Because Ideas Matter...
The faculty and staff of Butler University's College of Liberal
Arts and Sciences presents
Recommended Readings
Catching Fire: How
Cooking Made Us Human
by Richard Wrangham, Persus, 2009
Reviewed by Paula Saffire
Richard Wrangham makes mincemeat out of
raw-food faddists. Okay, just kidding. But Wrangham does discuss
the importance of meat and of mincing for the evolution of our
big-brained selves. He makes a complex and solid case for cooking
as the impetus for progress from australopithecines to homo
sapiens, with a little help from mincing and marinating. It is a
pleasure to find an argument so carefully made from so many
different angles. We can thank cooking for the fact that we do not
need to spend five hours a day chewing. (And think of all we
accomplish with that saved time!)
Wrangham is a primatologist so devoted to
his subject matter that has actually eaten many of the wild foods
eaten by chimpanzees. He reports that some of the fruits, seeds,
and leaves were so foul he could barely swallow them. He weaves
together many interesting topics, from gut size and mouth capacity
to the significance of having meal times. He discusses the
extraordinary predominance of women as cooks (responsible for
cooking in almost 98 per cent of cultures studied) and suggests
that the invention of cooking "trapped women into a newly
subservient role enforced by male-dominated culture." He ends with
a discussion of our far too simple conventions of calorie
counting.
- Paula Saffire is associate professor of classical
studies at Butler University.