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Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human
Ever since Darwin and The Descent of Man, the existence of humans has been attributed to our intelligence and adaptability. But in Catching Fire, renowned primatologist Richard Wrangham presents a startling alternative: our evolutionary success is the result of cooking. In a groundbreaking theory of our origins, Wrangham shows that the shift from raw to cooked foods was the key factor in human evolution. when our ancestors adapted to using fire, humanity began.
Once our hominid ancestors began cooking their food, the human digestive tract shrank and the brain grew. Time once spent chewing tough raw food could be used instead to hunt and to tend camp. Cooking became the basis for pair bonding and marriage, created the household, and even led to a sexual division of labor.
Tracing the contemporary implications of our ancestors' diets, Catching Fire sheds new light on how we came to be the social, intelligent, and sexual species we are today. A pathbreaking new theory of human evolution, Catching Fire will provoke controversy and fascinate anyone interested in our ancient origins--or in our modern eating habits.
--from the dustjacket
Once our hominid ancestors began cooking their food, the human digestive tract shrank and the brain grew. Time once spent chewing tough raw food could be used instead to hunt and to tend camp. Cooking became the basis for pair bonding and marriage, created the household, and even led to a sexual division of labor.
Tracing the contemporary implications of our ancestors' diets, Catching Fire sheds new light on how we came to be the social, intelligent, and sexual species we are today. A pathbreaking new theory of human evolution, Catching Fire will provoke controversy and fascinate anyone interested in our ancient origins--or in our modern eating habits.
--from the dustjacket
309 pages, Hardcover
First published May 26, 2009
About the author
Richard W. Wrangham
14 books158 followersRichard Wrangham (born 1948, PhD, Cambridge University, 1975) is Ruth B. Moore Professor of Biological Anthropology at Harvard University and founded the Kibale Chimpanzee Project in 1987. He has conducted extensive research on primate ecology, nutrition, and social behaviour. He is best known for his work on the evolution of human warfare, described in the book Demonic Males, and on the role of cooking in human evolution, described in the book Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human. Together with Elizabeth Ross, he co-founded the Kasiisi Project in 1997, and serves as a patron of the Great Apes Survival Partnership (GRASP).
Wrangham began his career as a researcher at Jane Goodall's long-term common chimpanzee field study in Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania. He befriended fellow primatologist Dian Fossey and assisted her in setting up her nonprofit mountain gorilla conservation organization, the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund (originally the Digit Fund)
Wrangham's latest work focuses on the role cooking has played in human evolution. He has argued that cooking food is obligatory for humans as a result of biological adaptations and that cooking, in particular, the consumption of cooked tubers, might explain the increase in hominid brain sizes, smaller teeth and jaws, and the decrease in sexual dimorphism that occurred roughly 1.8 million years ago.
Wrangham began his career as a researcher at Jane Goodall's long-term common chimpanzee field study in Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania. He befriended fellow primatologist Dian Fossey and assisted her in setting up her nonprofit mountain gorilla conservation organization, the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund (originally the Digit Fund)
Wrangham's latest work focuses on the role cooking has played in human evolution. He has argued that cooking food is obligatory for humans as a result of biological adaptations and that cooking, in particular, the consumption of cooked tubers, might explain the increase in hominid brain sizes, smaller teeth and jaws, and the decrease in sexual dimorphism that occurred roughly 1.8 million years ago.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 501 reviews
December 4, 2013
I did not enjoy this book.
The main premise was that cooking makes food easier to consume as well as easier to digest. This advancement allowed humans to consume more energy to support a bigger brain.
Now you do not have to read this book.
The main premise was that cooking makes food easier to consume as well as easier to digest. This advancement allowed humans to consume more energy to support a bigger brain.
Now you do not have to read this book.
June 25, 2009
From the first page I liked the writing style. I found it easy to follow and understand, although a good knowledge of either nutrition or anthropology will make it a faster and more comprehensible read.
According to Wrangham, there are no raw food cultures ever recorded in human history. Yes, people eat foods raw but no culture has ever done this exclusively. Using this and other points, he provides an interesting critique to the raw movement.
Throughout the book Wrangham impressed me with the quality of the studies he selected to back up his theorizing. His theories were well supported and well argued. He first shows that the evolution of humans was directly linked first to the use of fire and second to using fire to cook food. Perhaps because he is a primatologist, he draws frequent parallels between humans and animals throughout the book. He uses the comparisons as a way to understanding how we as humans ended up in the unique position of being the only animal that cooks and how this has affected and changed us. In particular, he argues that the process of cooking created a fascinating shift in our anatomy that led to bigger brains and smaller digestive systems.
Wrangham also offers an interesting critique of our current method of caloric analysis of foods. In his writing he discusses the actual differences in nutritional values in cooked versus raw food. He also takes into account the amount of work our bodies have to do in order to digest various macromolecules such as protein, fat, and carbohydrates. Fat is the easiest to digest. Protein takes more work to digest if eaten with high fiber foods. Softer food makes you gain weight easier. Harder food takes more work and you will not gain weight as easily. He cites an interesting study in which rats were given the same amount of calories per day. One group of rats had their food pellets ‘puffed’ to soften them, while the other group just ate regular pellets. At the end of the study, the rats that ate the softer pellets weighed more than the rats that ate the harder pellets. The rats that ate hard pellets literally had to burn more calories in order to digest the harder food. Because the puffed pellets were softer, the nutrition and energy from them was incorporated and digested with ease.
He had a few random judgments that stood out to me as unnecessary and unprofessional. His comment “Life can be unfair” in regards to how two people can eat the same amount of calories and if your digestive tract works harder (as is the case with most lean people) then you will gain less weight. And vice versa. This flippant and unpleasant side note should have been left out.
He also made the statement that you rarely find amenorrhea in women who eat primarily cooked food. Amenorrhea is a pathology where a women stops having her period, which is linked to osteoporosis. He says that it is common among women on a predominantly raw-food diet. I believe these statements to be completely unfounded. I have worked with a number of women with amenorrhea and they are not raw-foodists. I have a hard time believing I have found the very rare ones. From everything I have read, it is not a rare condition in women.
All in all, I really thought this was a great read. It got me thinking and his anthropological prospective was a welcome shift from the nutrition centric books I’m usually pouring over. I enjoyed the historical and evolutionary approach to understanding our relationship to food. I also enjoyed learning about the evolution of human anatomy in direct correlation with the foods we eat.
I’d like to take a moment to expound upon my own theories on the subject of cooking and raw food inspired by the topics of this book. Keep reading if you are interested in hearing how some of my thoughts shifted from Wrangham’s work....
I think all health counselors should read this book to gain a more well-rounded perspective on the history of cooked food and how cooking effects the nutritional value of food. I appreciate the shift in my viewpoint. It filled in a lot of blanks for me with regard to the raw food movement. I love eating raw, but have never quite gotten into it as a full-time dietary change other than a few month-long cleanses. Currently, I eat at least 75% of my food raw and this is fabulous for me. And I also notice that I enjoy the option of eating warm foods regularly. I like how grounded I feel after soup or grains.
