If you’ve been following the study of human prehistory for awhile, you may have been struck by the sheer weight of complexity and controversy. No one can split hairs like a paleoscientist and no discipline seems so murky and incomprehensible. But every now and then someone comes up with an idea that brings clarity to our ancient past.
This is precisely what we find in Richard Wrangham’s new book Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human. Once you read it, you’ll be struck by the tremendous power of his explanation. For Wrangham, the pivotal movement in human history came when our ancestors first began to heat food by the fire. Suddenly, our food became far more nutritious and gave us a tremendous survival edge. Not only were cooking tribes more likely to survive, but they now had to put less energy into digestion. This allowed for bigger brains and in turn, a positive feedback loop of better food gathering, better hunting and better cooking. Over thousands of generations, cooking allowed us to evolve from modest scavengers and gatherers into the intellectual super-predators that we are today.
This book is fascinating.
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How does this tie in with raw foods? Thanks!
According to Wrangham’s work, raw foods are simply less nutritious than cooked. That, of course, works both ways. If you want less nutrition (i.e. weight loss) raw may be the way to go. But if you want to maximize the amount of nutritional value in your food, cooking is best. Plus, raw just doesn’t taste as good. That’s why Wrangham refers to the Biologically Appropriate Raw Foods Diet, also known as BARF.
This flies in the face of everything I’ve heard of and studied as part of health and wellness training. Lightly cooked or uncooked food is more nutritious. Cooking food gives other advantages (being able to prepare and consume more calories more quickly, being able to break down tougher seeds/grains/vegetarian, being able to survie in harsh climates with little palatable raw food available, etc.). But to somehow say that is optimal for us now is not correct.
Especially in a world when we have supermarkets and natural health stores with endless bounty of fresh organic produce….we can eat raw or mostly raw food diets and thrive at a very high level nowadays….and I think at an even higher level than on a cooked food diet.
Ravi,
Wrangham never says that cooked food is optimal for today’s world! You have to read the book.
He’s saying that it made the difference in human evolution. You can eat raw if you want, but if you wanted to stay alive on the grassland of a million years ago, cooked food would have saved your skin. In fact, cooked food is far more nutritious than raw; that’s why most animals prefer cooked food when they can get it.
Hey Frank,
Just checked out the blog- keep up the good work!
I don’t disagree with you or Wrangham necessarily, nor agree with Ravi totally, but want to add a bit. I think cooking makes sense in many contexts, and certainly we evolved to do well with fire. We seem to be the only fire-tenders of the world among species, and I think it’s telling that every indigenous group we’ve interacted with cooks at least some of their food. But I want to add that, contrary to popular opinion, we ought to be looking at cooking or vegetables, especially our roots and more fibrous vegetables, and eating more of our animal food raw. According to the Weston A Price Foundation, a group formed around the works of a dentist named Price who traveled around the world and observed what healthy primitive and non-industrial people actually ate, every group he encountered had a mixed raw/cooked diet, with at least some plant matter cooked and some animal matter raw.
Another key here is the preparation practuces, including sprouting, soaking and fermenting, which help to remove anti-nutrients and in many cases enhance digestibility and nutrient levels. Fermenting is the longer-scale analog to cooking. Both transform food, both create bubbling up, and both are ways to enhance our enjoyment and nourishment from our foods.
And Ravi, I agree that we now have supermarkets and health food stores with endless bounty of organic produce, but at what cost? In most non-tropical climates, such things are not available year round, and must be shipped in from afar, and kept refrigerated along the way. It seems irresponsible to me in an era of energy descent and climate change to encourage practices that exacerbate the problem, and which disconnect us from the land and region we actually inhabit. Re-localized food systems are far more viable and preferable in my opinion. Also, I wonder whether there’s not some wisdom embodied in the changing availability of food through the seasons as it relates to our bodies. I know there’s some research available and underway about the hormonal effects of lighting on us, and the way our bodies really are designed to shift dietarily as the seasons shift. Maybe we really do need the calorie and nutrient dense, non-starchy animal foods more readily available to us during winter. And maybe we really do need the lighter, sweeter foods (fresh fruits and veggies) during summer months when the sun shines 14 or 18 hours a day.
Just some thoughts. Thanks for writing Frank.
Cheers,
Rob