Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human
by Richard Wrangham
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Book Reviews of Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human
Book Review: Important contribution to anthropology
Summary: 5 Stars
Anthropology is supposed to be the scientific study of humankind. Unfortunately, since its inception, it has been inundated by carefully disguised pseudoscience - attempts to use scientific data to support the preconceived biases of the investigators. Typically these biases (aka hypotheses) have been ethnocentric and agrocentric, and the arguments used to support them are often composed of flawed logic in the service of false implications. How relieving to read Wrangham's book, which actually appears to draw hypotheses from observations rather than a self-aggrandizing belief system. The author then analyzes realistic and sensible implications of these hypotheses, testing them in a simple but logical way that makes his conclusions seem obvious.
This is the kind of book that makes one wonder, "Why hasn't this been argued before?" While his book is rather small and the ideas are not deeply explored, this is largely because the hypotheses that Wrangham presents are quite new. I believe that his ideas will be supported, refined, and expanded by further investigation.
While some of his ideas appear outdated or unsupported (for example, he seems to suggest that hunter-gatherers were poorly nourished compared to later farmers, when in fact a substantial body of archeological evidence points to the contrary being true), and he makes some assumptions that are unfounded (for example, that human diets without cooking would be comparable to those of chimpanzees. This is highly unlikely, since pre-humans were bipedal, which suggests a far greater mobility geared toward different food preferences than apes that move on all fours or in trees. It is possible, if not likely, that human ancestors used their greater mobility to extract higher quality food from a larger home range more selectively than chimps.)
However, despite these shortfalls, the ideas presented in the book are extremely important to the study of human evolution and anthropology, as well as the endless and robust contemporary debates about nutrition and health. The book reflects something that I have been telling participants in my wild food foraging workshops for years: that cooking and processing food is the most significant human invention of all time. We would be wise to remain aware of that, and I am grateful that this author has increased my understanding of this issue.
Indeed, I feel that this is the single most important contribution to anthropology in decades. It is also well written, enough so to keep the interest of the casual reader.
Book Review: How Cooking Kills Us
Summary: 1 Stars
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.
Book Review: Unsurprising but plausible
Summary: 4 Stars
The really amazing thing about this book is that it took so long for someone to write it. That we are a nutrient extracting tube with some intelligence attached was pointed out by George Orwell in his novel, Down And Out In Paris And London, in the 1930s.
A drawback of Science, just like other major human efforts, is that a theory becomes established (hunting made us what we are) and becomes the orthodoxy. We just love to be orthodox, conforming doobies - so it has a long run.
Also, since such ideas come from men (and glorify male activities - male gods), the concept that female hominids played a major role in rolling out our social nature doesn't get traction amongst all the self-important, strutting, sexist scientists who don't have a clue that their view of reality has flaws.
This is a very readable work. Although, I wish all academic writers would stuff the references and the mutual back-patting (telling in the text exactly who was involved in every single bit or research they reference) to the reference ghetto at the back of the book where it belongs.
There is evidence that hominids have been using fire for cooking for many hundreds of thousands of years - long enough for cooked food to have been an influence on jaw size, brain size, social life, and reproductive success.
The protocols needed by hominids to ensure that cooked food would not be stolen by hungry, agressive males were at the heart of pair-bonding, sharing, and the role of females. Fire and cooking allowed our ancestors not only to fend off predators, but the more easily digested cooked food allowed a smaller gut, much more rapid eating and digestion, the shedding of body hair, the ability to run down prey because we can sweat instead of going into heat stroke, and importantly the increase in brain size as a result of selection for the intelligence needed to do what we still do: gossip, groom, bond, fight a mutual enemy.
Book Review: I Cook Therefore I Am
Summary: 4 Stars
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.Book Review: Bon appetit!
Summary: 5 Stars
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.