Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation (9 page)

One way to approach cooking of any kind is as
a secular and somewhat faded version of the same operation, helping us to locate
ourselves in nature and deal with our ambivalence about eating other beings. Like fire
itself, which destroys what photosynthesis has created, all cooking begins with small or
large acts of destruction: killing, cutting, chopping, mashing. In that sense, a
sacrifice is at its very heart. But cooking also helps put Emerson’s
“graceful distance of miles”—or
time, or smoke, or
seasoning, or chopping, or sauce—between the eaters and the eaten, its various
transformations helping us to forget, or suppress, the violence of the underlying
transaction. At the same time, the wonderful refining alchemies of the kitchen
demonstrate how far we have come as a species, affirming that we have indeed lifted
ourselves out of nature red in tooth and claw, achieved a kind of transcendence. Cooking
sets us apart, helps us to mark and patrol the borders between ourselves and
nature’s other creatures—none of which can cook.

“My definition of Man is a
‘Cooking Animal,’” James Boswell wrote. “The beasts have memory,
judgment, and all the faculties and passions of our mind, in a certain degree, but no
beast is a cook.” Boswell was not alone in regarding cooking as a faculty that
defines us as human. According to Lévi-Strauss, the distinction between “the
raw” and “the cooked” has served many cultures as the great trope for
the difference between animals and people. In
The Raw and the Cooked,
he wrote,
“Not only does cooking mark the transition from nature to culture, but through it
and by means of it, the human state can be defined with all its attributes.”
Cooking transforms nature and, by doing so, elevates us above that state, making us
human.

If the human enterprise involves
transforming the raw of nature into the cooked of culture, the different techniques
we’ve devised for achieving this transformation each embody a different stance
toward both nature on the one side and culture on the other. After studying the foodways
of hundreds of peoples around the world, Lévi-Strauss (who apparently never saw a
dualism he didn’t like) distinguished two basic methods for turning the stuff of
nature into something that is not only more tasty and digestible but more human (i.e.,
good to think) as well: cooking directly over a fire and cooking in a pot with
liquid.

To barbecue or to braise? To roast or to
boil? That, apparently, is
the question, and much—about who we think we
are—depends on the answer. Compared with cooking over a fire, braising or stewing
implies a more civilized approach to the transformation of nature. The braise or boil,
since it cooks meat all the way through, achieves a more complete transcendence of the
animal, and perhaps the animal in us, than does grilling over a fire, which leaves its
object partly or entirely intact, and often leaves a trace of blood—a visible reminder,
in other words, that this is a formerly living creature we’re feasting on. This
lingering hint of savagery isn’t necessarily a strike against fire cooking,
however. To the contrary, some believe a bloody slab of beefsteak augments the power of
the eater. “Whoever partakes of it,” Roland Barthes wrote in
Mythologies
, “assimilates a bull-like strength.” By comparison,
the braise or stew—and particularly the braise or stew of meat that’s been cut
into geometric cubes and rendered tender by long hours in the pot—represents a deeper
sublimation, or forgetting, of the brutal reality of this particular transaction among
species.

Certainly this kind of forgetting has its
advantages, especially in everyday life, where cooking in pots is the norm. Who wants to
be confronted with existential questions of life and death and human identity on a daily
basis? And yet there are times when that is exactly what we’re looking for, when
we
want
to be reminded, if only a little, of what’s really going on just
beneath the thin crust of civilization. This is, perhaps, the same impulse that compels
some people to endure the discomforts of sleeping out in the woods, or to go to the
unnecessary lengths of hunting their own meat or growing their own tomatoes. All these
activities are forms of adult play that also serve as ceremonial acts of remembering—who
we are, where we came from, how nature works. (And, perhaps, of a time when men were
still indispensable.) Cooking meat over a fire—whether a few steaks thrown on the
backyard barbecue or, more spectacularly, a whole animal
roasted all
night over a wood fire—is one of the most stirring of those ritual acts, usually
performed outdoors, on special occasions, in public, and by men. And what, exactly, does
such cooking commemorate? No doubt many things, including male power (for isn’t
the triumph of the hunt at least implied?) and ritual sacrifice (for this is
cooking-as-performance, exerting the kind of gravitational force that draws people out
of the house to watch). But I suspect that, as much as anything else, grilling meat over
a fire today commemorates the transformative power of cooking itself, which never
appears so bright or explicit as when wood and fire and flesh are brought together under
that aromatic empire of smoke.

