A Brief History of Food
(From Fire to Microwave)
If some of us had not started cooking thousands of years ago, all of us would be idiots now.
While we, collectively, have made some seriously stupid choices with our life path as a species, without cooking we wouldn’t even have the capacity to be aware of how awful or how great we are.
Before the art of cooking, we were Homo Erectus. After discovering cooking, we were us — Homo Sapiens.
Cooking civilized us.
Your momma was right: Raman noodles do not make a man. Neither does gathering seeds, grasses and fruits and then spending six hours a day chewing the aforementioned items. That’s what we used to do before we learned how to control fire.
That is the beginning of the history of food.
Our digestive system was much larger than it is now and our brains were much smaller. Our priorities were reflected in our physicality.
We were a stomach on legs, but we didn’t even know what good food was.
And then, about 1.7 million years ago, we learned to control fire.