What if the raw food movement is another dietary fad that is the answer to the high consumption of refined, chemicalized, pesticide-ridden, homogenized, and heavily processed foods. The Standard American Diet laden with meat and animal products left the United States feeling clogged and sluggish. Our country is host to millions of people who have a lot of gunk to cleanse from their intestines and the raw food diet offers this in a great way that doesn’t require you totally fast from food. You are cleansing and eating at the same time, which allows you to cleanse while working or doing your other day to day tasks. I think it is important to eat raw foods, but I also think it is important to stay balanced and build digestive fire. Sometimes a continual diet of raw foods can dampen digestive fire. If you already experience compromised digestive function eating 100% raw foods may be very difficult because it can further impair digestion. When I read raw food books, I seldom see this important issue being addressed.
I also get concerned for my clients who experience alienation from their families from eating a healing diet while overcoming health concerns. People connect and come together around food. This builds community and defines culture. For this reason it is important to find common ground within your family and eat food together. This strengthens family and community and creates a place to connect. This has been happening for thousands upon thousands of years. The nurturing of family and community is very important in holistic health. It strengthens our relationships, which are one of the main facets of primary food.
According to Wrangham, there are no raw food cultures ever recorded in human history. Yes, people eat foods raw but no culture has ever done this exclusively. Using this and other points, he provides an interesting critique to the raw movement.
Throughout the book Wrangham impressed me with the quality of the studies he selected to back up his theorizing. His theories were well supported and well argued. He first shows that the evolution of humans was directly linked first to the use of fire and second to using fire to cook food. Perhaps because he is a primatologist, he draws frequent parallels between humans and animals throughout the book. He uses the comparisons as a way to understanding how we as humans ended up in the unique position of being the only animal that cooks and how this has affected and changed us. In particular, he argues that the process of cooking created a fascinating shift in our anatomy that led to bigger brains and smaller digestive systems.
Wrangham also offers an interesting critique of our current method of caloric analysis of foods. In his writing he discusses the actual differences in nutritional values in cooked versus raw food. He also takes into account the amount of work our bodies have to do in order to digest various macromolecules such as protein, fat, and carbohydrates. Fat is the easiest to digest. Protein takes more work to digest if eaten with high fiber foods. Softer food makes you gain weight easier. Harder food takes more work and you will not gain weight as easily. He cites an interesting study in which rats were given the same amount of calories per day. One group of rats had their food pellets ‘puffed’ to soften them, while the other group just ate regular pellets. At the end of the study, the rats that ate the softer pellets weighed more than the rats that ate the harder pellets. The rats that ate hard pellets literally had to burn more calories in order to digest the harder food. Because the puffed pellets were softer, the nutrition and energy from them was incorporated and digested with ease.
He had a few random judgments that stood out to me as unnecessary and unprofessional. His comment “Life can be unfair” in regards to how two people can eat the same amount of calories and if your digestive tract works harder (as is the case with most lean people) then you will gain less weight. And vice versa. This flippant and unpleasant side note should have been left out.
He also made the statement that you rarely find amenorrhea in women who eat primarily cooked food. Amenorrhea is a pathology where a women stops having her period, which is linked to osteoporosis. He says that it is common among women on a predominantly raw-food diet. I believe these statements to be completely unfounded. I have worked with a number of women with amenorrhea and they are not raw-foodists. I have a hard time believing I have found the very rare ones. From everything I have read, it is not a rare condition in women.
All in all, I really thought this was a great read. It got me thinking and his anthropological prospective was a welcome shift from the nutrition centric books I’m usually pouring over. I enjoyed the historical and evolutionary approach to understanding our relationship to food. I also enjoyed learning about the evolution of human anatomy in direct correlation with the foods we eat.
I’d like to take a moment to expound upon my own theories on the subject of cooking and raw food inspired by the topics of this book. Keep reading if you are interested in hearing how some of my thoughts shifted from Wrangham’s work....
I think all health counselors should read this book to gain a more well-rounded perspective on the history of cooked food and how cooking effects the nutritional value of food. I appreciate the shift in my viewpoint. It filled in a lot of blanks for me with regard to the raw food movement. I love eating raw, but have never quite gotten into it as a full-time dietary change other than a few month-long cleanses. Currently, I eat at least 75% of my food raw and this is fabulous for me. And I also notice that I enjoy the option of eating warm foods regularly. I like how grounded I feel after soup or grains.
What if the raw food movement is another dietary fad that is the answer to the high consumption of refined, chemicalized, pesticide-ridden, homogenized, and heavily processed foods. The Standard American Diet laden with meat and animal products left the United States feeling clogged and sluggish. Our country is host to millions of people who have a lot of gunk to cleanse from their intestines and the raw food diet offers this in a great way that doesn’t require you totally fast from food. You are cleansing and eating at the same time, which allows you to cleanse while working or doing your other day to day tasks. I think it is important to eat raw foods, but I also think it is important to stay balanced and build digestive fire. Sometimes a continual diet of raw foods can dampen digestive fire. If you already experience compromised digestive function eating 100% raw foods may be very difficult because it can further impair digestion. When I read raw food books, I seldom see this important issue being addressed.
I also get concerned for my clients who experience alienation from their families from eating a healing diet while overcoming health concerns. People connect and come together around food. This builds community and defines culture. For this reason it is important to find common ground within your family and eat food together. This strengthens family and community and creates a place to connect. This has been happening for thousands upon thousands of years. The nurturing of family and community is very important in holistic health. It strengthens our relationships, which are one of the main facets of primary food.
June 23, 2012
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.
March 22, 2015
I'm feeling especially lazy at the moment and not wanting to think enough to write even my standard lazy review, so I'll just say that I thought parts of this were very interesting, and other parts of it were stretching a bit to make things fit the theory.
It was well-read though, and I would recommend it, so that's a plus.
It was well-read though, and I would recommend it, so that's a plus.
November 19, 2017
قدحة النار: دور الطهي في تطور الإنسان لريتشارد رانجام
لا يختلف العلماء حول إذا ما كان الإنسان قد تطور من سلف مشترك مع بقية الكائنات الحية، فالأدلة على ذلك وافرة وقوية لا تدع مجالًا للشك. ولكنهم يختلفون حول العوامل التي أدت لهذا التطور في هذا المسار بالتحديد.
في هذا الكتاب يطرح رانجام، المتخصص في البيولوجيا الأنثروبولوجية، فرضيته الخاصة حول ذلك. يُحسب له أنه يقدم الفكرة بشكل صادق، فهي ليست حقيقة مؤكدة، بل لا تزال فرضية، رغم هذا فإن الكاتب يقدم طرحًا قويًا، بتدرج جميل جدًا في الفصول يهيّء القارى لتقبل النتيجة، خصوصًا مع مراكمته للأدلة وتقديمها بشكل مقنع وقوي.
يكمّل هذا الطرح أطروحات أخرى حول تطور العقل، فحتى مع وجود ميزات ودوافع تطورية كتلك المذكورة في كتاب الملكة الحمراء (ذا ريد كوين)، فإن هناك تغيرات ضرورية في توزيع الطاقة في الجسم كان لا بد لها أن تحصل، وهنا يأتي دور هذا الكتاب، حيث يبين كيف أن طبخ الطعام هو ما يجعل الجسم يستخلص منه كمية أكبر بكثير من الطاقة مقارنة بتلك المستخلصة من الغذاء غير المطهي، رغم احتوائهما على نفس المقدار من السعرات الحرارية تقريبًا.
