With humans it’s the same (cravings), you need potassium & maybe crave a banana milkshake. If you explore your craving further, eg ask yourself if you would like to drink milk or eat a banana, it might get more clear what you need (it also helps exclude carbs bcs usually we don’t need them, but the self-preservation & long winters of the past usually means most humans don’t have much limit on carbs, bcs why not more of them, just to be safer). It’s a trained skill to some extent, especially in the modern era.
We associate nutrients with food tastes we get from our meals (which are usually a mixture of things & might even be wrong/false with ultra-processed foods).
I have no idea how this works in ancient crocks. Is it a learned (try all the foods when growing up?), observed (yo, why Silly Goose the neighbouring crock eating a jack-o’-lantern?), or “instinct” (ie only crocks that occasionally ate pumpkins survived)?
… especially given that even the current “true crocodiles” predate squash/pumpkins by 40+ million years :D.
With humans it’s the same (cravings), you need potassium & maybe crave a banana milkshake. If you explore your craving further, eg ask yourself if you would like to drink milk or eat a banana, it might get more clear what you need (it also helps exclude carbs bcs usually we don’t need them, but the self-preservation & long winters of the past usually means most humans don’t have much limit on carbs, bcs why not more of them, just to be safer). It’s a trained skill to some extent, especially in the modern era.
We associate nutrients with food tastes we get from our meals (which are usually a mixture of things & might even be wrong/false with ultra-processed foods).
I have no idea how this works in ancient crocks. Is it a learned (try all the foods when growing up?), observed (yo, why Silly Goose the neighbouring crock eating a jack-o’-lantern?), or “instinct” (ie only crocks that occasionally ate pumpkins survived)?
… especially given that even the current “true crocodiles” predate squash/pumpkins by 40+ million years :D.
Yes I guess cravings are part of the “reptilian brain” (brain stem) in humans as well.
Funny to think crocs could crave banana’s. “Finally, gotta have some potassium after all these meats”.
There is no “reptile brain”. This is 1960s bad science.