system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: Why do our taste buds prefer ingredients compiled into a recipe instead of just the base ingredients by themselves?
gpt
A meal isn't simply the sum of it's ingredients on a plate. When you mix ingredients, cook food, etc. they undergo chemical reactions that make them entirely different. Of course, there are plenty of things you can throw together that taste bad, so it's not really that the taste buds prefer recipes in general but more like the bad tasting ones don't survive to reach the dinner table. This is more of a chemistry question than biology.