“Homo sapiens is the only animal that …”

How many flattering clauses have
philosophers tacked on to that cherished construction, only to watch them eventually
crumble? One by one, the faculties on which we thought we could stake the flag of our
specialness science has shown belong to other animals as well. Suffering? Reason?
Language? Counting? Laughter? Self-consciousness? All have been proposed as human
monopolies, and all have fallen before science’s deepening understanding of the
animal brain and behavior. James Boswell’s nomination of cooking as the defining
human ability seems more durable than most, though perhaps an
even
sturdier candidate would be this: “Humans are the only species that feels
compelled to identify faculties that it alone possesses.”

But here’s why cooking may stand a
better-than-average chance of surviving this silly game: Only the control of fire and
consequent invention of cooking can explain the evolution of brains big and
self-conscious enough to construct sentences like “
Homo sapiens
is the
only species that …”

That at least is the import of “the
cooking hypothesis,” a recent contribution to evolutionary theory that throws a
wonderfully ironic wrench into the scaffold of our self-regard. Cooking, according to
the hypothesis, is not merely a metaphor for the creation of culture, as Lévi-Strauss
proposed; it is its evolutionary prerequisite and biological foundation. Had our
protohuman ancestors not seized control of fire and used it to cook their food, they
would never have evolved into
Homo sapiens
. We think of cooking as a cultural
innovation that lifts us up out of nature, a manifestation of human transcendence. But
the reality is much more interesting: Cooking is by now baked into our biology (as it
were), something that we have no choice but to do, if we are to feed our big,
energy-guzzling brains. For our species, cooking is not a turn away from nature—it
is
our nature, by now as obligatory as nest building is for the birds.

I first encountered the cooking hypothesis
in a 1999 article in the journal
Current Anthropology
titled “The Raw and
the Stolen: Cooking and the Ecology of Human Origins” by Richard Wrangham, a
Harvard anthropologist and primatologist, and four of his colleagues. Wrangham
subsequently fleshed out the theory in a fascinating 2009 book,
Catching Fire: How
Cooking Made Us Human
. Soon after it came out, we began corresponding by
e-mail, and eventually we had the opportunity to meet, over a lunch (of raw salads) at
the Harvard Faculty Club.

The hypothesis is an attempt to account for
the dramatic change
in primate physiology that occurred in Africa
between 1.9 and 1.8 million years ago, with the emergence of
Homo erectus
, our
evolutionary predecessor. Compared to the apelike habilines from which it evolved,
Homo erectus
had a smaller jaw, smaller teeth, a smaller gut—and a
considerably larger brain. Standing upright and living on the ground,
Homo
erectus
is the first primate to bear a stronger resemblance to humans than
apes.

Anthropologists have long theorized that the
advent of meat eating could account for the growth in the size of the primate brain,
since the flesh of animals contains more energy than plant matter. But as Wrangham
points out, the alimentary and digestive apparatus of
Homo erectus
is poorly
adapted to a diet of raw meat, and even more poorly adapted to the raw plant foods that
would still have been an important part of its diet, since a primate cannot live on meat
alone. The chewing and digestion of raw food of any kind requires a big gut and big
strong jaws and teeth—all tools that our ancestors had lost right around the time they
acquired their bigger brains.

The control of fire and discovery of cooking
best explain both these developments, Wrangham contends. Cooking renders food much
easier to chew and digest, obviating the need for a strong jaw or substantial gut.
Digestion is a metabolically expensive operation, consuming in many species as much
energy as locomotion. The body must work especially hard to process raw foodstuffs, in
which the strong muscle fibers and sinews in meat and the tough cellulose in the cell
walls of plants must be broken down before the small intestines can absorb the amino
acids, lipids, and sugars locked up in these foods. Cooking in effect takes much of the
work of digestion outside the body, using the energy of fire in (partial) place of the
energy of our bodies to break down complex carbohydrates and render proteins more
digestible.

