Reddit reviews Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human
We found 23 Reddit comments about Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
Used Book in Good Condition
This is a fascinating question that's beyond the expertise of, well, me, but I shan't let that stop me.
There are nutritional benefits to cooking. See e.g. How Cooking Made Us Human which argues compellingly that cooking was necessary for human development. Cooking neutralizes phytic acid and oxalic acid, both of which bind to iron/calcium in many vegetables and make them nutritionally unavailable. Ditto raw eggs--avidin in the egg binds to biotin (a b vitamin) and makes it unavailable; cooking makes it available.
Compare to vitamin c, and a number of other good things, that are unavailable after cooking but are before.
So will you lose vitamin content by cooking? Absolutely. Will you lose vitamin content by not cooking? Bet your bottom dollar you will. What to do? As the roughest of rough guidelines, my thinking is this: fruits are literally designed to be eaten, so eat them raw if you're after nutritional value. Some vegetables are not keen (in the evolutionary sense) on being eaten and have evolved to encourage people not to eat them, so cook them some and eat them raw some.
There is an excellent essay from J. Steingarten in The Man who Ate Everything on this topic if you'd like further reading.
Generally, cooked vegetables will be better for you, nutritionally, than no vegetables at all, so go to town.
There's a great book called Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human by Richard Wrangham that's primarily about the hypothesis that it was our ability to cook food that drove our evolutionary development as early humans, not our hunting ability to eat additional meat. In addition to providing a compelling case for this, he also brings together a bunch of disparate studies to almost accidentally prove a side case: that calories in, calories out is only part of the equation. An important one, but not the only one.
One examples I remember clearly from the book were a standard experimental/control set of rats. They were given food which had the same calorie count, but one of them was hard pellets, and the other one was a "puffed" version of the food; think cold rice versus unsugared rice krispies. Both sets of rats finished all of the food, but the puffed food rats gained weight while the unpuffed did not.
Similarly, a dietary experiment that wanted to look at the effects of eating a raw food diet vs. a regular diet was attempted. The experimental and control groups were served the same food, including olive oil, spices, etc. but the control group's food was cooked, while the experimental group's food was unprepared. It was meant to take place over the course of a few months if memory serves (I haven't read the book in years), but had to be cut short after a matter of a few weeks as the raw food group lost more weight than was considered safe.
Our way of measuring the number of calories in food is grossly inadequate. And from the studies that have been performed, which unfortunately are few and far between as most food research is done by the companies that make the food, even when we measure the calories int he food, we're often not actually measuring how easily our body processes and stores those calories.
Calories in, calories out is a good place to start. But saying that's all there is to it is like answering the question "how do birds fly," with "by flapping their wings." It's accurate, but also insufficient, as it ignores their lighter bone structure, aerodynamic qualities, etc. And expecting someone to lose weight just by watching calories without also changing the types of food they eat is often about as useful as expecting someone to fly by strapping on ersatz wings and flapping their arms.
A very sketchy source. After all, our chimp cousins eat meat as well, and we have incisors, so it's reasonable to assume our common ancestors did.
Pre agriculture humans were scavengers that ate anything they could find. In fact, I'm pretty sure I've read studies that show that learning how to cook meat was critical in our development, because it allowed us to digest energy faster, so our brains could grow larger and we spent less time foraging, and could develop communities.
Edit: One source for what I mean: http://www.amazon.com/Catching-Fire-Cooking-Made-Human/dp/0465020410/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1350932227&sr=1-1&keywords=catching+fire+richard+wrangham
EDIT: After a bit of digging, here's a link to an article they should have linked to. Choice pullquotes from Pollan:
> “[The appreciation of cooking was] a bit of wisdom that some American feminists thoughtlessly trampled in their rush to get women out of the kitchen.”
> Yet there he is again, in the New York Times Magazine, dismissing “The Feminine Mystique” as “the book that taught millions of American women to regard housework, cooking included, as drudgery, indeed as a form of oppression.” In the same magazine story, Pollan scolds that “American women now allow corporations to cook for them” and rues the fact that women have lost the “moral obligation to cook” they felt during his 1960s childhood.
I don't know. I know he's getting lots of hate because he dared to speak out against feminism...yet I know people my age where the woman of the household just flat out refuses to do housework. Her turn to cook? It better be in a can, or there better be some cash for going to a restaurant. She not only won't cook, she can't cook, and won't learn anything about it, and God help you if you'd like for her to wash your clothes while she does hers. And sometimes we're talking about married couples.
Yes, I also know guys my age who just flat out demand that she do all the housework...I'm sure that works out great for them.