إن طهي الطعام يعني أن الجسم يبذل جهدًا أقل في عملية الامتصاص، وهو ما يهيء الظروف لكي تصغر الأمعاء ويكبر الدماغ. بل ويمتد هذا التأثير حتى على أسلوب الحياة، فلم تعد هناك حاجة لمضغ الطعام غير المطهي لساعات طويلة، بل يمكن خلال وقت بسيط الحصول على كمية كبيرة من الطاقة من الغذاء المطهي، وهو ما يعني وجود وقت أطول للقيام بأمور اخرى كالصيد. ويعتقد الكاتب أن تقسيم الوظائف بين الرجل والمرأة قد يكون بدأ هنا، مع الطبخ.
بالإضافة لهذا فإن استخدام النار في حد ذاتها له ميزات كثيرة، فهي توفر الدفء، ما يعني عدم الحاجة لوجود الشعر الكثيف، ما يفتح المجال لكي يتكيف الجسم مع الحرارة، ولهذا نجد أن جسم الإنسان به شعر قليل، ولديه خاصية التعرق التي تسمح له بالتخلص من الحرارة. وكذلك سمحت له النار بالنوم على الأرض بدل الأشجار، لأنها باتت سلاحًا دفاعيًا جيدًا وهو ما أعد الظروف لتطور الانتصاب على قدمين بدل أربع.
هل يبدو هذا التقديم سطحيًا بعض الشيء؟ نعم هو كذلك، فهذا ليس سوى تلخيص بسيط لكتاب مليء بالأفكار والاستدلالات. أدعوكم لقراءته لمزيد من التفاصيل، فهو يستحق ذلك.
لا يختلف العلماء حول إذا ما كان الإنسان قد تطور من سلف مشترك مع بقية الكائنات الحية، فالأدلة على ذلك وافرة وقوية لا تدع مجالًا للشك. ولكنهم يختلفون حول العوامل التي أدت لهذا التطور في هذا المسار بالتحديد.
في هذا الكتاب يطرح رانجام، المتخصص في البيولوجيا الأنثروبولوجية، فرضيته الخاصة حول ذلك. يُحسب له أنه يقدم الفكرة بشكل صادق، فهي ليست حقيقة مؤكدة، بل لا تزال فرضية، رغم هذا فإن الكاتب يقدم طرحًا قويًا، بتدرج جميل جدًا في الفصول يهيّء القارى لتقبل النتيجة، خصوصًا مع مراكمته للأدلة وتقديمها بشكل مقنع وقوي.
يكمّل هذا الطرح أطروحات أخرى حول تطور العقل، فحتى مع وجود ميزات ودوافع تطورية كتلك المذكورة في كتاب الملكة الحمراء (ذا ريد كوين)، فإن هناك تغيرات ضرورية في توزيع الطاقة في الجسم كان لا بد لها أن تحصل، وهنا يأتي دور هذا الكتاب، حيث يبين كيف أن طبخ الطعام هو ما يجعل الجسم يستخلص منه كمية أكبر بكثير من الطاقة مقارنة بتلك المستخلصة من الغذاء غير المطهي، رغم احتوائهما على نفس المقدار من السعرات الحرارية تقريبًا.
إن طهي الطعام يعني أن الجسم يبذل جهدًا أقل في عملية الامتصاص، وهو ما يهيء الظروف لكي تصغر الأمعاء ويكبر الدماغ. بل ويمتد هذا التأثير حتى على أسلوب الحياة، فلم تعد هناك حاجة لمضغ الطعام غير المطهي لساعات طويلة، بل يمكن خلال وقت بسيط الحصول على كمية كبيرة من الطاقة من الغذاء المطهي، وهو ما يعني وجود وقت أطول للقيام بأمور اخرى كالصيد. ويعتقد الكاتب أن تقسيم الوظائف بين الرجل والمرأة قد يكون بدأ هنا، مع الطبخ.
بالإضافة لهذا فإن استخدام النار في حد ذاتها له ميزات كثيرة، فهي توفر الدفء، ما يعني عدم الحاجة لوجود الشعر الكثيف، ما يفتح المجال لكي يتكيف الجسم مع الحرارة، ولهذا نجد أن جسم الإنسان به شعر قليل، ولديه خاصية التعرق التي تسمح له بالتخلص من الحرارة. وكذلك سمحت له النار بالنوم على الأرض بدل الأشجار، لأنها باتت سلاحًا دفاعيًا جيدًا وهو ما أعد الظروف لتطور الانتصاب على قدمين بدل أربع.
هل يبدو هذا التقديم سطحيًا بعض الشيء؟ نعم هو كذلك، فهذا ليس سوى تلخيص بسيط لكتاب مليء بالأفكار والاستدلالات. أدعوكم لقراءته لمزيد من التفاصيل، فهو يستحق ذلك.
December 6, 2022
I've seen reviews rating this book 1 star, saying that is either "sexist" because it states that "women cook for men and yabba dabba doo", and another idiot resumed the book in one paragraph, proudly saying that he "saved us all the time". Kudos, to these geniuses.
These kind of reviews come from people that do not engage in critical thinking, nor have any experience on evolutionary psychology. Richard Wrangham has contributed a lot when it comes in human behavior through the evolutionary lens, releasing interesting books such as "Demonic Males" and "The goodness paradox".
To respond to the first observation, im gonna quote the author "Gathering can be just as critical as hunting because men sometimes return with nothing, in which case the family must rely entirely on gathered foods." Let me translate this quote: it says that both activities are complementary, they are both a necessity, both of them required equally. Women do not gather because of patriarchy, not because men gathered together deliberately to exploit women. That's absurd and can only be explained by the Social Justice Scholarship (postmodernism) failing to explain any other thing and denying science.
To respond to the second critique, let me state this: evolutionary psychology is actual science. It was born in the early 90's, and used elements from biochemistry, neurology, cognitive psychology, biology and neurobiology, and im actually just mentioning a few. So, even though the title is simple, "Catching fire", the content is not. To people that perceive this as repetitive, unfortunately, science consists on explanations from many disciplines. That's why in this book we mention neurotransmitters, food contents, basic chemistry, anthropology, ethology, paleontology, public health and other disciplines ON "cooking". That's why the word "cooking" is so important to this book.
This title could be complemented by Richard L. Currier's "Unbound", which is one the most amazing books that explain the Homo Sapiens species. It is not a surprise that the book is a journey to millions years ago, and that there's a lot of paleontology on it. It may sound hypothetical at times, but that can be explained by the nature of the book, is divulgative, not academic. However, the annex of "notes" is really, really long, also the references. The use of fire probably started as a defense against predators, but, as any other thing, through time, another species in our past managed to use it for another reason. Another fact: the fact that women cook, is documented the majority of cultures worldwide. Stating that "patriarchy" did it to enslave women, is just repeating a concept that Simone de Beauvoir made mainstream in the 50's; almost 50 years before evolutionary psychology was born. (note: I'm not saying she was wrong, what I think is wrong, is the idea that "men deliberately enslave women", and repeating this only using philosophy, and the act of thinking, with no objective experimentation at all is not science.). So, there's actually a lot on the book concerning cooking and its benefits, not to mention what cooked food did to our brains.
Anyways, I hope that at least I managed to explain something concerning this book, which I think could also explain nowadays obese epidemic, that unfortunately postmodernism encourages.
