“Why couldn’t she understand my agony?”  was the puzzlement of the five-year-old Cynthia trying to explain that I had eaten my veggies and pascetti (translation: spaghetti), and was full from dinner.  “But MAAaaaooom, my dessert section is not full!”  My case for a bowl of ice cream proved unsuccessful too many times.  My mom didn’t believe in the dessert section.

Yet, one does not have to be a snot-nosed brat to understand what I’m talking about.  Just take this shared cultural experience: it’s Thanksgiving.  You’ve stuffed yourself with two varieties of potatoes, stuffing, turkey, and maybe some greens.  And just when you feel like rolling over and going to sleep, someone asks, “Who wants pie?”  At the very word you suddenly feel a bit hungry and your stomach not so stuffed.  What is that mysterious feeling? Bingo! It’s the dessert section.

Scientists have been hard at work trying to understand what makes up that hungry sensation.  A few quotes from the Science Behind Appetite shed some credibility on my neglected dessert section:

Identified in 1999, ghrelin is often called the hunger hormone because that precisely captures what it does. Ghrelin is produced in the gut in response to meal schedules—and, according to some theories, the mere sight or smell of food—and is designed to give rise to the empty feeling we recognize as wanting to eat…

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“This whole idea of eating smaller portions—I’m really fed up with it,” Rolls says. “It’s not big portions that make you eat more. It’s big portions of calories. If you eat big portions of fruits and vegetables, they displace other foods.” Rolls stresses that it’s important to eat a variety of tastes and textures. If you overload on one thing—say, the heavy dose of meats that the low-carbohydrate Atkins plan recommends—you’re going to crave the sweet or crunchy or doughy experience of the fruits and breads you’re forbidden. “It’s called sensory-specific satiety,” she says, and it’s one of the reasons we still have the appetite for a sweet dessert even after we stuff ourselves with a heavy dinner.

These insightful snippets also shed some light on the epic changes of taste through one person’s lifetime in response to changes such as going to college, traveling, or camping.

For example, being in archaeology camp meant sweating all day in the sun for me. Then, for meals, I got lukewarm beef sandwiches for lunch, and steak and potatoes for dinner.  Lots of sweating temporarily programs human bodies to smell and seek out salty foods, so I was all into salt and Gatorade. Yet, this one camping event affected me long term as well.  At least three years after that experience I could not bring myself to eat cold-meat sandwiches, only P&J would do.

Perhaps smart farmers, food companies, and marketers will find creative ways of measuring what we eat and could help us find the foods we want and physically need? At least for now, I am happy to prove to my mom that the dessert section does exist—now pass me the ice cream!

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