This book argues that everything about humans has always been due to COOKING – that the progression from Australopithecus to Homo sapiens, the intelligence brought about by increased brain size, social norms, sexuality/sex culture and gender roles, are all due to COOKING. It invokes perspectives from human physiology, cultural anthropology, and archaeology.
“Cooking increased the value of our food. It changed our bodies, our brains, our use of time, and our social lives. It made us into consumers of external energy and thereby created an organism with a new relationship to nature, dependent on fuel.” – Richard Wrangham (Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human)
“My definition of Man is, a ‘Cooking Animal’. The beasts have memory, judgement, and all the faculties and passions of our mind, in a certain degree; but no beast is a cook. . . . Man alone can dress a good dish; and every man whatever is more or less a cook, in seasoning what he himself eats.” – James Bosswell (Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson)
“In 2006 nine volunteers with dangerously high blood pressure spent twelve days eating like apes in an experiment filmed by the British Broadcasting Corporation. They lived in a tented enclosure in England’s Paignton Zoo and ate almost everything raw. Their diet included peppers, melons, cucumbers, tomatoes, carrots, broccoli, grapes, dates, walnuts, bananas, peaches, and so on—more than fifty kinds of fruits, vegetables, and nuts. […] The aim of the volunteers was to improve their health, and they succeeded. By the end of the experiment their cholesterol levels had fallen by almost a quarter and average blood pressure was down to normal. But while medical hopes were met, an extra result had not been anticipated. The volunteers lost a lot of weight—an average of 4.4 kg (9.7 pounds) each, or 0.37 kg (0.8 pounds) per day.” – Richard Wrangham (Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human)
“The average weight loss when shifting from a cooked to a raw diet was 26.5 pounds (12 kilograms) for women and 21.8 pounds (9.9 kilograms) for men. Among those eating a purely raw diet (31 percent), the body weights of almost a third indicated chronic energy deficiency. The scientists’ conclusion was unambiguous: “a strict raw food diet cannot guarantee an adequate energy supply.”” – Richard Wrangham (Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human)
“The spontaneous benefits of cooked food explain why domesticated pets easily become fat: their food is cooked, such as the commercially produced kibbles, pellets, and nuggets given to dogs and cats.” – Richard Wrangham (Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human)
“Cooking consistently increases the glycemic index of starchy foods.” – Richard Wrangham (Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human)
“While some foods are naturally tender, meat is variable. Meat with smaller muscle fibers is more tender, so chicken is more tender than beef. An animal slaughtered without being stressed retains more glycogen in its muscles. After death the glycogen converts to lactic acid, which promotes denaturation and therefore a more tender meat. Carcasses that are left to hang for several days are more tender, because proteins are partly broken down by enzymes.” – Richard Wrangham (Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human)
“If cooking softens food and softer food leads to greater energy gain, then humans should get more energy from cooked food than raw food not only because of processes such as gelatinization and denaturation, but also because it reduces the costs of digestion.” – Richard Wrangham (Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human)
“In 1995 Leslie Aiello and Peter Wheeler proposed that the reason some animals have evolved big brains is that they have small guts, and small guts are made possible by a high-quality diet. Aiello and Wheeler’s head-spinning idea came from the realization that brains are exceptionally greedy for glucose—in other words, for energy. For an inactive person, every fifth meal is eaten solely to power the brain. Literally, our brains use around 20 percent of our basal metabolic rate—our energy budget when we are resting—even though they make up only about 2.5 percent of our body weight.” – Richard Wrangham (Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human)
“Although the breakthrough of using fire at all would have been the biggest culinary leap, the subsequent discovery of better ways to prepare the food would have led to continual increases in digestive efficiency, leaving more energy for brain growth. The improvements would have been especially important for brain growth after birth, since easily digested weaning foods would have been critical contributors to a child’s energy supply.” – Richard Wrangham (Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human)
“Cooking was a great discovery not merely because it gave us better food, or even because it made us physically human. It did something even more important: it helped make our brains uniquely large, providing a dull human body with a brilliant human mind.” – Richard Wrangham (Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human)
“Take softness. Foods soften when they are cooked, and as a result, cooked food can be eaten more quickly than raw food. Reliance on cooked food has therefore allowed our species to thoroughly restructure the working day. Instead of chewing for half of their time, as great apes tend to do, women in subsistence societies tend to spend the active part of their days collecting and preparing food. Men, liberated from the simple biological demands of a long day’s commitment to chewing raw food, engage in productive or unproductive labor as they wish. In fact, I believe that cooking has made possible one of the most distinctive features of human society: the modern form of the sexual division of labor.” – Richard Wrangham (Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human)
“The idea that cooking led to our pair-bonds suggests a worldwide irony. Cooking brought huge nutritional benefits. But for women, the adoption of cooking has also led to a major increase in their vulnerability to male authority. Men were the greater beneficiaries. Cooking freed women’s time and fed their children, but it also trapped women into a newly subservient role enforced by male-dominated culture. Cooking created and perpetuated a novel system of male cultural superiority. It is not a pretty picture.” – Richard Wrangham (Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human)
Photo taken from Amazon.
Incognito 