These kind of reviews come from people that do not engage in critical thinking, nor have any experience on evolutionary psychology. Richard Wrangham has contributed a lot when it comes in human behavior through the evolutionary lens, releasing interesting books such as "Demonic Males" and "The goodness paradox".
To respond to the first observation, im gonna quote the author "Gathering can be just as critical as hunting because men sometimes return with nothing, in which case the family must rely entirely on gathered foods." Let me translate this quote: it says that both activities are complementary, they are both a necessity, both of them required equally. Women do not gather because of patriarchy, not because men gathered together deliberately to exploit women. That's absurd and can only be explained by the Social Justice Scholarship (postmodernism) failing to explain any other thing and denying science.
To respond to the second critique, let me state this: evolutionary psychology is actual science. It was born in the early 90's, and used elements from biochemistry, neurology, cognitive psychology, biology and neurobiology, and im actually just mentioning a few. So, even though the title is simple, "Catching fire", the content is not. To people that perceive this as repetitive, unfortunately, science consists on explanations from many disciplines. That's why in this book we mention neurotransmitters, food contents, basic chemistry, anthropology, ethology, paleontology, public health and other disciplines ON "cooking". That's why the word "cooking" is so important to this book.
This title could be complemented by Richard L. Currier's "Unbound", which is one the most amazing books that explain the Homo Sapiens species. It is not a surprise that the book is a journey to millions years ago, and that there's a lot of paleontology on it. It may sound hypothetical at times, but that can be explained by the nature of the book, is divulgative, not academic. However, the annex of "notes" is really, really long, also the references. The use of fire probably started as a defense against predators, but, as any other thing, through time, another species in our past managed to use it for another reason. Another fact: the fact that women cook, is documented the majority of cultures worldwide. Stating that "patriarchy" did it to enslave women, is just repeating a concept that Simone de Beauvoir made mainstream in the 50's; almost 50 years before evolutionary psychology was born. (note: I'm not saying she was wrong, what I think is wrong, is the idea that "men deliberately enslave women", and repeating this only using philosophy, and the act of thinking, with no objective experimentation at all is not science.). So, there's actually a lot on the book concerning cooking and its benefits, not to mention what cooked food did to our brains.
Anyways, I hope that at least I managed to explain something concerning this book, which I think could also explain nowadays obese epidemic, that unfortunately postmodernism encourages.
March 28, 2014
This is a fascinating book! Just so you know, it is NOT the Hunger Games sequel! This is an anthropology/evolutionary biology book that posits the theory that what made us human--that is, what allowed us to develop bigger brains and many of the unique aspects of human culture--was not hunting, but the use of fire to cook our food. And that the acquisition of fire happened much earlier than is generally assumed, at the time of homo erectus, not homo sapiens.
There is a really interesting discussion in this book about raw foods and whether humans can survive on them (answer: under normal conditions, no). Every other animal can thrive on raw food, but when humans are restricted to a raw food diet, we lose weight. This also means that our estimates for counting calories are wrong because an apple is considered to be about 120 calories whether cooked or raw, but our digestive system extracts more calories from cooked food than from raw food. We also extract more calories from foods that are highly processed (e.g., ground up). But I've never seen any calorie counter that accounted for these differences.
The second half of the book goes into some of the ways that cooking shaped human society in ways that benefited men more than women. In short, the roots of pair bonding and of patriarchy, particularly male exploitation of female labor, go back earlier than homo sapiens, all the way back to homo erectus. This is a rather disturbing chapter of the book. But it explains a great deal.
There is a really interesting discussion in this book about raw foods and whether humans can survive on them (answer: under normal conditions, no). Every other animal can thrive on raw food, but when humans are restricted to a raw food diet, we lose weight. This also means that our estimates for counting calories are wrong because an apple is considered to be about 120 calories whether cooked or raw, but our digestive system extracts more calories from cooked food than from raw food. We also extract more calories from foods that are highly processed (e.g., ground up). But I've never seen any calorie counter that accounted for these differences.
The second half of the book goes into some of the ways that cooking shaped human society in ways that benefited men more than women. In short, the roots of pair bonding and of patriarchy, particularly male exploitation of female labor, go back earlier than homo sapiens, all the way back to homo erectus. This is a rather disturbing chapter of the book. But it explains a great deal.
March 30, 2014
Any time you see the phrase "How _____ made us human" you know you're going to see a whole lot of over-selling of an idea. Bipedality, language, cooperation, tool use, cooking of food, and many other factors went in to making us the species we are today.
How the cooking of food shaped our evolution is an interesting topic but I did not find this a particularly interesting book. Wrangham starts out by spending an inordinate amount of time bashing people who eat raw food diets. It went way beyond presenting evidence that eating an exclusively raw diet is not healthy for humans into bringing up ridiculous crackpot ideas that individuals have had about the benefits of raw food.
Every idea he discusses is beat to death as he tries to stretch out his thesis into book length. He barely manages that as the book contains just over 200 pages of text with another 100 as notes. This could have been an excellent long article in a magazine but as a book, it's a fail. The most interesting part for me came at the very end as he discusses flaws in the way we calculate nutritional content information. Sadly, it was too little, too late.
How the cooking of food shaped our evolution is an interesting topic but I did not find this a particularly interesting book. Wrangham starts out by spending an inordinate amount of time bashing people who eat raw food diets. It went way beyond presenting evidence that eating an exclusively raw diet is not healthy for humans into bringing up ridiculous crackpot ideas that individuals have had about the benefits of raw food.
Every idea he discusses is beat to death as he tries to stretch out his thesis into book length. He barely manages that as the book contains just over 200 pages of text with another 100 as notes. This could have been an excellent long article in a magazine but as a book, it's a fail. The most interesting part for me came at the very end as he discusses flaws in the way we calculate nutritional content information. Sadly, it was too little, too late.
May 1, 2022
Įdomi įtikinanti teorija, kaip terminis maisto apdorojimas mus padarė žmonėmis.
Šalutinis poveikis: knyga skatina kitokiu žvilgsniu pažiūrėti į maisto gaminimą. Va, sukamės virtuvėje, verdame, kepame - būtent tai ir skiria mus nuo kitų gyvūnų. Mums nereikia daug laiko praleisti ieškant valgio. Nereikia kelias valandas per dieną kramtyti ir virškinti žalio maisto. Galime dalintis darbus. Pasak knygos autoriaus, Harvardo universiteto antropologijos profesoriaus, būtent todėl ir tapome žmonėmis. O jis išmano savo sritį. Iš 300 puslapių knygos beveik 80 sudaro pastabos ir literatūros sąrašas.
Truputį kliuvo knygos stilius. Nesu tikra, ar dėl vertimo, ar tiesiog 'klampokai' parašyta.
Šalutinis poveikis: knyga skatina kitokiu žvilgsniu pažiūrėti į maisto gaminimą. Va, sukamės virtuvėje, verdame, kepame - būtent tai ir skiria mus nuo kitų gyvūnų. Mums nereikia daug laiko praleisti ieškant valgio. Nereikia kelias valandas per dieną kramtyti ir virškinti žalio maisto. Galime dalintis darbus. Pasak knygos autoriaus, Harvardo universiteto antropologijos profesoriaus, būtent todėl ir tapome žmonėmis. O jis išmano savo sritį. Iš 300 puslapių knygos beveik 80 sudaro pastabos ir literatūros sąrašas.
