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shapes taste, and experience shapes the mind. A version of this dialogue has gone on through billions of meals since life first developed an appetite.

CHAPTER 2
    The Birth of Flavor in Five Meals
    T he first inklings of flavor appeared as early life-forms began to sense the world around them and the taste of nutrients floating by in seawater excited primitive nervous systems. Countless meals were consumed as life evolved over the hundreds of millions of years that followed. Like Russian nesting dolls, our modern tastes contain those experiences. No matter how cultured one’s palate or subtle the ingredients in a dish, a taste summons raw urges out of the deep past, echoing evolutionary twists and long-ago life-and-death struggles over food. Five ancient meals, each taking place at a turning point in evolutionary history, help explain where the sense of flavor, and Homo sapiens ’ talent for culinary invention, came from.
    The First Bite
    The creature resembled a scarab. About an inch long, with a soft, ribbed carapace, it scuttled across the sand in a primordial coastal shallow. Then it sensed a threadbare tapestry ofsmells, vibration, and shifting light. Its wormlike prey burrowed into the sand, trying to undulate its way to safety. But it was too late. The predator ripped it open with its pincer-­like mandibles, sucked it into its mouth and down its gullet, then continued on its way, searching for a sheltered spot to digest.
    Evidence of this 480-million-year-old meal was discovered in 1982, when a scientist named Mark McMenamin on a survey expedition spotted a tiny fossil imprint in a gray-green slab of shale. Without giving it much thought, he chiseled the impression out of the rock and bagged it along with dozens of other samples. Then a graduate student, McMenamin was surveying the geology of the Sonoran Desert for the Mexican government, picking over the flanks of Cerro Rajón, a summit about seventy miles southwest of Tucson in the Mexican state of Sonora. The ancient seabed had ended up on a mountaintop.
    To the untrained eye, the fossil looked like a series of faint scratches barely a quarter-inch long. When he studied it back at the lab, McMenamin recognized them as traces of the movements of a trilobite, etched into petrified mud. Trilobites were the ancestors of nearly everything in the animal kingdom: fish, flies, birds, humans. They left countless fossils in seabeds, making them a fixture in natural history museums. Many had shells with multiple segments and looked like a cross between a horseshoe crab and a centipede. This fossil’s pattern of markings was well-known, and even had a scientific name, Rusophycus multilineatus . McMenamin kept it and wrote about it in his PhD thesis. He thought little about it until more than twenty years later, when he was a professor of geology at Mount Holyoke College, studying the early evolution of life.
    McMenamin was examining the fossil again when he sawsomething he had previously overlooked. “It had this additional feature, not just the trilobite, but another sinuous trace fossil right next to it,” he said. “These things are rare.” He concluded the fossil contained evidence of an encounter between two creatures. The extra trace was an indication of a smaller, wormlike organism’s attempt to burrow into the mud. From the arrangement of the markings, it appeared the trilobite had been right on top of it. McMenamin employed Occam’s razor: the simplest explanation was that the trilobite had been digging for lunch. This was, he wrote, evidence of the “first bite,” the oldest known fossil of a predator eating its prey.
    What did this meal taste like? Is it even possible to imagine?
    Before this era, known as the Cambrian Period, flavor did not exist in any meaningful sense. Life on earth consisted mostly of floating, filtering, and photosynthesis. Bacteria, yeasts, and other single-celled creatures nestled in the furrows