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Why does food taste so much better when you are hungry? My family calls it 鈥渉unger sauce鈥�.

鈥� That hunger is the best sauce is proverbial in various languages. But remember that many of our ancestors were intimately familiar with famine. Many locally popular delicacies such as olives, chillies and garlic contain poisons and repellents that are repugnant when unfamiliar. So at first such foods would require a special sauce: presumably ancestors under the temptation of hunger, that greatest of all condiments, were driven to try the new foods in desperation, then learned to like them.

One of our most important hunger-associated hormones, , influences certain brain regions including the hippocampus, a major centre of learning processes. It seems likely that eating anything that makes a starving belly feel better adds that foodstuff to the mental list of things that don鈥檛 taste so bad really 鈥� things that when suitably combined with foody tastes and smells, we learn to enjoy. Though repellent when you are sated, they will have you positively slavering when hungry. Some flavourings, such as pepper and mustard, may not satisfy the belly, but they became appetising through association with other satisfying foods, some of which 鈥� such as gamey meat 鈥� are barely tolerable without them.

Jon Richfield, Somerset West, South Africa

鈥� Never mind the physiological and chemical reasons for food tasting better when hungry, we should not be eating unless we are hungry. Stuffing ourselves with unneeded food will lead to obesity, food wastage and a whole host of other problems.

Eat just enough to satisfy your hunger at that point and then wait until really hungry again. The result? Consistently wonderful-tasting food!

Gillian Peall, Macclesfield, Cheshire, UK