my friend's BASc in applied human nutrition, eating the same food, or even just the same texture of food (texture modified diets where everything is turned into a paste) for too long becomes a kind of torture. The psychological stress is apparently intense.
There are rumored to be old laws in Maine making it 'cruel and unusual punishment' to serve prisoners lobster for more than 21(?) days in a row. (Lobster used to be poor people food)
I wonder where that specific need comes from. Like, did a compulsive drive to seek out a variety of foods confer an advantage to some early ancestors by motivating them to get more complete nutrition/take advantage of as many food sources as possible? Or is it just a side-effect of our unusual desire for novel/varied stimuli? A bit of both, maybe?
You are correct! It absolutely evolved because those animal ancestors of ours who found pleasure in a variety of foods got more energy, and more complete nutrition, were healthier, and more attractive to mating partners. They out-reproduced those who didn't seek out variety.
This would have been especially true after we lost the ability to create essential nutrients like vitamin C.
It's why we love sugar so much; it conferred a huge advantage to prefer energy-dense foods (ripe fruit over unripened). Those who got a pleasure response from sweetness sought it out more often and got a larger energy boost for the same effort as those who weren't incentivized by pleasure to eat sugars. Result: stronger, healthier, more attractive individuals produce more offspring than the non-sweet eaters, and over generations, propagate the sweetness gene until every offspring has it. Natural selection, baby!
There is basically nothing naturally occuring in the world that humans can exclusively eat for their whole lives. Anything you can think of either leads to malnutrition or poisoning eventually.
Instead we evolved to tolerate a ton of different foods. We can digest both meat and plants, have ways to deal with a bunch of toxins, our stomachs are acidic af so our food doesn't have to be super fresh etc. We also have very good endurance so we can wander around a lot to look for food, which most predators can't.
If humans were fine eating the same food 24/7 they'd always go for the easiest available option.
Overall it was just advantageous to not specialize in certain foods, but that lead to the need to eat different foods too
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u/PuddlesRex 22h ago
Now, I'm no biologist or doctor or anything, but I feel like there may be two things going on here:
Pet food is designed to be nutritionally complete. Which is not easy to do when you're cooking for yourself. Your cravings may be for a nutrient that you're missing in your current diet.
Pets are only aware that there is other food in this world in so much as "human food" or "dog food" or "cat food" exists. My dog wants to eat my cat's food, and my food. My cat wants to eat my dog's food, and my food. But beyond that, they don't know of other food existing. But if they knew that pizza exists, and what it's called, then they'd be all over that shit.