Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human
ISBN:9780465013623 read summary

When I used to to Benihana's Japanese restaurant, I used to think those big grills with all of that fire was just for show. Apparently not. According to Richard Wrangham, cooking doesn't just make raw meat taste better, but also has enabled many of the most important advances in human evolution.

There are several key points in Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human. First, cooking food softens it, enabling humans to spend less time chewing and digesting food - and thus more time pursuing other activities. Second, less difficulty digesting food means the human body can dedicate less energy to the gut and more to brains (human brains are abnormally large, and human guts abnormally small). Finally, cooking had social impacts that reduced the time for gathering food, leading to a division of labor and gender inequality.

I found Wrangham's arguments fascinating, but never felt like he "proved" his hypothesis. Much of his evidence is anecdotal. The one thing I still didn't understand is whether he thought cooking or the biological changes in humans evolved first (the chicken and egg problem). I suspect the former, but the exact sequence is unclear. However, the thesis seems to suggest that cooking led to larger brains. This implies that humanity mastered fire before evolving human brains. If this is true, then why have other animals not harness fire?

Some of these sequencing issues left me a bit uncertain about whether cooking really was THE trait that made us human. Nonetheless, the issues discussed in Catching Fire are fascinating and will change the way you look at dinner.

The author illustrates, and givens compelling evidence, for his central thesis -- that cooking occurred early enough in human evolution to have an evolutionary effect on us. Indeed, it seems that people cannot survive on uncooked food alone, as their digestive systems cannot extract enough calories. The story of discovery of fire as a central point of human evolution is an interesting, and convincing, story.

The endnotes in this extensively annotated book are not linked into the main text, but float /en bloc/ at the end, cited (apparently) by page number in the hardcover edition. Likewise, the lengthy index is useless: a list of phrases, with no hyperlinking or even line numbers.

Buy this excellent work in paper instead of Kindle.

I eat a mostly raw food diet and I purchased this book to hear the other side of the story. Actually, I would have liked to learn that cooking food is a good thing. In the end, the author made me even more aware of why I should not cook my food. But what is mostly disappointing is the lack of logic in Wrangham's writing. He wants to convince us that cooking is a good thing but ends up citing much research that goes against his premise.

For example, he writes about the Evo Diet experiment in Britain. People with high blood pressure and cholesterol ate nothing but raw fruits, vegetables, nuts, and seeds for a short time. In the end the volunteers lost a lot of weight, which the author said was a bad thing and why eating raw food is unhealthy. Seems to me he must be living on another planet. He also concedes that blood pressure dropped to normal and cholesterol levels fell by a quarter. If this is what happens when you eat a raw food diet, seems like humans took a wrong turn when they turned to cooking.

Throughout the book Wrangham tells of writers feeling energized and mentally sharper, animals flourishing, and cultures benefiting from raw foods, yet he argues that cooking food is better because we can extract more calories that way. By that logic a diet of pork fat is better than peaches because there are more calories in pork. Geez, I had to spend $15 to find this out. If you are a raw foodist and want to have your beliefs challenged, don't waste your time and money.

The book's major premise is that our bodies have biologically adapted to a cooked food diet, and we can obtain more calories from our food that way. He does not prove this and states there is no evidence, yet. But trust him, there will be. I have to think that even if he is right, evolution is only interested in getting us to live till we can reproduce ourselves. Cooked food "may" help more people reach reproductive capacity, but it will not make us healthy as even Wrangham admits at the end of his book when he says "We must find ways to make our ancient dependence on cooked food healthier." This is stated after he connects cooked food to the obesity crisis in America.

While researching the history of man's diet, I found that numerous anthropologists felt cooking had some advantages that enhanced man's evolution. I got a copy of a cooking manifesto, Catching Fire, How Cooking Made Us Human by Richard Wrangham, professor of Biological Anthropology at Harvard University. (As a side note, my husband thought this was just another of my books that promote the raw food diet--to him, being human is not a plus; we should instead identify with our divine nature!)

