| >> Cooking makes us far less beastly |
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What separates us from lesser primates? When I was a kid, teachers assured us it was our ability to make and use tools. Then Jane Goodall saw chimps pulling leaves off sticks and using the sticks to pull tasty termites from their nests. The chimps were making and using tools. Scratch the tool theory. So what separates us from the animals? All these years later, I finally have a theory I can buy, thanks to Richard Wrangham, a professor of anthropology at Harvard University. In Dallas last week for a meeting of the International Association of Culinary Professionals, I got to hear Wrangham's keynote speech. What separates humans from lesser primates? Cooking. Let's pause here to let applause from the kitchen die down. We knew it all along, didn't we? Wrangham calls his field of study "paleo-gastronomy." His theory: Cooking is what defines humans. Broken down a little, here's the idea: Cooking is universal among humans. In every society, a hot meal in the evening is universal and central to family life. Despite claims by proponents of so-called "raw food" diets -- that all natural nutrition is raw and all primates thrive on raw food -- animals actually show a preference for cooked plant foods. Monkeys and chimps have been observed taking advantage of fire, either by putting things in it to change the texture or by searching out cooked seeds after a forest fire. Unfortunately, Wrangham says, past work in archaeology and anthropology downplayed cooking as symbolic or unimportant. Since so much of the food we eat -- even meat -- is edible and digestible raw, no one has given much time to studying why we cook it. The fact is, according to Wrangham, as we have evolved, we lost the ability to survive on raw food alone. Chimps eat raw meat. But it takes five hours to chew enough raw meat to reach 2,000 calories. It takes one hour to get that much nutrition from cooked meat. Our digestive systems are smaller and shaped differently than a chimp's, so we need nutrition we can digest rapidly. Even more intriguing: Our mouths are smaller, and we can't open them as wide as chimps, so we need food that is less bulky. Cooked food is smaller than raw food. Smaller jaws mean more room for bigger brains. And here's the really interesting part: No one has ever figured out why one branch of prehistoric primates suddenly came down out of the trees, stood upright and got bigger. Homo erectus may have just been the first short-order cook. Cooked food delivers more nutrition in less time, freeing us to do all kinds of things, like hunt, plant and eventually invent the drive-through lane. "Changes wrought by cooking," says Wrangham, "can be thought of as one of the greatest improvements in the history of life, if not the greatest." Wave a spoon with your opposable thumb if you agree: Cooking was the dawn of civilization. Source:
http://www.charlotte.com/mld/charlotte/living/food/11435436.htm |