Things I Like - Food

Have you heard the big news? The act of cooking might very well be what sent us down the path of modern day humanity. This revolutionary evolutionary idea comes from Richard Wrangham, a biological anthropologist from Harvard who usually spends his time observing and writing about chimpanzees. His latest book, Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human, argues that the act of cooking our food led to major physical changes – smaller jaws, smaller guts and consequently larger brains.

These physical changes can all be traced back to the benefits obtained from cooking your food instead of eating it raw. As summarized in an excellent piece by Christine Kenneally at Slate:

Though there's no archeological evidence of controlled fire before 800,000 years ago, [Wrangham] realized that a cluster of changes in the human face, brain, and gut 1.8 million years ago could be explained by only one thing—regular cooked meals. His argument begins with the odd spend-money-to-make-money aspect of digestion: You must burn calories in order to release calories from food… Because raw food is harder to digest, it takes more calories to get the calories out of it, and you get fewer calories from it anyway.

Wrangham illustrates this with an array of observations and experimental evidence. He cites a BBC TV show about an "Evo Diet Experiment" that followed nine volunteers who gave up processed food for 12 days and ate only the kinds of food that humans are supposedly wired to eat, mostly raw nuts, fruits, and vegetables. At the end of the experiment, the volunteers had improved cholesterol and blood pressure, and they also lost a lot of weight, despite the fact that the food was chosen to give them the required amount of calories per day.

Cooked food, by contrast, is easier to digest, gives you more energy, and takes no time to eat. Cooking also kills bacteria and renders many natural poisons inactive.
So the simple expedient of heating food gave us access to many more safe calories every day, which was a survival jackpot. Once we started to eat soft, cooked food, our jaws and teeth were no longer required to munch ceaselessly, and they became smaller and more delicate. That is why we don't look like apes anymore. Similarly, the more cooked food we ate, the less industrial-strength digestion we had to do, and the smaller our guts became. In the same way that our bodies evolved to better walk on two legs, our bellies changed to better handle well-done over rare.

This had two enormous payoffs. First, as our guts got smaller, this freed up energy for our brains to operate on a larger and larger scale…Second, as we spent less time eating, we had more time to do other things with those rapidly expanding brains.
~ Slate

So all you gourmet chefs, home cooks and backyard barbecuers can all proudly point to your cooking efforts and say ‘you’re welcome, humanity’.