Why do we want to eat candy?

Have you ever had a bacon 'n french toast sandwich? Don't forget the syrup, but then what sort of philistine would? Mmmmm. Nummins. As tasty as can be, n'est pas? And yet this glorious epicurean menagerie is a harbinger of death. Newsweek shocked us all when it revealed that 1 out of 3 American women die of heart disease. (They decided not to run the far-too-shocking story that 3 out of 3 American women die of something or other.) And a number of men out of a another number also die when their heart pops because it's all sticky with high fructose corn syrup. And those numbers would be telling if I bothered to look them up.

We love to eat fatty meats with complex carbohydrates all covered in sugar. If these foods are cardiac poison that pretty consistently kills us, why would we have evolved a tendency to enjoy them? Shouldn't the bacon and white-bread eating apes have all been easily defeated by the lean vegan-hippy apes leaving the world to their peaceful life-respecting organic ways? Maybe there is a God because, no, the vegans don't run anything significant and they certainly don't defeat anyone ever. The reason why we crave all that delicious candy can be blamed on farmers. Humans have had agriculture for nigh on 10,000 years and that is barely a mouse fart on an evolutionary time scale. Agriculture changed our world so fast that we haven't began to try to catch up with it yet. Back in the good ole days, when we were the Nomad Apes we occasionally hunted (not as much as shitty movies from the makers of Independence Day would have you think) but mostly gathered our food from the trees 'n the ground 'n caves 'n the occasional Doritos machine that had fallen into a time warp. In our gatherings we ate lots of vegetables cause that's what there was most of. It was rare that any of us would have the opportunity to munch on a pear or some Doritos, simply because they were very few and quite far between. The added boost of energy in fruit and specifically in the fruit's sugars, made it a much more highly valued food item both for its rarity and it's ability to sustain us for much longer than celery could. Meat and the very rare carbos contained even more potential energy for us. Nomad Apes would have loved bread, but all they could really hope for was once a year finding some wheat, a potato, or a bag of Cool Ranch from the year 2525 (if man is still alive). These foods are so chocked full-o-energy that they tasted great, but were available so rarely that they posed no detrimental health risks whatsoever. Agriculture facilitated human civilization, but only because these high-sugar and high-calorie foods could be mass produced allowing large numbers of people to live close together and wham - Pittsburgh. But at the cost of Pittsburgians (and rest of us in civilization) getting fat and dying of heart failure, not to mention with cavities in our teeth. The Nomad Apes lived most of their lives (which are estimated at only slightly shorter than ours) with no tooth decay and mostly never died of heart failure. 10,000 years of farmin' hasn't been enough time for us to affect millions of years of evolution. If you want a more detailed explanation of why we're fat and how agriculture is the plastic demon of the downfall of mankind, read Jared Diamond's excellent book The Third Chimpanzee.