Thursday, August 6, 2009
Cooking the Books Good Cooks: The Most Evolved Creatures on the Planet
Posted by Nicki Wood on Thu, Aug 6, 2009 at 1:16 PM
Did anyone else catch the interview Monday with Michael Pollan on NPR's Fresh Air? It was fascinating look at the popularity of cooking shows, but Pollan also covered some current deep thoughts in the food world, including this one I'd forgotten.
It's a theory of civilization that loosely began with a 1975 book by Claude Levi-Strauss called The Raw and the Cooked, though Pollan didn't mention him. Levi-Strauss' book defines raw as natural and cooked as civilized. Cooking symbolizes civilized societies. Levi-Strauss goes off in another direction, intellectually, with the essay, but the germ of the idea was there.
The expanded theory, these days, goes like this: we used to think that communication separated man from beast. But now we know that animals communicate. Then it was thought to be cooperation that made us civilized, but lions hunt cooperatively, and elephants raise their young cooperatively.
Research now points to cooking as the benchmark. Culturally, cooking requires "made" implements. Physically and intellectually, it requires control of fire. But the powerful evidence comes from brain research. The action of heating and combining foods unlocks the extra nutrients that may have given our brains the boost they needed to dominate the natural world.
You see where this is going, right?
Not to put too fine a point on it, but if this is true, then you, Bites readers and curious cooks, are at the very tip top of the food chain. Good to be king, isn't it?
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I missed the NPR interview, but Michael Pollan had a wonderful piece on the NY Times last week on the same topic that did reference The Raw and the Cooked
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/02/magazine/02cooking-t.html?_r=1&sq=michael%20pollan&st=cse&scp=3&pagewanted=all
