Why do apples taste good?

Did they evolve to taste good? Or did our sense of taste evolve to prefer nutritive foods over, say, dirt and rocks?Fruits are a deceptive strategy by plants to ensure seed dispersal - you eat the apple and either toss away the core or eat it (some folks do) and the seeds pass through your gut. (They have a hard, undigestible shell that protects them.) The bonus there is that the seed is also fertilized by your manure.But it's a strategy that benefits you, too, because fruits are full of the sugars you need to survive. And your body evolved to "reward" you when you consume the foods it thinks it needs.Of course, the foods your body thinks it needs are different than the foods a human being living in civilization needs, because your body is operating from the assumption that it may never eat again. Your body is always prepared to enter a period of starvation, so you're always being rewarded for foods that would be a good "last meal." If you were going on a 2-week fast, what would you want your last meal to be? A cheeseburger and a milkshake, or a salad and an iced tea? The former has a lot more of the fats, starches, and sugars that your body can store up to tide you over.Your body rewards you with pleasure for eating foods that prepare you for starvation. Of course, in a first-world civilization, you almost never starve except on purpose, which explains the problems a lot of people have with weight.

Right, exactly. It's not a conspiracy of the universe that the foods that are bad for us are the ones that taste the best; the foods that are "bad" for us are actually really great foods that you would want to eat if you knew that they were going to be the last things you might eat for a long time.It's true that our bodies "tell us" what they want; those sensations are information about your body, like the way pain is. The problem is that our bodies don't know the future. While people living in our society are nearly always guaranteed a next meal, humans evolving on the African steppes most definitely had no such guarantee.What the body wants is not necessarily what the body should have.

I think the food police exaggerate a little bit, and c'mon, a hamburger can't be that bad - cows are made out of it, after all, and being made out of cow isn't bad for cows, is it?Starvation is always worse for your body than food. And there's a population of people in Italy who have evolved a mutation that protects them against heart disease (I think) resulting from high-fat diets.(Don't make me look up the cite at 2 in the morning, ok? Go use Google Scholar if you're really dying to know.)

The vast majority of the apple varietals are the product of intelligent design - that is to say, purposeful breeding by humans.