Truputį kliuvo knygos stilius. Nesu tikra, ar dėl vertimo, ar tiesiog 'klampokai' parašyta.
January 23, 2019
تقييم عالي، لأني أظنه الكتاب العربي الوحيد عن الموضوع، فشكراً لمن عمل على ترجمته، والترجمة ممتزاة الحقيقة، ولكن تمنيت لو أن الكتاب توسع في نقاش الجانب البيولوجي للطبخ والهضم، وليس الجانب الإجتماعي.. أرجو ترجمة كتب عن دور النار في تطور الفكر الديني والإجتماعي والفكر الإنساني
March 8, 2012
I've been waiting since around page 50 to write this: For a book about cooking, this thing is half-baked.
October 7, 2021
Rather good but rather drawn out. Some wonderful connections made but I got the feeling the last few chapters were just there to move it from a newspaper article to a book.
Worth a read though.
Worth a read though.
April 4, 2010
How did australopithecines develop into Homo erectus? The traditional answer has been that the use of tools allowed them to hunt, and that the increased protein in the diet allowed the developmental spurt toward a bigger brain. But there are two, not one, major jumps in development along this road toward Homo sapiens. Richard Wrangham argues that the first, as has been established, resulted from hunting and eating more meat (and not just consuming scavenged meat), but that the second came from cooking food, which implies controlling fire.
I almost put the book down after the first chapter, “The Quest for Raw Foodists.” The author denigrates vegetarians and raw foodists in such a way that I wondered whether he had had a relationship with a salad lover that had gone south, which might account for his contemptuous tone. That aside, he uses anecdotal and indirect evidence to suggest that cooked food allowed homo erectus to evolve, and that the species can not longer thrive on a raw food diet for any extended length of time.
Fascinating was the report of the Evo Diet, an experiment conducted in 2006 in the UK with patients suffering from life-threateningly high blood pressure. They submitted to a raw food diet for 2 weeks, consisting of 50 kinds of raw fruits, veg and nuts in huge quantities (except for one man, who snuck chocolate in week 2). The all brought their blood pressure down to less dangerous levels, but the diet had an unintended side effect: they all lost weight, about a pound each day.
The rest of the book argues that cooked food releases more energy (calories) than the same food would release if it were raw. This is true for both meat and plant-based foods. And the implications of this fact/argument are surprising.
1. Cooking softens food, and soft food is more easily digested and requires less energy to utilize than hard food. Among rats that were given hard pellets and the same pellets “puffed” like children’s cereal, the soft-food rats became obese in a matter of months, even through they were consuming the same number of calories as the hard pellet rats.
2. Soft food allowed homo erectus to develop smaller digestive organs. Because of the “conservation of total bodily organ mass,” this allowed h.e. to develop much larger brains.
3. In all hunter-gatherer societies, women gather and men hunt. Cooking food further differentiated the gendered division of labor, so that women also became the keepers of the fire and the cooks. This also made women vulnerable, since smoke from a cooking fire can be seen from a mile away. Women received protection and occasional meat from men, and men received a cooked meal from women, and voila, marriage was born. My question though: if men are off hunting, how can they be protecting the hearth at the same time?
4. This model challenges the convention, as anthropologists usually see marriage as “an exchange in which women get resources and men get a guarantee of paternity.” In this model, however, men marry so that they are guaranteed a hot meal.
I’m not a specialist in this field and would have to do much more reading to evaluate this properly, but I wonder just how many of the ideas presented in this book are Richard Wrangham’s. Ailello and Wheeler had (by Wrangham’s own description) attributted the increase in brain size to the invention of cooking. Furthermore, we’ve known for a long time that large-grain whole wheat bread is less fattening than highly milled white bread (because the whole grain bread costs us more energy to digest, and we eliminate many indigestible particles), and that cooked carrots have a much higher glycemic index than raw carrots (which is why some people choose a raw food diet to lost weight).
Richard Wrangham’s greatest contribution might be telling these facts in a series of anecdotes. You’ll have to read about the snake experiments yourself, but I’ll tell you about the Inuit diet. It won’t be too much of a spoiler. The sub-arctic Puiplirmiuts eat frozen caribou dropping like berries (thus raw), whereas most other neighboring tribes find this a waste of good food and take the partially digested lichen pellets (=euphemism) and boil them in blood soup. Maybe the most valuable contribution of this book is that it explains why there are no Inuit restaurants in London.
I almost put the book down after the first chapter, “The Quest for Raw Foodists.” The author denigrates vegetarians and raw foodists in such a way that I wondered whether he had had a relationship with a salad lover that had gone south, which might account for his contemptuous tone. That aside, he uses anecdotal and indirect evidence to suggest that cooked food allowed homo erectus to evolve, and that the species can not longer thrive on a raw food diet for any extended length of time.
Fascinating was the report of the Evo Diet, an experiment conducted in 2006 in the UK with patients suffering from life-threateningly high blood pressure. They submitted to a raw food diet for 2 weeks, consisting of 50 kinds of raw fruits, veg and nuts in huge quantities (except for one man, who snuck chocolate in week 2). The all brought their blood pressure down to less dangerous levels, but the diet had an unintended side effect: they all lost weight, about a pound each day.
The rest of the book argues that cooked food releases more energy (calories) than the same food would release if it were raw. This is true for both meat and plant-based foods. And the implications of this fact/argument are surprising.
1. Cooking softens food, and soft food is more easily digested and requires less energy to utilize than hard food. Among rats that were given hard pellets and the same pellets “puffed” like children’s cereal, the soft-food rats became obese in a matter of months, even through they were consuming the same number of calories as the hard pellet rats.
2. Soft food allowed homo erectus to develop smaller digestive organs. Because of the “conservation of total bodily organ mass,” this allowed h.e. to develop much larger brains.
3. In all hunter-gatherer societies, women gather and men hunt. Cooking food further differentiated the gendered division of labor, so that women also became the keepers of the fire and the cooks. This also made women vulnerable, since smoke from a cooking fire can be seen from a mile away. Women received protection and occasional meat from men, and men received a cooked meal from women, and voila, marriage was born. My question though: if men are off hunting, how can they be protecting the hearth at the same time?
4. This model challenges the convention, as anthropologists usually see marriage as “an exchange in which women get resources and men get a guarantee of paternity.” In this model, however, men marry so that they are guaranteed a hot meal.
I’m not a specialist in this field and would have to do much more reading to evaluate this properly, but I wonder just how many of the ideas presented in this book are Richard Wrangham’s. Ailello and Wheeler had (by Wrangham’s own description) attributted the increase in brain size to the invention of cooking. Furthermore, we’ve known for a long time that large-grain whole wheat bread is less fattening than highly milled white bread (because the whole grain bread costs us more energy to digest, and we eliminate many indigestible particles), and that cooked carrots have a much higher glycemic index than raw carrots (which is why some people choose a raw food diet to lost weight).
Richard Wrangham’s greatest contribution might be telling these facts in a series of anecdotes. You’ll have to read about the snake experiments yourself, but I’ll tell you about the Inuit diet. It won’t be too much of a spoiler. The sub-arctic Puiplirmiuts eat frozen caribou dropping like berries (thus raw), whereas most other neighboring tribes find this a waste of good food and take the partially digested lichen pellets (=euphemism) and boil them in blood soup. Maybe the most valuable contribution of this book is that it explains why there are no Inuit restaurants in London.