In the first chapter, Richard discusses studies showing how raw fooders do not get enough calories, claiming that this could not have sustained our ancestors and therefore, a raw food diet was not what we evolved on. Cooking, he explains, increases the number of calories we absorb.

But, I argue, these raw fooders are on mainly vegan diets, which tend to be lower in calories. What about the nuts, seeds, olives and avocados, which made some of us raw fooders (like me!) actually struggle with our weight at times? These, he insists, were only seasonally available before modern times.

OK, got it. But that only proves we were not raw vegans. What about all the raw meat and eggs our ancestors ate? Richard goes on to argue that cooking meat and eggs has been shown in tests to enhance digestibility and absorption of calories. The argument that raw foodists use against cooking meat--that cooking denatures protein--is something that he views as an advantage. Denaturing it makes it easier to digest. Ironically, he cites the exact same study cited by raw meat promoters in which Dr. William Beaumont observes the digestion of a man (St. Martin) with a hole in his stomach. Richard says this study shows that cooked meat digests faster than raw meat! Promoters of raw meat claimed the opposite--that raw meat digested faster. So I decided to purchase the book myself to see what the truth of the matter is. (It is free on google books, but I can't read an entire book without being curled up in my rocking chair, and marking things up is my style of study!)

Richard argues that the advantage of obtaining more calories from cooked starches ensured humans got enough energy for survival. This may be true, but given our obesity epidemic, eating cooked starches is hardly an advantage in modern times. Furthermore, cooked grains and legumes, according to experts on the Paleo diet, were also not common in our diet until agriculture began about 10,000 years ago. These foods contain anti-nutrients (phytates and lectins) which create leaky gut syndrome leading to the diseases of civilization (arthritis, diabetes, multiple sclerosis, ALS, and much more).

Richard points out that "from an evolutionary perspective, if cooking causes a loss of vitamins or creates a few long-term toxic compounds, the effect is relatively unimportant compared to the impact of more calories." But evolution is not concerned about the longevity of the individual, only the survival of the species. For example, getting enough calories to remain fertile is great for the survival of the species. But studies abound showing that a calorie restricted diet enables the individual to live longer. So if cooking otherwise toxic tubors, grains and legumes helped us overpopulate the world, cooking did its job to ensure the survival of homo spapiens. But for the individual, eating raw is conducive to superior health and longevity, as proven by all the studies in my book The Live Food Factor.

Richard argues that the studies which show cooking produces toxins need not alarm us, because these toxins will affect only animals, since humans have adapted to them. About half the studies in my book are on humans, though. They show that eating raw and giving the body a break from these toxins helps it to detox. Clearly, as Richard points out, we have been cooking for tens of thousands of years--enough time to adapt to these toxins. But the problem is that the molecules are so chaotic and unpredictable, scientists believe we will never be able to adapt. Also, blood tests on people who eat cooked food show leukocytosis--an increase in white blood cells (which indicate some toxins they are fighting). Such tests on people after they eat raw food do not demonstrate this increase in white blood cells!

Richard gives the old argument that it doesn't matter if we eat food with enzymes or not, because the stomach digests the enzymes. However, an alternative theory is that in the first 30 to 60 minutes, these food enzymes in help to digest the food in the upper cardiac stomach. I always tell people, if you don't believe it, just eat everything raw for a few days and see how much more energy you have. (So far everyone I know can see a huge difference.) When we eat raw, we spare our pancreases of much labor in cranking out digestive enzymes to compensate for enzymes lost in the heat of cooking.

Richard argues that the human brain became larger not just from eating meat, but also from cooking. I wonder then, how does he explain the 11% shrinkage of the human brain in the last 10,000 years (coinciding with the onset of agriculture, when we began to cook much more)?

This book did make me realize that cooking began much earlier than I had thought. He cites evidence of cooking having occurred 2 million years ago, and credits the reduction of our gut, teeth and mouth size to eating cooked foods.

To the author's credit, I no longer feel so bad about steaming my turkey. (At least I am not getting all the toxic load that comes with barbecuing or grilling it.) However, for me, it is clear that raw is law.