Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human
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15
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Average rating3
In this stunningly original book, renowned primatologist Richard Wrangham argues that "cooking" created the human race. At the heart of "Catching Fire" lies an explosive new idea: The habit of eating cooked rather than raw food permitted the digestive tract to shrink and the human brain to grow, helped structure human society, and created the male-female division of labor.
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The only reason I'm not giving this book more stars is that straight-up evolutionary theory is not, in my opinion, the most scintillating thing to read ever. That said, Wrangham has written an excellent and provocative book. Basically, his (apparently radical, although I don't know enough mainstream evolutionary theory to know) theory is that learning to cook, thereby getting more nutritional value out of food for a lowered digestive cost, is what spurred the evolutionary churning that made humans out of apes. He employs tons of evidence, all fascinating. There are a lot of interesting side stories to this: how raw food diets are bullshit, because the energy costs of digesting that stuff alone are so high, how nutritional science doesn't actually give us accurate calorie counts because of how complicated our digestive processes are, and finally (I think most importantly), how cooking caused patriarchy:
“The idea that cooking led to our pair-bonds suggests a worldwide irony. Cooking brought huge nutritional benefits. But for women, the adoption of cooking has also led to a major increase in their vulnerability to male authority. Men were the greater beneficiaries. Cooking freed women's time and fed their children, but it also trapped women into a newly subservient role enforced by male-dominated culture. Cooking created and perpetuated a novel system of male cultural superiority. It is not a pretty picture.”
No kidding. Fuck that noise!
