英国卫报：人类的感官重要吗？该如何修复？(1)（在线收听）

　　How we lost our sensory connection with food -- and how to restore it

　　我们如何失去与食物的感官联系的--以及该如何恢复

　　This is going to sound weird, but I want you to look closely for a moment at your thumbs.

　　这听起来会很奇怪，但我想让你仔细看看你的拇指。

　　See how they flex forwards as well as back.

　　看看他们如何向前和向后缩的。

　　Notice how responsive and grippy the skin is.

　　注意手指的反应和抓力。

　　The human thumb is not just a device for giving the thumbs-up sign or for picking up dropped keys.

　　人类的手指不仅仅是可以用来竖起大拇指或捡起掉在地上的钥匙。

　　It is also one of the most efficient and sensitive tools in existence for determining the ripeness of fruit.

　　它也是现有的确定果实成熟度的最有效和最灵敏的工具之一。

　　One of the hallmarks of being a hominid is having opposable thumbs: stronger, longer and more flexible than the thumbless hands of a spider monkey or the non-opposable thumbs of a marmoset.

　　作为原始人的特征之一是拥有对生拇指：比蜘蛛猴的无拇指或绒猴的不对生拇指更强壮、更长、更灵活。

　　These opposable thumbs are a trait that humans share with our primate cousins such as chimpanzees.

　　这些对生拇指是人类与黑猩猩等灵长类近亲的共同特征。

　　But it has only recently been discovered that our thumbs might have first evolved as a device for measuring whether or not fruit was ripe.

　　但直到最近才发现，我们的拇指可能最初是作为一种测量水果是否成熟的工具进化而来的。

　　In 2016, biologist Nathaniel Dominy studied the way chimpanzees pick figs.

　　2016年，生物学家纳撒尼尔·多米尼克研究了黑猩猩采摘无花果的方式。

　　Dominy found that chimpanzees use their dexterous hands to give figs a quick squeeze to determine whether they are ripe or not -- a technique that works four times quicker on average than the method used by monkeys (plucking figs at random, biting them to check for ripeness and spitting out the unripe ones).

　　多米尼克发现，黑猩猩用它们灵巧的手快速挤压无花果，以判断它们是否成熟--这项技术的运行速度平均比猴子快四倍(随机拔无花果，咬它们检查成熟度，然后吐出未成熟的无花果)。

　　Humans also have these incredible hands capable of identifying the ripest fruit from touch alone.

　　人类也有神奇的手，单凭触摸就能识别最成熟的水果。

　　But most of us don’t use them that way any more.

　　但我们中的大多数人不再使用这种方法了。

　　If you want ripe fruit, you no longer need to rely on your own sense of touch.

　　如果你想要成熟的水果，你不再需要依靠自己的触觉。

　　You can go into the nearest supermarket and buy a plastic tub of pre-peeled, pre-sliced mango or melon labelled “ripe and ready” or “ripe and sweet” and eat it with a fork.

　　你可以走进最近的超市，买一桶去皮、切好的芒果或甜瓜，上面标着“熟透了”或“熟了，很甜”的标签，然后用叉子吃。

　　One of the most striking things about eating in the modern world is that we do so much of it as if we were sense-blind.

　　在现代社会，吃东西最引人注目的一点是，我们吃得太多了，就好像我们是感官盲人一样。

　　We still have the same basic physiognomy as our hunter-gatherer ancestors, yet much of the time, we switch off our senses when choosing what to eat.

　　我们仍然拥有与狩猎采集祖先相同的基本相貌，但在很多时候，我们在选择吃什么时会关闭我们的感官。

　　Our noses can distinguish fresh milk from sour milk, and yet we prefer to look at the use-by date rather than sniffing.

　　我们的鼻子可以区分新鲜牛奶和酸奶，但我们更喜欢看保质期，而不是闻一闻。

　　Senses, wrote the late anthropologist Jack Goody, are “our windows on the world” -- the main tools through which humans acquire information about our environments.

　　已故人类学家杰克·古迪写道，感觉是“我们了解世界的窗口”——人类获取环境信息的主要工具。

　　Senses are instruments of survival as well as pleasure.

　　感官是生存的工具，也是快乐的工具。

　　But today, we have relinquished many of the functions of our own senses to the modern food industry – which suits that industry just fine.

　　但今天，我们已经将我们自己感官的许多功能让给了现代食品行业--这正好适合这个行业。

　　It suits us less well, judging by the current epidemic of diet-related ill health.

　　从目前与饮食相关的流行病问题来看，它不太适合我们。