May 4, 2017
I know I’ve been reading and reviewing a lot of non-fiction lately, but this is probably one of the more entertaining and accessible of the bunch in style. It’s a convincing idea: what caused humans to be able to evolve such big brains and short digestive tracts, compared to other species? The answer, according to Wrangham: first the ability to hunt and eat raw meat, then control of fire for cooking meat.
It’s a very readable book, making all the science and history easy to follow. For me, it was an enjoyable read, though not exactly revolutionary; I was aware of most of the ideas already, since I’m fascinated by human evolution. It pulls together various different threads of the story, bringing together evidence from different ways of understanding human evolution.
(Oh, but if you don’t believe in evolution, this… will not be the book for you. That’s definitely an assumption of the book.)
Originally reviewed for breathesbooks.com.
It’s a very readable book, making all the science and history easy to follow. For me, it was an enjoyable read, though not exactly revolutionary; I was aware of most of the ideas already, since I’m fascinated by human evolution. It pulls together various different threads of the story, bringing together evidence from different ways of understanding human evolution.
(Oh, but if you don’t believe in evolution, this… will not be the book for you. That’s definitely an assumption of the book.)
Originally reviewed for breathesbooks.com.
August 31, 2010
Great review of the possibilities of our origins with a persuasive argument about cooking being a driving force for human evolution. Cross species comparisons make a lot of sense as Wrangham develops his argument.
Essential read, especially when he addresses gender issues. He sidesteps the challenge of the origins of language but nonetheless locates humans in the context of changing and challenging environments.
Essential read, especially when he addresses gender issues. He sidesteps the challenge of the origins of language but nonetheless locates humans in the context of changing and challenging environments.
July 3, 2022
ผมอยากอ���านหนังสือเล่มนี้ครั้งแรกตอนกำลังอ่าน The Viral Storm ของ Nathan Wolfe ผ่านไปไม่กี่เดือน ก็มาเจอหนังสือแปล ไฟในประวัติศาสตร์มนุษย์ (Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human) ของมติชนพอดี ผู้เขียนหนังสือเล่มนี้ Richard Wrangham เป็นอาจารย์ของ Wolfe นำเสนอความคิดที่ว่าสายพันธุ์ของเราเป็นอย่างที่เราเป็นทุกวันนี้ ทั้งในเชิงกายภาพ สรีระ สังคม วัฒนธรรม ก็เพราะบรรพบุรุษสายพันธุ์ก่อนหน้ารู้จักการใช้ไฟในการทำอาหารให้สุ�� การรู้จักทำอาหารจึงเป็นเหตุการณ์ที่ส่งผลกระทบสำคัญอย่างยิ่งยวด ถึงขั้นบรรพบุรุษวิวัฒนาการมาเป็นมนุษย์ปัจจุบัน ไม่ว่าจะทำให้สมองใหญ่ขึ้น ลำไส้เล็กลง การสร้างครอบครัวแบบผัวเมีย (แย้งกับหลายทฤษฎีที่ชูเรื่องเพศนำหน้าเรื่องกิน) การรวมกลุ่มสังคม การแบ่งงานกันทำตามเพศ และวิวัฒนาการทางภาษา ทั้งนี้ ผู้เขียนได้กล่าวถึงในบทแรก ๆ ว่า ด้วยเหตุที่อาหารสุกให้พลังงานมากกว่าอาหารดิบ ในแง่ของตัวอาหารเอง พร้อม ๆ กับที่การบริโภคอาหารสุก ช่วยลดพลังงานที่ต้องใช้ ทั้งการเคี้ยว การย่อย การดูดซึมดูดซับสารอาหาร และอื่น ๆ อีกมากมาย ทำให้พลังงานส่วนต่างนำไปใช้กับกิจกรรมทางสมองได้มากขึ้น ฯลฯ หนังสือเล่มนี้ ผู้เขียนนำเสนอการทดลองทางวิทยาศาสตร์ เคียงคู่กับหลักฐานทางมานุษยวิทยา ชีววิทยาวิวัฒนาการ และบันทึกข้อสังเกตการณ์จากกลุ่มชนเผ่า และสัตว์ไพรเมตบางสายพันธุ์ในปัจจุบันได้อย่างน่าติดตาม ใครชอบหนังสือวิทยาศาสตร์ (ผมมองว่ามันเป็นหนังสือวิทยาศาสตร์นะครับ แต่มติชนจัดอยู่ในกลุ่มหนังสือประวัติศาสตร์) แนววิวัฒนาการสายพันธุ์มนุษย์ที่อธิบายผ่านมุมมอง (สมมติฐาน) ความสำคัญของการทำอาหารด้วยไฟ มากกว่าความสำคัญของไฟ ในฐานะเครื่องให้ความอบอุ่นร่างกาย ก็ลองหามาอ่านกันครับ
May 30, 2017
Πολύ ενδιαφέρον βιβλίο, πάαααρα πολύ ενδιαφέρον θέμα, ρευστή γλώσσα, random facts που τα λατρεύω, αλλά ο συγγραφέας απέχει από το πρότυπο συγγραφέα επιστημονικού συγγράμματος που έχω στο μυαλό μου. Το κύριο πρόβλημα είναι ότι η γραφή του δεν οδηγείται από την κλασσική σειριακή σκέψη των επιστημόνων (α+β=γ==>δ), αλλά μοιάζει κατακερματισμένη σε σκέψεις χωρίς σαφή σειρά, πράγμα που πολλές φορές μ' έκανε να διαβάσω μια φράση δύο και τρεις φορές.
Θεωρώ ότι σπατάλησα πολλή ενέργεια για να μπορέσω να καταλάβω ένα βιβλίο που τελικά δε μου προσέφερε και τόσα όσα θα ήθελα. Το ντοκιμαντέρ που γυρίστηκε πριν μερικά χρόνια πατώντας πάνω σε αυτό, ήταν πολύ, πολύ πιο ενδιαφέρον και συνεκτικό.
Θεωρώ ότι σπατάλησα πολλή ενέργεια για να μπορέσω να καταλάβω ένα βιβλίο που τελικά δε μου προσέφερε και τόσα όσα θα ήθελα. Το ντοκιμαντέρ που γυρίστηκε πριν μερικά χρόνια πατώντας πάνω σε αυτό, ήταν πολύ, πολύ πιο ενδιαφέρον και συνεκτικό.
January 11, 2011
Wrangham's thesis is that fire is what made modern humans. We didn't just learn to use fire because we were so smart: using fire actually gave us an evolutionary advantage which led to our being smart. In a nutshell: cooked food is more nutritious and easier to eat, thus allowing our evolutionary ancestors to acquire more calories for less effort, increasing their survival and also freeing up more time for things like inventing the wheel.
At first this may seem counter-intuitive, but Wrangham makes a convincing case, talking about the speed of evolution and how it's plausible that humans could indeed have evolved as a result of our control of fire, which Wrangham dates back to (possibly) up to a quarter of a million years ago. He talks about the physiology of chewing and digestion, how our australopithicene ancestors differed from us in how they ate, and crucial differences between human diets and monkey diets. Lots of talk about how the body handles cooked meat and vegetables differently than raw meat and vegetables. All of this is fascinating and convincing.
