The idea that cooking is a defining human activity is not a new one.
In 1773, the Scottish writer James Boswell, noting that “no beast is a cook,” called Homo sapiens “the cooking animal.”
(Though he might have reconsidered that definition had he been able to gaze upon the frozen‒food cases at Walmart.) Fifty years later, in The Physiology of Taste, the French gastronome Jean Anthelme Brillat‒Savarin claimed that cooking made us who we are; by teaching men to use fire, it had “done the most to advance the cause of civilization.”
More recently, Claude Lévi‒Strauss, writing in The Raw and the Cooked in 1964, reported that many of the world’s cultures entertained a similar view, regarding cooking as the symbolic activity that “establishes the difference between animals and people.”
For Levi‒Strauss, cooking was a metaphor for the human transformation of raw nature into cooked culture.
But in the years since the publication of The Raw and the Cooked, other anthropolo‒ gists have begun to take quite literally the idea that the invention of cooking might hold the evolutionary key to our humanness.
A few years ago, a Harvard anthropologist and prima‒ tologist named Richard Wrangham published a fascinating book called Catching Fire, in which he argued that it was the discovery of cooking by our early ancestors ― and not tool making or meat eating or language ― that set us apart from the apes and made us human.
According to the “cooking hypothesis,” the advent of cooked food altered the course of human evolution.
By providing our forebears with a more energy‒dense and easy‒to‒digest diet, it allows our brains to grow bigger (brains being notorious energy guzzlers) and our guts to shrink.
It seems that raw food takes much more time and energy to chew and digest, which is why other primates our size carry around substantially larger digestive tracts and spend many more of their waking hours chewing ― as much as six hours a day.