"Cooking Makes You Human"

An excellent review from the New York Times: Why Are Humans Different From All Other Apes? It’s the Cooking, Stupid.

Human beings are not obviously equipped to be nature’s gladiators. We have no claws, no armor. That we eat meat seems surprising, because we are not made for chewing it uncooked in the wild. Our jaws are weak; our teeth are blunt; our mouths are small. That thing below our noses? It truly is a pie hole.

To attend to these facts, for some people, is to plead for vegetarianism or for a raw-food diet. We should forage and eat the way our long-ago ancestors surely did. For Richard Wrangham, a professor of biological anthropology at Harvard and the author of “Catching Fire,” however, these facts and others demonstrate something quite different. They help prove that we are, as he vividly puts it, “the cooking apes, the creatures of the flame.”

“Catching Fire” is a plain-spoken and thoroughly gripping scientific essay that presents nothing less than a new theory of human evolution, one he calls “the cooking hypothesis,” one that Darwin (among others) simply missed.

“Cooked food does many familiar things,” he observes. “It makes our food safer, creates rich and delicious tastes and reduces spoilage. Heating can allow us to open, cut or mash tough foods. But none of these advantages is as important as a little-appreciated aspect: cooking increases the amount of energy our bodies obtain from food.”

He then delivers a thorough, delightfully brutal takedown of the raw-food movement and its pieties. He cites studies showing that a strict raw-foods diet cannot guarantee an adequate energy supply, and notes that, in one survey, 50 percent of the women on such a diet stopped menstruating. 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.

Mr. Wrangham also dismisses, for complicated social and economic reasons, the popular Man-the-Hunter hypothesis about evolution, which posits that meat-eating alone was responsible. Meat eating “has had less impact on our bodies than cooked food,” he writes. “Even vegetarians thrive on cooked diets. We are cooks more than carnivores.”

This is an eminently judicious argument for one extraordinarily simple reason - that plants have no defense mechanisms against predators is completely risible.

And we humans are fierce predators!

It just turns out that the various fiery techniques - roasting, steaming, boiling, etc. negate the defense mechanims in very aggressive ways (for example, look here.)

The CC may make fun of the vegetables occasionally because they are effectively guilt-seeking hairshirt-types with a completely bullshit pseudo-moralistic view of the world (and the CC is a frisky, guilt-free, pleasure-maximizing hedonistic omnivore) but the vegans and the raw-foods are the complete and utter retards. They simply do not understand at a functional level how cooking and eating actually proceeds. To cut the crap, they are simply wrong.