Applying the heat of a fire to food transforms
it in several ways—some of them chemical, others physical—but all with the same result:
making more energy available to the creatures that eat it. Exposure to heat
“denatures” proteins—unfolding their origami structures in such a way as to
expose more surface area to the action of our digestive enzymes. Given enough time, heat
also turns the tough collagen in the connective tissues of muscle into a soft, readily
digestible jelly. In the case of plant foods, fire “gelatinizes” starches,
the first step in breaking them down into simple sugars. Many plants that are toxic
eaten raw, including tubers such as cassava, are rendered harmless as well as more
nutritious by heat. Other foodstuffs the cook fire purifies, by killing bacteria and
parasites; it also retards spoilage in meat. Cooking improves texture and taste as well,
making many foods more tender, and others sweeter or less bitter. Though which comes
first—an inborn taste for cooked food or nearly two million years of familiarity with
it—is hard to say.

True, cooking can have some negative,
seemingly maladaptive, effects, too. High heat produces carcinogenic compounds in some
foods, but the danger of these toxins is outweighed by the sheer increase in energy that
cooking makes available to us—and life is at bottom a competition for energy. Taken as a
whole, cooking opened up vast new horizons of edibility for our ancestors, giving them
an important competitive edge over other species and, not insignificantly, leaving us
more time to do things besides looking for food and chewing it.

This is no small matter. Based on
observations of other primates of comparable size, Wrangham estimates that before our
ancestors learned to cook their food they would have had to devote fully half their
waking hours simply to the act of chewing it. Chimps like to eat meat and can hunt, but
they have to spend so much of their time in mastication that only about eighteen minutes
are left each day for
hunting, not nearly enough to make meat a staple
of their diets. Wrangham estimates that cooking our food gives our species an extra four
hours a day. (This happens to be roughly the same amount of time we now devote to
watching television.)

“Voracious animals … both
feed continually and as incessantly eliminate,” the Roman physician Galen of
Pergamum pointed out, “leading a life truly inimical to philosophy and music, as
Plato has said, whereas nobler animals neither eat nor eliminate continually.” By
freeing us from the need to feed constantly, cooking ennobled us, putting us on the path
to philosophy and music. All those myths that trace the godlike powers of the human mind
to a divine gift or theft of fire may contain a larger truth than we ever realized.

Yet having crossed this Rubicon, trading
away a big gut for a big brain, we can’t go back, as much as raw-food faddists
would like to. Wrangham cites several studies indicating that in fact humans don’t
do well on raw food: They can’t maintain their body weight, and half of the women
on a raw-food regimen stop menstruating. Devotees of raw food rely heavily on juicers
and blenders, because otherwise they would have to spend as much time chewing as the
chimps do. It is difficult, if not impossible, to extract sufficient energy from
unprocessed plant matter to power a body with such a big, hungry brain. (Our brains
constitute only 2.5 percent of our weight yet consume 20 percent of our energy when
we’re resting.) By now, “humans are adapted to eating cooked food in the
same essential way as cows are adapted to eating grass,” Wrangham says. “We
are tied to our adapted diet of cooked food, and the results pervade our lives, from our
bodies to our minds. We humans are the cooking apes, the creatures of the
flame.”

How do we know if the cooking hypothesis is
true? We don’t. It’s just a hypothesis, and not an easy one to prove. The
fossil evidence
that humans were cooking when
Homo erectus
walked the earth is not yet there, though it has recently gotten stronger. When Wrangham
first published, the oldest known fossil remains put the date for controlled fire at
around 790,000 B.C., but Wrangham’s hypothesis suggests cooking must have begun at
least a million years earlier. In his defense, Wrangham pointed out that evidence of
fires that old would be unlikely to survive. Also, cooking meat doesn’t
necessarily leave behind charred bones. But recently archaeologists found a hearth in a
cave in South Africa that pushed the likely date for cooking back considerably
further,
^*
to one million years
B.C
., and the hunt for even
older cook fires is on.