EDIT: A couple of choice edits from another graf:
> When much-lauded food writer Michael Ruhlman writes, “I know for a fact [emphasis added] that spending at least a few days a week preparing food with other people around, enjoying it together, is one of the best possible things in life to do, period. It’s part of what makes us human [emphasis added]. It makes us happy in ways that are deep and good for us,” he’s writing from the point of view of a food writer, someone who enjoys cooking and has freely chosen it as his vocation. That’s a privileged position, and a frankly absurd one. To borrow Ruhlman’s wording, I know for a fact that plenty of people don’t like to cook and it’s not because they haven’t been properly educated or had the “revelatory” experience of eating an exquisitely ripe peach or a simple-yet-perfect slice of sole meunière. I know for a fact that plenty of people aren’t even that interested in the experience of eating, and I bet you do too: the absentminded friend who has to be reminded to bolt down a granola bar before heading to her after-work Italian class; the picky-eater sibling who, though grown, still happily subsists on spaghetti and bananas and diced red peppers. The term “foodie” was originally invented to describe people who really enjoy eating and cooking, which suggests that others do not. Yet today everyone is meant to have a deep and abiding appreciation for and fascination with pure, wholesome, delicious, seasonal, regional food. The expectation that cooking should be fulfilling for everyone is insidious, especially for women. I happen to adore cooking and eating, and nothing is more fun for me than sharing a home-cooked bowl of pasta puttanesca and a loaf of crusty bread with friends. Yet, I know for a fact that others would much rather go kayaking or read magazines or write poems or play World of Warcraft or teach their dog sign language. And, unlike Ruhlman, I don’t suspect them of being less than human.
Because having the leisure time to go kayaking or teaching your dog sign language (seriously???!?) totally aren't privileged activities. And expecting people to enjoy cooking is insidious? Really? I'm thinking that when he said that, he may have been speaking, or at least thinking, about this book.
EDIT3: Here's a pullquote from an article entitled, "Michael Pollan Says Men Need to Get Back Into the Kitchen, Stat":
> "If we're going to rebuild a culture of cooking," Pollan says, "it can't mean returning women to the kitchen. We all need to go back to the kitchen." He continues:
> "First, we need to bring back home ec, but a gender-neutral home ec. We need public health ad campaigns promoting home cooking as the single best thing you can do for your family's health and well-being."
I'm guessing the feminist blogs just overlooked that one.
I'm reading a book called Catching Fire by Richard Wrangham. It makes the case that cooked food was essential to human evolution, as opposed to simply a cultural side-effect. He cites a study by Corinna Koebnick called the Giessen Raw Food study, which examined the diets of a group of raw-foodists in Germany. I'll quote the relevant passage below:
> In the Giessen study, the more raw food that women ate, the lower their BMI and the more likely they were to have parital or total amenorrhea [failure to menstruate]. Among women eating totally raw diets, about 50 percent entirely ceased to menstruate. A further proportion, about 10 percent, suffered irregular menstrual cycles that left them unlikely to conceive.
Aiello and Wheeler 1995 was the first to really get the ball rolling. Now the cause is being taken up by Richard Wrangham. His book Catching Fire: How cooking made us human is a more layman's introduction to the topic. Here is one of his peer-reviewed articles from last year.
Cooking food makes the calories in the food more bioavailable, but it doesn't magically create more of them.
Check out Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human for tons of references, explanation about how our digestive system is adapted to cooked foods, and a compelling theory on how discovering cooked food led to our large brains.
It's not just to make sure the food is safe to eat, it also allows us to get more energy from the food. Cooked food gives much more energy than raw food, and so early humanoids that ate cooked foods wouldn't have to spend as much time eating. There's a hypothesis that cooking food is what caused our jaws and digestive systems to shrink, since we didn't have to expend as much energy digesting raw food, allowing us to devote more energy to a energy-devouring brain.
book on the subject
http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2012-10/eating-cooked-food-made-us-human-study-finds
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2012/10/121026-human-cooking-evolution-raw-food-health-science/
http://www.pnas.org/gca?allch=&submit=Go&gca=pnas%3B109%2F45%2F18571
Let's see, to be smart, like us, a big brain is required. A big brain needs more energy than raw food can deliver so your super smart, super special mystery monkey has apparently learned how to cook it's food (https://www.amazon.ca/Catching-Fire-Cooking-Made-Human/dp/0465020410).
Awesome, you don't have to search for tree structures anymore, just claim that firepits are proof of sasquatch BBQ's.
This is my favorite hypothesis.
Basically, cooking food enabled us to use the energy derived from our diets for larger brains. Most animals spend a significant portion of the energy they get from food on digesting that food. Cooking means that we don't have to do so and can use that energy elsewhere.
Hummingbirds are another example of a low digestive energy species. Instead of using that energy for their brains, they use it for flight - that's how they can hover and fly backwards.
The large number of cultures achieving the purported health benefits of paleo without eating anything remotely like it is a good starting point.
The people promoting the diet also pretty much come out and say "hurrr, we're guessing what ancient man ate based on modern hunter-gatherers", which is a silly fucking rationale for living your life by. "Paleo will change your life because it is how we imagine people used to eat!"
