Origin of Cooking
I’ve heard a couple of different theories on the origin of cooking, from eating animals killed in a forest fire and liking the taste, to accidentally dropping food in a fire, eating it, and liking the taste. These may be true, and it’s hard to prove any theory one way or the other, but I’d like to add another theory to the list that I haven’t heard before. Have you ever tried to eat a frozen slab of mammoth meat first thing in the morning? Well, neither have I, but I imagine that you might want to try to thaw it out first, say maybe by holding it over a fire? I think cooking started during the ice age. The cold is good for storing food, but you have to thaw it out before you can eat it.
I think what you like and dislike is something that you develop. I don’t think something inherently tastes good or bad, it depends on your experiences. Just because we like the taste of cooked meat doesn’t mean that someone who’s eaten raw meat all of their life will like it. They might like it, and that theory could be correct, it’s just that my theory doesn’t depend on that. With my theory, they would cook their meat for a different reason, and then develop a taste for it over time.
The problem with my theory is that it only applies to cultures living in a cold environment. It doesn’t explain why food is cooked all over the world, even in areas that have never had freezing temperatures. Nor does it explain why cooking continued even after the ice age temperatures warmed up. For that you need something else. The reasons I can think of are:
1) It kills parasites that might be in the food, resulting in a healthier population.
2) It softens the food, making it easier to eat, and potentially opening up new types of food that we couldn’t eat or digest raw.
It seems logical to me that, if we hadn’t developed cooking already, we would have developed it during the ice ages, and it seems logical to me that cooking would have continued after the temperatures warmed, and probably even would have spread to other areas to some extent. It’s not obvious to me that it would have spread the world over and be as ubiquitous as it is today just based on the reasons I’ve stated above. But, it is obvious that it as common as it is today, so there must be some driving force behind it, and given that, I think the theory I’ve stated above is a good one for its origin.
posted by LeRoy at 1:51 PM
4 Comments:
I think it may have started out as a food preservation technique. In all honesty cooking meat probably happened immediately after or concurrent with the mastery of fire.
Paleolithic man was identical to modern man in all ways. They had the same intelligence and curiosity we do. In my experience people love tossing stuff into fires so a scrap of meat was probably one of the first things to go in.
You may well be right, and I'd love to hear of any evidence you have one way or the other. One thing I'm certain of though, if cooking hadn't been invented before man began living in colder climates where food froze during the night, it would have been then to thaw out the food.
Cooking is not universal. Japanese traditionally eat raw fish. I bet there are other examples (prior to the McRevolution at least).
And the fact that a practice is widespread or predominant does not mean it is healthy. Many Russian men dying in their 50s from excess alcohol for an example. Smoking tobacco. A third of the Chinese population addicted to opium a century ago, with huge consequent reduction of population.
Eating raw food takes an abundant amount of energy. Many women even stop menstruating on a quality, raw food diet. Some studies suggest that up to a third of people on a raw food diet suffer from chronic energy depletion. One theory suggests that humans evolved smaller jaws and rounder teeth as a result of cooking food. In response to the earlier posting about the Japanese, they eat an abundance of vegetables, mainly processed through pickling and/or cooking as well as rice, which is inedible unless cooked. It isn't necessary to cook most seafood, as it is tender and readily digestible as is.
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