Here's something to drink about.
QUOTE
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 scale. (Leslie Aiello and Peter Wheeler first discovered the relationship between gut size and brain size, dubbing it the Expensive Tissue Hypothesis.) Second, as we spent less time eating, we had more time to do other things with those rapidly expanding brains.
As we noshed our way to modernity, Wrangham explains, our psychology changed as well. We had to develop qualities like restraint and trust. While it's not novel to suggest that elements of human society arose around the primeval hearth, people tend to think of this in an abstract way — safe, companionable feelings developing around the campfire.
Wrangham puts meat on these bones by comparing how other apes act around food. Chimpanzees — whom he knows intimately from decades of observation, many of those years at the Kibale Chimpanzee Project in Uganda — don't readily share food at all. At best, they tolerate some petty theft.
In contrast, humans of all cultures ritually share their cooked food with a network of spouses, children and more distant relatives. For cooking to get off the ground, we had to divide labor such that some individuals did the cooking and others protected the cook from less-patient individuals.
Ideas like ownership and sharing would have become so fundamental that it's probably more illuminating to think of these emergent beings as hunter-gatherer-cooks. Here, too, Wrangham apologetically explains, is probably where the global subjugation of women began. Women, he observes, do most of the cooking in most societies (he describes it as a historic phenomenon, not a biological necessity), and the division of labor around food could have been the beginning of the marriage contract and the prototypical human household.
If this is the case, Wrangham argues, marriage is not a primitive contract to ensure paternity, as most anthropologists would argue, but primarily an economic contract. In a book of great ideas and otherwise wide-ranging research, this final point will be a nonrevelation to any but the above-mentioned anthropologists. Ask any single mother.
The ambition of Wrangham's theory gives it great appeal: Cooking is a powerful biological force and the universal activity around which the rest of human history — the households and tribes, the migrations and wars, the religion and science — arranged itself. But the added treat of the I-cook-therefore-I-am idea is the counterintuitive light it sheds on one of our most intense cultural preoccupations — living the right life by eating naturally.
http://www.tampabay.com/news/perspective/article1021232.ece