We have evolved pretty rapidly in a dietary sense - the "health effects are the result of a modern diet" statements are pretty silly when you consider things like milk, which we've clearly adapted to using entirely within the Neolithic era.
For further reading, I'd suggest Catching Fire, or The 10,000 Year Explosion.
Paleo is a good diet, but the rationale used to promote it is in the same league as something like creationist dogma. If the belief helps people eat better and move away from a shitty diet, great - but beliefs aren't facts, and the evolutionary ideas used to promote it are pretty bankrupt.
As an endnote, I'm miffed that paleo helps promote the weird anti-gluten hysteria some people have latched onto.
You're still misunderstanding evolution. Biologists don't consider animals in terms of "inferior" or "superior".
As for the laws of physics, organ systems require energy, and an organism has a total energy budget to run its systems based on the total energy it can consume. Brains are metabolically expensive, so evolving a large brain requires lots of energy. This energy cannot just come from eating more, however, because there is a practical threshold to how much energy an animal can actually extract from the environment: the more food an animal eats, the more energy it has to spend digesting that food; at a certain level it hits a plateau, and this plateau is below the level of energy it takes to run a human brain. Humans got around this by externalizing part of our digestive process, by cooking and processing food: instead of using our own energy to digest our food, we use external energy sources to digest part of it for us. This allowed us to reduce the energy budget of our digestive systems and divert that energy into running a brain larger than physically sustainable under natural conditions. Brain size in human ancestors was only moderately larger than chimpanzees before Homo erectus, but by the time controlled use of fire was habitual human brain size had doubled. Controlled use of fire is not an accepted or commonly reported bigfoot behaviour, and it is not consistent with them being so elusive since smoke would make them easier to find; without some mechanism to break this energy plateau it is not possible for bigfoots to feed an exceptionally expensive brain like humans have.
A seminal paper on the bioenergetics of brain evolution was Aiello and Wheeler's (1995)Expensive Tissue Hypothesis, which described the unique relationship between human brain and gut size, and Richard Wrangham has bud part of his career on the relationship between controlled use of fire and human brain evolution, including his 2010 book Catching Fire: How Cooking Made us Human
read this book
The relevant research is by Dr. Wrangham and associates and has been summarized in his book Catching Fire: how cooking made us human. I don't recall them specifying fish but just cooked food in general.
This appears to be the primary reference.
Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human
Richard Wrangham is Professor of Biological Anthropology at Harvard University - since I sense you are about to question his credentials.
Fantasy: The Thief by Megan Whalen Turner. The first book is good, but the second and third are fantastic.
Non-fiction: Catching Fire: How Cooking Made us Human by Richard Wrangham. Flat-out the most fascinating book I've ever read. About evolution and shit.
Literary Fiction: Orsinian Tales by Ursula K. Le Guin. The writing is so beautiful, moving, exquisite, all that good stuff. Le Guin's best work, imo.
Science Fiction: The High Crusade by Poul Anderson. Sooooo awesome. Has some elements of fantasy in it (the medieval part anyway.) Basically, knights vs. aliens.
We've evolved to eat cooked food - including meat.
Catching fire
I'm not sure if anyone's linked to it yet, but there are some fascinating answers to your question in this book: http://www.amazon.com/Catching-Fire-Cooking-Made-Human/dp/0465020410/ref=sr_1_fkmr1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1374682314&sr=8-1-fkmr1&keywords=how+cooking+allowed+us. Maybe not written on a five-year-old level, but if you want a college-level understanding, you might find it interesting :)
Being able to digest/handle rotten meat or raw low-nutrition plants (grass) takes special organs that require additional energy.
Inventing fire and cooking helped early hominids to simplify their digestive track since it now digests mostly cooked food.
The freed up energy used by our guts and redirected it to power the brain.
The brain in fact uses so much energy that one out of five meals eaten is used to just power the brain.
"Catching Fire" is a book on this.
http://www.amazon.com/Catching-Fire-Cooking-Made-Human/dp/0465020410/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1381948456&sr=8-1&keywords=cooking+human
If you are interested in this kind of thing, check out Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human. It traces the evolution of gender roles, from early man until today. Very interesting stuff.
https://www.amazon.com/Catching-Fire-Cooking-Made-Human/dp/0465020410/
> Automation relies on lack of human input outside set up
So there's no auto in any automobile? You're saying there's no automation right now?
> a beast of burden to plow fields was not automation [...] Ai/Algorithmic learning isn't the same as a mechanized arm
Prove animals don't learn.
> we now have a tool in AI that can replaced an infinite number of processes.
That makes your labor more efficient. Thus, you are now more employable.
Yes! So many people get this confused. Richard Wrangham, Catching Fire. I had to read it for an evolutionary biology class and it was wonderful, if I remember correctly.
Catching Fire explains why raw food diets don't work for humans.