Summary
Forget the trope "you are what you eat." Two new books demonstrate that cuisine is what made us human in the first place, and in the second, that the stuff we took as proverbial mother's milk is what made us variously Yankees and Carolinians and Cajuns and whoever else inhabits, or inhabited, this sweet land of culinary liberty.
Take the somber volume first. In "Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human," Harvard academician Richard Wrangham posits a wonderful idea, articulates it to a fare-thee-well and wrestles it to the ground. In its most elegant and digestible state, his thesis is this: The earliest of our ancestors to differentiate themselves from other primates stumbled upon ways to improve natural food, started eating differently than their cousins and evolved smartly because they learned to cook. (We are not talking cordon bleu yet.)See the full content of this document
Extract
Deeper Than 'You Are What You Eat'
Controlling fire was the first step, the primo mobile. Tractable fire provided heat and light at night, which kept wilder critters at bay, made its possessors less vulnerable to predators and kept them warmer, alive longer. Once these divergent primates got comfortable around hearths, the fat was in the...
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