Lucky for us all, I was not the human holding a piece of raw food that came in contact with fire 1.9 million years ago because none of my prehistoric cave-mates would have thought of cooking as a good idea given what I could cook (or not cook.) Imagine men, women and children leaving the cave with the mixed look of disgust and amazement on their faces brought about by what I did to set their diets on fire.
January of last year, I wrote a column about a theory by a Harvard anthropologist, Richard Wrangham about how cooking probably made us who we are. I based it on a Scientific American article on his work. But recently, he came out with his book on the subject, entitled “Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human” and he put forth arguments that are quite convincing in making us think that cooking might have just been a real defining force in what makes us the humans that we are now with plenty of time for other things other than chewing.
I also listened to the May 30, 2009 interview with Wrangham at NPR.org and he said some fascinating ideas about this Cooks ‘R Us idea. He said that he has followed people who lived on raw food and he concluded that it is extremely challenging to survive on just raw food because you need to have the best conditions to get the best food. Good raw food which will not kill you means a very good environment which grows these foods and you have to have a very good storage system for these foods to keep them raw but not spoiled. These are conditions that are not easy to sustain for one’s survival.
So then we learned to cook. Wrangham thinks that we have biologically adapted to cooking because it gave us so many advantages in order to survive. He said that cooking raises the share of nutrients you get from food when you cook it because cooking it opens them up, resulting in “denatured” proteins which essentially exposes them to the enzymes that enable our bodies to use these nutrients. Also, there are food components which can only unleash their “powers” when they are cooked (an example is lycopene which is an antioxidant from cooked tomato). Another advantage is that cooking softens food, considerably shortening the time you spend chewing the food. Less time chewing would mean time for other things — like thinking, conversation, maybe contemplating the meaning of life or your navel. If you doubt this, just observe when everyone at the table is chewing altogether, nothing else is happening. There would be no one giving updates or giving their opinion on the Hayden Kho sex scandal.
The interview became even more interesting when Wrangham said that cooking could have spurred the concept of “ownership.” He said that to commit to cooking, you need to collect foods in your prehistoric version of a pantry and this require that this be “secure” from anyone who would unduly take interest. This required that there be some unspoken rule about that “pile” of goodies in the cave remaining “intact” so they would be available when cooking time begins. For this to work, some kind of cave rules would have been developed so as to keep the food pile secure. I can see what is probably the modern extensions of this behavior now — say, “panic buying” which could have started when humans started to notice that nature was not uniformly generous throughout the seasons to their hunting and gathering and that they should therefore stock up in frenzied acquisitions.
Lucky for himself, Wrangham wears the professional cloak of anthropology as he puts forth even more interesting ideas about cooking and how it came to be that women ended up to be, more often than not in history, the assigned negotiator of fire in the kitchen. I just do not know if that cloak is fire-proof since I can imagine many women with fiery reactions to his theory that this sexual division of cooking grew out of the bigger males bullying the smaller females to cook for them. This is because some may not find it such a preposterous idea that women became the assigned cooks because they were simply better at it because it is women who had to remedy the serious situation when their hunting male mates arrived at the cave entrance carrying raw meat tucked in their armpits. But as Wrangham says, you gentlemen bullied us ladies so we would cook for you. If that were so, I guess it is just fair that my culinary ineptness is my unconscious way of getting back at the bullying caveman in men. I also really laughed when I heard Wrangham say that “marriage may have been a primitive protection racket where women cooked for men and men protected food through a social arrangement.” Finally, we now can blame the stove and not ourselves, for all the problems that marriage brings.
If our primitive cooking made us the humans that we are now, and it is the bullying male that made for women cooks, then I think females like me who suck at cooking are the ones responsible for the evolution of the male chef. So Mario Batali and Anthony Bourdain, in behalf of a long line of lousy female cooks before me, I expect a thank you note, pronto.
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