Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human
By Richard Wrangham.
Profile Books Ltd.: 2009.
ISBN 978-1846682858
"cooking is the missing link....defining the human essence....I pin our humanity on cooks"
-Michael Symons, Cooking historian.
Why do we cook? Richard Wrangham gives us the answer as a gripping tale through time- from when our ancestors hopped on tree tops plucking fruit to our aisle-gliding in modern supermarkets. He traces the development of cooking food and the effect it has had on human evolution.
There are numerous theories regarding the development of the modern human, Homo sapiens, from the tree shrew. A notable event happened when one of our ancestors, the Australopethicines, turned into a meat-eater. This gave rise to the species called habilines. Then, about 1.8 million years ago, the habilines gave rise to the Homo erectus. Homo erectus shares many common features with the modern man; moving over the low foreheads, big browridges, long muscular arms and short legs of the earlier species. The reasons which gave rise to this new species are not clearly established. Wrangham proposes that taming of fire and cooking food had much to contribute to this change.
Homo erectus had smaller teeth, smaller jaws, weaker jaw muscles, a smaller gut and a swollen brain like the modern man. According to Wrangham, "humans do not eat cooked food because we have the right kind of teeth and guts; rather, we have small teeth and short guts as a result of adapting to a cooked diet". The anatomy of habilines must have changed to accommodate this new diet and become Homo erectus.
Wrangham particularly focusses on the theory of "smaller guts-bigger brains" put forth by Leslie Aiello and Peter Wheeler in 1995. The duo propose that some animals have larger brains because they have smaller guts. A large amount of energy is required by guts to process food and having smaller guts means less processing which translates to more energy being available for the brain. This explains why our brains can use almost 20% of our energy intake compared to the 13% used by primate brains.
How the process of cooking using fire came into being is not a focus of this book; as Wrangham mentions it is not easy to deduce. But once, discovered, our ancestors found out the numerous advantages to a cooked meal. The food is easier to chew, most toxins are denatured and it is easier to digest.
Evidence for Wrangham's story comes from the hunter-gatherer communities found living even now in remote parts of the world and the history pieced together from fossilized remains of our ancestors. Being a primatologist himself, he also frequently compares behaviour of primates and humans and points out the role a calorie-dense, cooked meal has played in our development. An average human consumes a much higher calorific meal than a primate of the same size and also spends less energy on digesting and assimilating it. This is just due to the fact that the food we eat is cooked. The excess energy we consume is what fuels our brain and makes us the most intelligent species on this planet.
Raw foodists are slammed by Wrangham citing various experiments and freak accident cases. In most of the examples examined by Wrangham, it becomes evident that a diet of raw food only leads to a loss of weight which is sometimes followed by a decrease in fecundity; a phenomenon evolution does not favour. He further adds that a raw food diet might work in modern human society because we get high quality food all throughout the year, a luxury which was not available to our ancestors.
Particularly interesting is the book's take on the social aspects of this shift to eating cooked food. It manages to connect the act of cooking food, which began as a simple group activity, to complex male-female interactions. Food being cooked around a common fire led to building of communities. Also, cooking food was among the first tasks which got divided amongst the sexes. Males remained the hunters, women became gatherers who returned early to their homes to cook food for the males. Sounds remarkably similar to the current social order, doesn't it? Wrangham even puts forth that the concept of marriage came into being because of this division of labour created by the act of cooking food. According to him, this overrides the sexual politics which we assume would be involved in creating a bond like marriage.
Wrangham writes in a simple but compelling language which makes it difficult to dismiss any of his claims lightly. Despite dealing with evolutionary biology and even psychology, the book is almost jargon-free. The text is peppered with accounts of various experiments which are explained in a deceptively simple way. The best aspect of the book is the fact that it can manage to engage any reader since it talks about one of the most integral part of our lives- food. Lively descriptions of various methods of cooking and the ingenuity which our ancestors employed are an excellent hook which keep this story from becoming long winded or boring.
Moving from our evolutionary past, towards the end, Wrangham gives a snapshot of the current food culture. Even though we might have developed to what we are from eating easy-to-digest, processed foods, our diet seems to be now causing disorders like obesity. He calls for taking a lesson from evolution: we should manage to be fit in order to survive and be prepared to adapt to our own changing needs and the dynamic environment.
