Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human, by Richard Wrangham is a very interesting and thought provoking book, based on a theory that the advent of cooking led to many aspects of modern humanity. Its apparent length of over 300 pages might discourage a few, but considering that about 150 pages of those are appendixes, this book is not incredibly long.
According to the author, many changes in humanity, including modern physiology and culture were heavily influenced by the results of cooking. Cooking softens food and cooked food requires far less energy or intestinal tissue to effectively be digested. Therefore, human jaws evolved from the ape-like jaws of Homo habilis into today’s weaker and smaller jaws. In addition, unneeded intestinal tissue ceased to exist in later generations of habilis’ successor, Homo erectus, shrinking the ribcage and decreasing metabolic requirements, allowing larger brains to be supported. Extensive changes also occurred in cultural elements of humanity. Cooked food requires far fewer hours to consume than uncooked meats or vegetable matter, leaving many hours for other pursuits, hence leisure time. One more astounding point, since one must stockpile food to cook, and humans are inherently lazy, willing to take a free meal if one is available, households and marital relationships began to evolve. According to the text, a female’s economic services were exchanged for protection from a physically stronger male.
In general, I found this book highly interesting, though maybe not a page-turner. The evidence is presented in a very coherent manner, leaving very little for one to assume. After finishing a chapter, I never thought that the conclusions were a stretch. However, the actual chapter order was a bit convoluted. The first few chapters were also quite slow. Including many examples to support each and every point began to drag quite quickly. Despite the aforementioned flaws, I enjoyed reading this book. I would suggest this book to those who have a lot of time on their hands; though interesting, it takes one many hours to progress substantially through this text.
~Vladimir Lenin
This sounds like a very interesting book, especially about how cooking has changed things like psychology and culture. That sounds fascinating, and I'd love to learn how something like cooking could affect those seemingly unrelated things.
ReplyDelete-Napoleon Bonaparte
Some of the conclusions seem a little farfetched. And where did fire come from anyway? Are we assuming that we took that from Prometheus too?
ReplyDelete~Timothy Leary
It is very interesting to assume that human evolution was influenced by cooking. Either way the prospect of a book solely based on food and cooking seems interesting enough to be read, I may take a look at it.
ReplyDelete-Mohandas Gandhi
My book also discusses the starts of human history. The importance of food and cooking on human development is almost always overlook and i am happy to see that a book covers this topic well.
ReplyDelete- Robert E. Lee