Review: “Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human” by Richard W. Wrangham

Thumbs up for Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human by Richard W. Wrangham. Science/nature.

I always take this sort of theory-of-humanity book with an atom of sodium, but this one – which posits that the invention of cooking happened earlier than is usually accepted, and that cooking made a huge impact in the formation of human physiology and society – seems more believable than most. There are inevitable logic hiccups and pages of hypothesizing without data, but when Wrangham keeps his feet on the ground, I find his argument very intriguing. You can find out for yourself very quickly as the actual text of the book is a only 200 pages; the rest is notes.

“The difficulty lies in the large amount of time it takes to eat raw food. Great apes allow us to estimate it. Simply because they are big – 30 kilograms (66 pounds) and more – they need a lot of food and a lot of time to chew. Chimpanzees in Gombe National Park, Tanzania, spend more than six hours a day chewing. Six hours may seem high considering that most of their food is ripe fruit. Bananas or grapefruit would slip down their throats easily, and for this reason, chimpanzees readily raid the plantations of people living near their territories. But wild fruits are not nearly as rewarding as those domesticated fruits. The edible pulp of a forest fruit is often physically hard, and it may be protected by a skin, coat, or hairs that have to be removed. Most fruits have to be chewed for a long time before the pulp can be fully detached from the pieces of skin or seeds, and before the solid pieces are mashed enough to give up their valuable nutrients. Leaves, the next most important fond for chimpanzees, are also tough and likewise take a long time to chew into pieces small enough for efficient digestion. The other great apes (bonobos, gorillas, and orangutans) commit similarly long hours to chewing their food. Because the amount of time spent chewing is related to body size among primates, we can estimate how long humans would be obliged to spend chewing it we lived on the same kind of raw food that great apes do. Conservatively, it would he 42 percent of the day, or just over five hours of chewing in a twelve-hour day.”