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of granite and between grains of sand. Some joined together into slimy mats of cells. Organisms shaped like tubes or disks rode the ocean’s currents. “Eating” meant absorbing nutrients from the sea. Sometimes one organism enveloped another.
    Then, over tens of millions of years—suddenly, in geological terms—the seas filled to teeming with new creatures, including the trilobites, which became the most successful class of organism in the history of life; their dominion lasted more than 250 million years. Their emergence, about 500 million years ago, was when nature as we know it really began: for the first time, life began systematically devouring other life. Unlike their predecessors, these new creatures had mouths and digestive tracts. They had rudimentary brains and senses that allowed them to detect light, dark, motion, and telltale chemical signatures. They used this fancy newequipment to hunt, to kill, and to feed. As Woody Allen’s character Boris remarks in the film Love and Death : “To me, nature is . . . I dunno, spiders and bugs and big fish eating little fish. And plants eating plants and animals eating . . . It’s like an enormous restaurant.”
    No trilobites survive today, and fossils do not reveal much about their nervous systems, so assessing their sensory capabilities depends on educated guesswork. Certainly, they could perceive nothing like the complicated flavors of dark chocolate or wine. Human tastes, even the aversive ones, are full of subtleties and associations with other flavors, and to past events and feelings, the whole of our learned experience. Trilobites probably did not feel anything like pleasure, and retained only a few trace memories. Each meal would have tasted more or less the same. Its saliency would have come mainly from the slaking of hunger and the urge to attack.
    Still, these primordial elements of flavor were an extraordinary evolutionary achievement, and human tastes share this same basic physiological structure. Of course, that’s something like comparing a mud hut to Chartres Cathedral. But the foundation had been set.
    Some big change occurred in living conditions on earth to trigger this predator-prey revolution, which is called the Cambrian explosion. Scientists disagree about what it was. Some believe it was caused by a prehistoric bout of global warming that had melted the polar ice caps after a long deep freeze. The seas rose hundreds of feet, and water rolled far inland, over low hills and rocks with lichens and fungi (trees, grasses, and flowering plants did not yet exist), carving out lagoons and shaping sandbars and shoals, creating warm, shallow cauldrons ideal for life to flourish. Others trace it to a shift in the orientation of the earth’s magnetic field, stillothers to mutations that brought about the emergence of the action potential, the ability of nerve cells to communicate over distances, or other fortuitous changes in the DNA code.
    Whatever the precise sequence of events, an iron link was established between acute senses and evolutionary success. A biological arms race ensued as bodies and nervous systems adapted to rising threats and opportunities. The senses, once mere detection-and-response mechanisms, had to grow more powerful in order to guide complicated behavior. Flavor became the linchpin of this process. From the time of the trilobites to the present, foraging, hunting, and eating food have driven life’s endless bootstrapping, culminating in our big human brains and the achievements of culture. More than vision, or hearing, or even sex, flavor is the most impor­tant ingredient at the core of what we are. It created us. The ultimate irony, McMenamin says, is that the introduction of killing into the world, and with it untold suffering, also expanded intelligence and awareness, and ultimately led to human consciousness.
    Sweetbreads
    Drawn by the scent of decomposition, the