俗话说，“萝卜青菜各有所爱”。每个人都有自己的饮食偏好，不论是家庭的遗传还是环境的因素，酸甜苦辣咸中的滋味，不同的人会有不同的喜好。

有些人喜欢吃甜食，英语里很早就有一个为人熟知的词组来形容这种人, 即：sweet tooth。

近些年来英语里又出现了另外一个词组，同sweet tooth有些相近，但是用来指另外一种人，即：meat tooth。

我们先来看看下面这段话：

In a couple of months, I rediscovered my love for meat. Sausages, steak, buffalo wings, crab legs, brisket, pork dumplings, those chicken legs served at Dim Sum. Others craved chocolate or cheesecake; I had a "meat tooth."

讲这段话的仁兄提到了不少食物，细看一下，原来都是肉类食品：香肠、牛排、螃蟹、鸡腿、胸脯肉、猪肉饺子等等。别人喜欢吃巧克力和奶油蛋糕，这位仁兄则偏好肉类食物。

由此看来，我们可以将meat tooth解释为: a craving or fondness for meat（偏爱肉类食物的人，或者用目前流行的说法：肉食一族）。

下面还有两个使用这一词组的例子：

Seafood is hardly the only food product whose demographic profile skews toward the feminine— as Candler points out, women also eat more fruit and more mint-chocolate-chip ice cream than men do. But unlike these other foods, seafood may offer a unique way of connecting with men, and Tim Ryan, senior vice president of the Culinary Institute of America, thinks he knows what it is: appeal to their meat tooth.

"Dominion" is a horrible, wonderful, important book. It is horrible in its subject, a half-reportorial, half-philosophical examination of some of the most repugnant things that human beings do to animals, notably keeping them in the factory farms that have taken over the business of supplying America's insatiable meat tooth.