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: A New Theory On What Makes Us Human
Summary: 5 Stars
Anthropologists, historians, and theologians have many theories about how humans became "human". Dr. Richard Wrangham here posits that humans became "human" because we learned to cook our food over a million years ago, when homo erectus first tamed fire. Conventional theory holds that humans began to cook their food long after their path diverged from other primates, so its interesting to read Dr. Wrangham's belief that cooking was a cause rather than an effect.
Dr. Wrangham provides some fascinating material on how humanity began to physically separate from the apes, and how eating cooked food intensified the process and hurried it along. This has the potential to become impenetrably technical, but Dr. Wrangham writes clearly with the general reader in mind. I also enjoyed his coverage of the claims of present day raw-foodists, some of whom he interviewed. After that chapter I was left feeling simulataneous admiration for the dedication of raw-foodists and repulsion at the thought of following a similar diet myself! Dr. Wrangham has a good ear for an entertaining anecdote, such as the story of poor Alexis St. Martin, who survived a horrifying injury that permanently opened his stomach, thus involuntarily becoming an assistant to a researcher who wished to observe the process of digestion.
The text of this book is only about 200 pages. It is exhaustively researched and documented, with over 40 pages of notes, a 30 page bibliography, and a 20 page index. It will appeal to students of early man and to followers of Michael Pollan, with whom Dr. Wrangham shares a concern that humanity return to more natural and less highly processed food.
Book Review: Brain food is cooked food
Summary: 5 Stars
The story of hominid evolution to homo sapiens sapiens is primarily the story of brains increasing both in size and computing power.
Today the human brain typically comprises two and a half percent of the average person's body weight yet consumes twenty percent of the typical person's energy.
It's a pretty costly little device and this book presents the startling hypothesis that the original brain food was cooked food because cooking eases the digestability of food products and makes it easier for the body to convert them to other uses.
Viewed against the backdrop of the antiquity of other human activities or artifacts, cooking truly becomes perhaps the "world's oldest profession." Writing and record keeping are obviously most recent dating only to ancient Sumeria some five thousand years ago. Farming dates back perhaps another five or ten thousand years before that. The domestication of dogs coincides with farming also about fifteen thousand years ago. The use of ornamental jewelry and burial artifacts dates back to about fifty thousand years ago.
Deeper in time, bacteria adapted to clothing date to about one million years ago.
But cooking, according to this book, takes us back to the very beginning: nearly two million years ago (also perhaps not coincidentally with the first use of stone tools).
What emerges then is a picture of hominids as much influenced by their activities as they were influenced by them. In this way, Harvard's Wrangham has produced an amazing and thought provoking book that describes what it really took to make us what we are.
Book Review: CATCHING FIRE: HOW COOKING MADE US HUMAN BY RICHARD WRANGHAM
Summary: 3 Stars
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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Book Review: Why cooking mattered
Summary: 4 Stars
"Catching Fire" is the first book by Richard Wrangham that I have read. I picked up by chance due to the novel and interesting theorum stated on its cover, i.e. that cooking food led to the evolutionary changes that made our primate ancestors into modern humans. I was not disappointed.
The book's main thesis is that cooking food provided an evolutionary advantage due to the overall increased nutrient absorption and digestibility resulting from cooking. Many social and behavioral changes resulted due to the consumption of cooked food, such as male-female pair bondings to hunt, obtain and prepare meat, communities developing around the hunt, and consumption of nutritious tubers and organs that are undigestible when raw leading to more stamina and intelligence.
Wrangham provides ample evidence for his theory. However, he repeatedly presents many of the same ideas in support of this theory. The book frankly became tiring after a certain point due to this repetition. I also do not understand why no pictures were included. For example, comparisons of the different hominid teeth, pictures of the digestion process, fossils, etc. would have been interesting.
But overall the book was a fairly good read, and I would recommend it to anyone seriously interested in human evolution, physical anthropology, or prehistorical cooking.
Book Review: A Surprise Corroboration
Summary: 5 Stars
Since there are already 22 reviews of "Catching Fire" (some quite excellent such as George Sand's), rather than rehash the same territory I draw your attention to a delightful confirmation of Wrangham's theories.
In the 2009 holiday newsletter of The Gorilla Foundation, Director Dr. Francine "Penny" Patterson writes about gorilla Koko:
"Koko continues to astonish me with her capabilities and insights. She becomes more of a partner with every passing year. Recently she has been helping me answer a question from a colleague" (inspired by this book?) "as to whether gorillas prefer cooked or raw food. Koko says cooked is better. And as we plan for the Maui Ape Preserve, she has provided invaluable design insights as to what will work best in terms of gorilla sleeping quarters, play yard, and even landscaping!"
Q.E.D.