turrean's review against another edition
3.0
By the halfway point, I was thinking, "okay! I'm convinced! Enough!"
aminowrimo's review against another edition
3.0
I learned so many random facts in the first chapter, including the little-touted fact that raw foodism is unhealthy— eating completely raw doesn't provide the amount of energy necessary, despite the fact that calorie intake is sufficient. Basically, the amount of energy required to digest the fruits and vegetables isn't enough to keep someone alive for a long period of time. This was very good to know, as I'd been thinking of going raw when we got back home (merely to see what it was like). Now, of course, knowing what I do, I'll be staying well away from that— I'm thin enough as it is.
In case you don't have time to read the whole book:
- Cooking gelatinizes starch, denatures proteins, melts fat, and makes meat easier to chew, all contributing to the extraordinarily short amount of time humans spend chewing and digesting.
- This shorter digestion time shortened the gut, allowing more energy to be directed to brain size and growth.
- Cooking wouldn't have evolved to the extent it has now if men and women hadn't formed a partnership. Women provide the staples in most cultures, as well as the cooking, while men spend hours away hunting. They come home to a cooked meal, sometimes bringing meat and/or honey. The trade-off for women is that men who aren't their close kin or husbands don't dare steal their food.
A few more interesting notes:
- A wife is more important for her hearth-side care than sex favors in hunter-gatherer societies. A woman could give out sexual favors to practically anyone… but feeding anyone other than her husband? Absolutely not.
- Inuits, who send their men out to hunt for all food, still need women. To cook and make clothes, without which men wouldn't be able to hunt.
- The advent of cooking also brought about the sexual inequality that is pervasive in most not-completely-modern cultures nowadays.
- People in rich Western cultures now have to find a way to make eating their cooked food healthier.
So, in sum, it's a fascinating book which explained to me what damper is (ground grass seed flour made into bread), different cultures, different methods of food preparation, all of which are very helpful for writing. It definitely offers a different way of looking at evolution… and like most theories… it makes sense.
In case you don't have time to read the whole book:
- Cooking gelatinizes starch, denatures proteins, melts fat, and makes meat easier to chew, all contributing to the extraordinarily short amount of time humans spend chewing and digesting.
- This shorter digestion time shortened the gut, allowing more energy to be directed to brain size and growth.
- Cooking wouldn't have evolved to the extent it has now if men and women hadn't formed a partnership. Women provide the staples in most cultures, as well as the cooking, while men spend hours away hunting. They come home to a cooked meal, sometimes bringing meat and/or honey. The trade-off for women is that men who aren't their close kin or husbands don't dare steal their food.
A few more interesting notes:
- A wife is more important for her hearth-side care than sex favors in hunter-gatherer societies. A woman could give out sexual favors to practically anyone… but feeding anyone other than her husband? Absolutely not.
- Inuits, who send their men out to hunt for all food, still need women. To cook and make clothes, without which men wouldn't be able to hunt.
- The advent of cooking also brought about the sexual inequality that is pervasive in most not-completely-modern cultures nowadays.
- People in rich Western cultures now have to find a way to make eating their cooked food healthier.
So, in sum, it's a fascinating book which explained to me what damper is (ground grass seed flour made into bread), different cultures, different methods of food preparation, all of which are very helpful for writing. It definitely offers a different way of looking at evolution… and like most theories… it makes sense.
matthewdeanmartin's review against another edition
5.0
The best popular science books I read are the ones that I'm constantly reminded of while just living my ordinary life, which in a way helps make the point of the author that cooking is a fundamental part of human life and has been for a long time.
servemethesky's review against another edition
5.0
Brilliant. Challenging, provocative, and compelling.
kellythefig's review against another edition
5.0
A good book to engage and educated the public. He makes a handful of far fetched connections\metaphors that result in understanding, however logically twisted. If you want to get down to the science a bit more, read his academically reviewed work and his references. I enjoyed it.
juliaem's review against another edition
3.0
The only reason I'm not giving this book more stars is that straight-up evolutionary theory is not, in my opinion, the most scintillating thing to read ever. That said, Wrangham has written an excellent and provocative book. Basically, his (apparently radical, although I don't know enough mainstream evolutionary theory to know) theory is that learning to cook, thereby getting more nutritional value out of food for a lowered digestive cost, is what spurred the evolutionary churning that made humans out of apes. He employs tons of evidence, all fascinating. There are a lot of interesting side stories to this: how raw food diets are bullshit, because the energy costs of digesting that stuff alone are so high, how nutritional science doesn't actually give us accurate calorie counts because of how complicated our digestive processes are, and finally (I think most importantly), how cooking caused patriarchy:
"The idea that cooking led to our pair-bonds suggests a worldwide irony. Cooking brought huge nutritional benefits. But for women, the adoption of cooking has also led to a major increase in their vulnerability to male authority. Men were the greater beneficiaries. Cooking freed women's time and fed their children, but it also trapped women into a newly subservient role enforced by male-dominated culture. Cooking created and perpetuated a novel system of male cultural superiority. It is not a pretty picture."
No kidding. Fuck that noise!
"The idea that cooking led to our pair-bonds suggests a worldwide irony. Cooking brought huge nutritional benefits. But for women, the adoption of cooking has also led to a major increase in their vulnerability to male authority. Men were the greater beneficiaries. Cooking freed women's time and fed their children, but it also trapped women into a newly subservient role enforced by male-dominated culture. Cooking created and perpetuated a novel system of male cultural superiority. It is not a pretty picture."
No kidding. Fuck that noise!
epersonae's review against another edition
3.0
Review of the evidence for cooking as an important part of our evolution, looking at the fossil record, the habits and physiology of other primates, and the practices of modern hunter-gatherer groups.
He spends a chapter taking down the raw-foodist movement, mostly based on a German study, before getting into the evidence for cooking in our evolution. Most of that study's participants were at a chronic energy deficit, and a number of the women suffered from amenorrhea...and they had access to all the foodstuffs and processing devices of the modern world!
The physiology bits were fascinating: the trade-off between energy use in the gut and energy use in the brain, the differing jaw and teeth formations.
There's quite a bit of just-so-story of the kind that one often finds with evolutionary psychology & biology, but it seems more carefully constructed than some. The chapter(s) on cooking and the evolution of the pair-bond relationship are troubling but hard to refute, at least by me. (Cooking leading pretty much directly to patriarchy. Damn.)
I could have used some graphics, both to show the actual differences, and to keep track of the timeline. I often had to jump back to remember which groups were which, and who might have evolved what when.
But definitely interesting nonetheless.
He spends a chapter taking down the raw-foodist movement, mostly based on a German study, before getting into the evidence for cooking in our evolution. Most of that study's participants were at a chronic energy deficit, and a number of the women suffered from amenorrhea...and they had access to all the foodstuffs and processing devices of the modern world!
The physiology bits were fascinating: the trade-off between energy use in the gut and energy use in the brain, the differing jaw and teeth formations.
There's quite a bit of just-so-story of the kind that one often finds with evolutionary psychology & biology, but it seems more carefully constructed than some. The chapter(s) on cooking and the evolution of the pair-bond relationship are troubling but hard to refute, at least by me. (Cooking leading pretty much directly to patriarchy. Damn.)
I could have used some graphics, both to show the actual differences, and to keep track of the timeline. I often had to jump back to remember which groups were which, and who might have evolved what when.
But definitely interesting nonetheless.