Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human,   ISBN:9780465013623

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there aren't that many new ideas kicking around, but this book is an exception. how exciting to have 'catching fire' so wonderfully lay out the simple and clear theory that cooking is at the bottom of everything. but this is no dry science read. from homo hablis to the mongols, 'catching fire' is an adventurous read that is sure to capture the imagination. true stories are often the best. 5 stars!!!

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From the professor of Biological Anthropology at Harvard University, as well as the co-author of Demonic Males and co-editor of Primate Societies, comes Catching Fire, a thoroughly researching book on the importance of the discovery of fire and how it changed Homo sapiens sapiens forever.

While initially thinking Catching Fire would be a in depth foray into our ancestral humanity, looking at different hominids and what it was that led to the discovery of fire and going on from there, I was pleasantly surprised to discover a book more in the style of Michael Pollan's Omnivores Dilemma. While the origin of fire and cooking are certainly discussed in this book, the true story here is how humanity has benefited from cooking, and how it has aided us on the evolutionary path to making us the dominant species on the planet. Wrangham boils it down (pun intended!) to energy and how when foods (especially meats) are cooked, more energy is generated from consuming them. The author scientifically breaks this down by analyzing the energy gained from raw meats as opposed to cooked, as well as vegetables, revealing the problems that some vegetarians and vegans can have in needing to make sure they get enough energy from the foods they consume.

Reading Catching Fire will educate you in a number of ways: you will learn the importance of our ancestors learning to cook foods and further are evolutionary development, but you will also learn why it is we cook foods - on a biological level - and how it can change how we grow and develop, both physically and intellectually.

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... if you like Matt Ridley, Richard Dawkins, or other popular writers on evolution, or want something more substantial on cooking than "Julie and Julia." If you are female and like to cook or male and like to eat cooked food, this book provides a persuasive hypothesis why that might be.

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Author and Harvard biological anthropologist Richard Wrangham takes a fresh look at what makes us human, and he comes to a conclusion that is both original and in hindsight obvious - cooking. Our capture of fire not only helped us to keep warm and scare off predators, but allowed us to turn difficult to digest and bland edible fare into such mouthwatering delectables as Sacher tortes, cassoulet and 8 treasures rice. More importantly than satisfying our gourmet (or gourmand) instincts, cooking has had profound impact on both our biology and our society. Wrangham skillfully weaves together a number of different lines of evidence, e.g., comparative anatomy, archaeology, biochemistry, anthropology, and sociology, to demonstrate that it is by this simple heating of food we have literally become human. No other animal cooks their food. Even our closest relatives - the primates - have not only very different behaviors around food, but even their taste and anatomy (geared for long hours of chewing and long times and alimentary tracks for processing the food) are quite divergent from hours. Cooking not only improves the flavor, but increases the accessibility to the protein and nutrients. Because we are able to more efficiently extract nutrients from cooked food, in essence our guts could shrink and our brains to grow. Alas, the American diet of late has been effecting the reverse, but that is another series of books. Wrangham extensively documents and cites the research that supports his hypotheses and findings. These notes are fortunately in the end of the book, so they do not distract from the reading. If there is a weakness, it is his repetitive style of writing. The book is divided into chapters that each support one major point in his hypothesis. However, he often repeats the same set of arguments 2 or 3 times within the chapter. This gets tiresome. However, the novelty of his arguments and clarity of his discussion make this book well worth reading.

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This is a mind-bending book. While I was reading it, I bored everyone in my family (especially at every meal) with the details of Richard Wrangham's startling thesis: that of all the changes that distinguish ape from man, the ability to control fire and cook one's food comes first. It's cooking, argues Wrangham, that liberates us to travel widely and hunt effectively (other primates spend too much time chewing); it's cooking that creates the conditions for differentiated sex roles (and the relegation of women to the kitchen); it's cooking that denudes us of our hair (the fire keeps us warm), making us better runners (less overheating) and again adding to our ability to travel distances; cooking gives us small guts (well, not mine) and big brains (guilty as charged!).

The implications of this thesis are both historical and contemporary. The reader gains insight into how family structure evolved, and at the same time is enlightened about what kinds of foods are really contributing to 21st-century obesity and its related health problems. The epilogue, which explains and criticizes how calories are counted by the food industry, is quite illuminating on this last point.

The book is billed as being path-breaking and original. While written for the educated rather than academic reader, it does contain thorough and informative endnotes (they are unobtrusive as you read, since subscripts are not inserted in the text). I have not reviewed these notes completely, but my impression is that many parts of the book, rather than being paradigm changing, chiefly synthesize work on food that has already been done. I do not say this as a criticism -- his references demonstrate his impressive command of the field and range from well known sources (like Stephen Jay Gould) to the most up-to-date breaking scientific studies (for example, evidence that the digestion of hard foods is more costly than soft comes from a scholarly article that at the time of this writing [2009] is in press rather than in print; see p. 255). But it may be that the book as a whole can be characterized mostly as putting together work that others have done.

Still, I do think that there are some very original insights here and that the synthesis itself is distinctive. Wrangham is a biological anthropologist, whose academic work is in the study of chimpanzees. The observations he offers about the differences between the organization of human society and that of other primates seem less derivative and related more closely to his his own empirical observations. I would put in this category the insight that it is food rather than sex that really drives behavior. I was fascinated by the speculations on sex roles in which Wrangham engages, which fly in the face of some traditional explanations of the origin of human society in the regulation of sex relationships. He is quite persuasive that the hunter's need for a cooked meal and the gatherer's need for a protected hearth are more fundamental than the father's desire to know that his children are his own and the mother's appreciation for male help raising and protecting her young.

Whether you agree with everything that Wrangham proposes (or it squares with your own observations and experiences as closely as it did with mine), this is a well written and thought provoking book that should find a wide readership.