How Cooking Made Us Human

I am in agreement with at least one of Richard Wrangham's theories, a professor of biological anthropology at Harvard, renowned primatologist, and author of the new book CATCHING FIRE: How Cooking Made Us Human. I agree with him totally that it was cooking, rather than meat, that made man what he is, and have written extensively about this in my new book...i.e.....that it was cooking that gave man the larger brain and ability to do other things besides just eat and look for food, not meat.

{ Please do read the full New York Times Review of the book, it's great. Also, I have not read the book yet, so what I write is based upon what I learned from the NY Times Review. Certainly I will have more to say once I read it, and this is just my first spontaneous response. And here are some more editorial reviews at Barnes and Nobles. }

I also agree with him that cooking is what ultimately forged relationships between men and women and led to marriage/monogomy, because humans, especially men, are not monogomous by nature. For example, because of cooking, humans would have begun to store food that could be cooked, and this would need to be protected as would the chefs and cooking area. If women became the chefs then the men became the protector and hunter in return for sex. A pretty good bargain that would have kept men and women together as a team for a purpose. Men then had a permanent source of sex, and women had a permanent source of food and protection. Furthermore, cooking food would have started to take people away from a hunter-gather lifestyle to stay more in one place, which would also allow for them to have more kids because they don't have to carry them everywhere. (This could also explain why so many marriages end in divorce today, because women don't need to give up sex for protection anymore, nor do they necessarily want to be in the kitchen cooking. How's that for an interesting theory! Yet, as a married woman, I still love the feeling of partnership and protection I feel from my husband, even if the times have changed!)

Anyway, as a 10 year raw foodist, I also know that his theory and so called "evidence" that the raw food diet cannot guarantee an adequate energy supply, and makes women stop menstruating is largely misguided. Hello! I AM a women and I still bleed every month, and I have MORE energy then I did before. Now, to be fair, the study he states says that 50% of women stop menstruating on such a diet, so I guess I would be in the the other half that still does, but as others have written already, the mistake is to associate a lack of menstruating with infertility. Furthermore, I have no way of knowing what kind of diet these women were put on in this study, because just eating a bunch of raw vegetables is obviously a pretty unbalanced diet, and to do a raw diet right you really have to know what you are doing. The fact is, most do not know anything about how to do it right. I will have to look into this, but I think there is also plenty written about women who don't menstruate but are still healthy and fertile and able to get pregnant. So, right now I'm like kinda wishing I was one of those women who didn't menstruate anymore!

Regardless though, I can tell you this. I would NOT want to be one of our ancestors searching for enough food to eat and victim to wild animals etc. I would think it would be really hard to get a balanced diet in the first few thousand years of our existence. I don't think life would have been as tough as we are taught to believe, but it still would have been difficult to get enough of everything the body needs. So I will give him that, but in modern times this isn't a problem anymore -unless you live in poverity and have no resources.

He also writes that "There is no way our human ancestors survived, much less reproduced, on it. He seems pleased to be able to report that raw diets make you urinate too often, and cause back and hip problems." (DWIGHT GARNER, New York Times Review, May 26, 2009). I don't know what "urinating too often" would be, but I have absolutely no problem with this. I also have a very large bladder, but still, I am certainly not always peeing. I also certainly do not have any hip or back problems, and have a fantastic, healthy yoga practice.

All my raw food friends that have been raw for a long time also do not have any of these problems. His attack on the raw food diet really looks pretty ridiculous from people who have been living it for a long time and are a living example of the opposite of what he says a raw diet creates.

In a lot of ways, his conclusions just show me that you can conclude anything using scientific studies. Furthermore, unless you really research each study itself, there is no way to know what a study really shows. Finally, if our anscestors could not have survived or reproduced without cooking, then tell me this......

How the hell did mankind survive for thousands of years before the discovery of cooking????

While I think Mr. Wrangham is on to a lot of things, and right about many, he needs to do a little more research about the realities of a raw food diet. However, even as a raw foodist, I agree that there are many advantages that came from cooking our food, but one, we need to be careful before we claim that eating a majority of our food cooked is healthier, or two, that necessarily everything that may be thought of as an advantage brought by cooking, is really truly advantageous to our species. I also am not totally against cooked food.... I just feel so much healthier and happier without it!