I think the second part of the book is weaker, as Wrangham goes into evolutionary psychology, which as usual involves a lot of speculation but without much evidence. Many of the later chapters felt a bit padded, like he had an obligation to bring in a social and cultural dimension to the argument. This I found less convincing -- we get a lot of talk about how cooking and food preparation shakes out in "primitive" societies, but this is all dealing with homo sapiens in our modern state. It's somewhat interesting but I don't think it really contributes much to his central thesis, which is supported strongly enough by the physical evidence.
Overall, a good food science and physical anthropology book.
Recommended for: Fans of evolution, monkeys, and cooked food.
Not recommended for: Creationists, vegans, or raw foodists.
At first this may seem counter-intuitive, but Wrangham makes a convincing case, talking about the speed of evolution and how it's plausible that humans could indeed have evolved as a result of our control of fire, which Wrangham dates back to (possibly) up to a quarter of a million years ago. He talks about the physiology of chewing and digestion, how our australopithicene ancestors differed from us in how they ate, and crucial differences between human diets and monkey diets. Lots of talk about how the body handles cooked meat and vegetables differently than raw meat and vegetables. All of this is fascinating and convincing.
I think the second part of the book is weaker, as Wrangham goes into evolutionary psychology, which as usual involves a lot of speculation but without much evidence. Many of the later chapters felt a bit padded, like he had an obligation to bring in a social and cultural dimension to the argument. This I found less convincing -- we get a lot of talk about how cooking and food preparation shakes out in "primitive" societies, but this is all dealing with homo sapiens in our modern state. It's somewhat interesting but I don't think it really contributes much to his central thesis, which is supported strongly enough by the physical evidence.
Overall, a good food science and physical anthropology book.
Recommended for: Fans of evolution, monkeys, and cooked food.
Not recommended for: Creationists, vegans, or raw foodists.
September 5, 2013
مما يميز الإنسان عن سائر أبناء عمومته من القردة العليا هو ضآلة جهازه الهضمي. فم صغير، شفاه رقيقة، أسنان لا تقوى على القضم والتقطيع بفعالية، وأحشاء مدللة. نستطيع الإستنتاج من هذه المعطيات أننا تطورنا -بطريقة ما- لنأكل الغذاء المطبوخ.
يرى البروفسور ريتشارد رانغام، بروفسور الأنثروبولوجيا البيولوجية في جامعة هارفارد، أن القدرة على طهي الطعام كانت عاملاً مهماً في تطورنا كبشر. هذه القدرة الجديدة جعلتنا نأخذ من الأرض مسكناً بدل الأشجار. النار حررت أسلافنا من الطبيعة التي كانت تقيدهم مما آذن بفجر جديد، عصر الإنسان المنتصب أو هومو إريكتوس.
في بداية الكتاب يتحدث رانغام عن أهمية الطهي في حياتنا كبشر وعن تناسق جهازنا الهضمي مع عادات غذائية تعتمد على الأكل المطهو، وعن عدم قدرتنا على العيش وفق نظام غذائي يعتمد فقط على المأكولات النية. في الفصول التالية يقوم بالحديث عن الجهاز الهضمي لدى البشر وعن الفروق الهائلة بينه وبين الأجهزة الهضمية لدى باقي القردة العليا. ثم يقوم بعدها بشرح نظرية الطاقة من الطبخ، وهي ببساطة متعلقة بكمية الطاقة المستهلكة في عملية هضم الغذاء. فالطعام المطبوخ مثلا يستهلك طاقة أقل من الجسم في عملية الهضم مقارنة بالطعام غير المطبوخ. وفي الفصل الأخير يتحدث الكاتب عن التأثيرات التي أحدثتها هذه العادة الغذائية الجديدة على طبيعة علاقتنا مع بعضنا البعض كبشر، والتي منها طبيعة علاقة الجنسيين ببعضهما.
الكتاب رائع وغريز بالمعلومات.
يرى البروفسور ريتشارد رانغام، بروفسور الأنثروبولوجيا البيولوجية في جامعة هارفارد، أن القدرة على طهي الطعام كانت عاملاً مهماً في تطورنا كبشر. هذه القدرة الجديدة جعلتنا نأخذ من الأرض مسكناً بدل الأشجار. النار حررت أسلافنا من الطبيعة التي كانت تقيدهم مما آذن بفجر جديد، عصر الإنسان المنتصب أو هومو إريكتوس.
في بداية الكتاب يتحدث رانغام عن أهمية الطهي في حياتنا كبشر وعن تناسق جهازنا الهضمي مع عادات غذائية تعتمد على الأكل المطهو، وعن عدم قدرتنا على العيش وفق نظام غذائي يعتمد فقط على المأكولات النية. في الفصول التالية يقوم بالحديث عن الجهاز الهضمي لدى البشر وعن الفروق الهائلة بينه وبين الأجهزة الهضمية لدى باقي القردة العليا. ثم يقوم بعدها بشرح نظرية الطاقة من الطبخ، وهي ببساطة متعلقة بكمية الطاقة المستهلكة في عملية هضم الغذاء. فالطعام المطبوخ مثلا يستهلك طاقة أقل من الجسم في عملية الهضم مقارنة بالطعام غير المطبوخ. وفي الفصل الأخير يتحدث الكاتب عن التأثيرات التي أحدثتها هذه العادة الغذائية الجديدة على طبيعة علاقتنا مع بعضنا البعض كبشر، والتي منها طبيعة علاقة الجنسيين ببعضهما.
الكتاب رائع وغريز بالمعلومات.
January 2, 2013
Before reading this book, I was leery of the raw food movement, but now I know why. Wrangham exposes the pseudoscientific justifications for the movement, some of which are unbelievably ridiculous (such as that the cessation of a woman's menstrual period is a good thing because it means that the raw foodist no longer has any toxins to clear out of the body). Apparently, a strict raw-food diet would not give a person enough energy to meet his/ her needs. I don't have to feel any guilt for my mostly-cooked vegan diet!
Wrangham explains why all human cultures have relegated cooking to the female sex without justifying it. He seems to be saying that although many features of human society are inherited from our distant human and prehuman past, we should not feel bound to perpetuate harmful practices, such as the patriarchal assignment of gender roles or the eating of too much cooked, highly processed foods. We need to cook most foods in order to make the nutrients available to us to fuel our large human brains, but we should incorporate some raw foods into our diet. We should avoid a lot of refined, fibre-poor foods (which our evolutionary history has caused us to crave), since we tend to grow fat on a diet in which glucose is too readily available to us.
Wrangham explains why all human cultures have relegated cooking to the female sex without justifying it. He seems to be saying that although many features of human society are inherited from our distant human and prehuman past, we should not feel bound to perpetuate harmful practices, such as the patriarchal assignment of gender roles or the eating of too much cooked, highly processed foods. We need to cook most foods in order to make the nutrients available to us to fuel our large human brains, but we should incorporate some raw foods into our diet. We should avoid a lot of refined, fibre-poor foods (which our evolutionary history has caused us to crave), since we tend to grow fat on a diet in which glucose is too readily available to us.
January 12, 2016
This author makes a convincing case for consumption of cooked food and nocturnal fires being the spur to humans developing the physiological characteristics that made them properly human: slow to mature, large of brain and free of fur (n.b. hipsters are not properly human). Wrangham refutes other hypotheses effectively and goes into riveting detail about the consequences of cooking on the evolution of the human body.
His theories about how food affected social behaviour, however, are largely supposition and much less convincing. He paints a lovely picture of humans sitting around the camp fire learning to make social chitchat and not annoy one another, skills that weren't needed when they were busy gnawing uncooked roots and grinding their teeth to dust chewing raw bison straight off the carcass. he suggests that older early women cooked up extra food for sisters who were busy nursing. I'm not convinced, given that for most of recorded human society the ones doing the cooking have always been subordinate to the ones doing moist of the eating.
The notes are very detailed and comprise almost a quarter of the book which made the end feel oddly abrupt.
His theories about how food affected social behaviour, however, are largely supposition and much less convincing. He paints a lovely picture of humans sitting around the camp fire learning to make social chitchat and not annoy one another, skills that weren't needed when they were busy gnawing uncooked roots and grinding their teeth to dust chewing raw bison straight off the carcass. he suggests that older early women cooked up extra food for sisters who were busy nursing. I'm not convinced, given that for most of recorded human society the ones doing the cooking have always been subordinate to the ones doing moist of the eating.
The notes are very detailed and comprise almost a quarter of the book which made the end feel oddly abrupt.
July 25, 2011
"Cathing fire" is an interesting book. It presents some ideas that are original and thought-provoking about the phenomena that made us human. Some of them are perhaps too far-stretched and the author is too busy focusing on his main subject - processing the food - to notice the conglomerate of many other influences, not rooted in the food (pre)history. In short, the book offers interesting contents, but it is too biased.
It is also too repetitive - the same arguments appear dozens of times on its pages. There was a point when I felt almost bored and wanted to put the book aside - but then interesting things appeared, and hardly it became entertaining again, when it ended unexpectedly (I was reading it on Kindle, so that I didin't notice at the beginning that at 60% the book is finished and the rest is just endnotes - which, by the way, do not provide any particular additional entertainment or in-depth knowledge).
Overall - not a bad read, quite interesting, but definitely doesn't meet expectations.
It is also too repetitive - the same arguments appear dozens of times on its pages. There was a point when I felt almost bored and wanted to put the book aside - but then interesting things appeared, and hardly it became entertaining again, when it ended unexpectedly (I was reading it on Kindle, so that I didin't notice at the beginning that at 60% the book is finished and the rest is just endnotes - which, by the way, do not provide any particular additional entertainment or in-depth knowledge).
Overall - not a bad read, quite interesting, but definitely doesn't meet expectations.
August 6, 2015
This basically offered everything I wanted out of it. The book explored how fire affected human development, but went beyond humans, stating it likely that Erectus and maybe even Habilis began our love affair with cooked food. Wrangham didn't just conjecture, but used similar species as well as primitive societies still in existence in order to demonstrate natural inclinations. Sure, it went sort of gender history toward the end, but Wrangham's reasoning did seem rather believable, if slightly off topic in the way that we are human. I don't necessarily think that gender roles are key to what makes us human, but that's just my own view.
February 23, 2023
حقيقةً كنت أظن الكتاب عن التاريخ الطبيعي للنار وتطور الطهي عبر التاريخ، وكيف استطاع الإنسان التحكم في النار، ودور الطهي في تاريخ الإنسانية وخاصة أن عنوان الكتاب بالإنجليزية:
Catching fire: How cooking made us human
لكن فكرة الكتاب كانت تدور حول التطور، وكيف قد يكون الطهي هو ما ساعد أسلاف البشر في التطور إلى الإنسان الحالي.
فضَّل المترجم أن يضيف كلمة "تطور" في العنوان، وهي إضافة موفقة، لكنني لم أظن أن التطور الدارويني هو المقصود. الترجمة ممتازة، كنت أفضل فقط لو كانت الهوامش في قلب الكتاب لأنني قلما كنت أتذكرها.
رغم أني لا أوافق الكثير من الأفكار، لكن الكتاب عرض أفكار أخرى أعجبتني، ولم تخطر لي من قبل
Catching fire: How cooking made us human
لكن فكرة الكتاب كانت تدور حول التطور، وكيف قد يكون الطهي هو ما ساعد أسلاف البشر في التطور إلى الإنسان الحالي.
فضَّل المترجم أن يضيف كلمة "تطور" في العنوان، وهي إضافة موفقة، لكنني لم أظن أن التطور الدارويني هو المقصود. الترجمة ممتازة، كنت أفضل فقط لو كانت الهوامش في قلب الكتاب لأنني قلما كنت أتذكرها.
رغم أني لا أوافق الكثير من الأفكار، لكن الكتاب عرض أفكار أخرى أعجبتني، ولم تخطر لي من قبل
March 20, 2011
OK, forget the raw food movement. This book presents an interesting theory that a breakthrough moment in human evolution was when man began cooking his food. Cooking the food allowed more calories to be absorbed, changing the shape of primates from having large digestive tracts to large brains. Although the book is very technical, it is presented in a way such that people without a background in biology or anthropology can easily understand. I especially enjoyed the chapters on how social roles developed - males hunting and females cooking. Very informative!
January 17, 2016
كتاب جيّد يُلقي الضوء على دور الطهي في تطور الإنسان وتغيير مسيرته، وعن أهميّة النار في تغيير حياتنا إلى الأبد. هذا الكتاب هو مقاربة مختلفة لحياة الإنسان من منظور طهي الطعام.
من الملاحظات على الكتاب هو أنه يحتوي على معلومات وتفاصيل لا تهم كثيراً القارىء العادي وقد يكون الاخصائيون في مجال التاريخ البشري معنيين بها أكثر.
من الملاحظات على الكتاب هو أنه يحتوي على معلومات وتفاصيل لا تهم كثيراً القارىء العادي وقد يكون الاخصائيون في مجال التاريخ البشري معنيين بها أكثر.
May 1, 2022
As a principle, I don’t review books that I DNF. However, the fact that this was required reading for a class and I could t finish it says a lot. This book makes some gross assumptions about domestic roles and women and basically implies that women are more evolutionary able to handle cooking and other domestic roles.
January 19, 2012
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.
December 4, 2023
An excellent and compelling reinterpretation that brings together several disciplines to argue that a key to human evolution was the taming of fire and its use for cooking--which allowed us to get nutrition more efficiently, develop larger brains, lose the ability to climb trees, and develop a division of labor between men and women--with marriage based more on this economic division of labor than sexual relations and paternity. Note that this is cooking--not just "man as hunter" because cooking can make many foods more digestible (e.g., grains) and conversely meat with cooking is not nearly as efficiently nutritious.
At points the book is a bit too repetitive or takes longer than needed to make certain points (although it is still a relatively svelte 200 pages). And it is necessarily speculative, especially about the very early history of development of cooking, just how pivotal it was in human evolution, and also the ways in which it shaped gender. It would be nice if a wider array of evidence all lined up to support the speculation.
I would recommend Richard Wrangham's The Goodness Paradox: The Strange Relationship Between Virtue and Violence in Human Evolution even more highly than this book, it is longer but the argument is more subtle and the evidence it marshals more impressive and counterintuitive.
What follows is a brief summary of the key points of the chapters:
Quest for Raw Foodists: A completely convincing account of how it is basically impossible for humans to survive on raw food. Even sophisticated, modern high quality food with blenders and even low temperature cooking leads to tremendous weight loss and often loss of the ability to reproduce. And no known human society has ever just eaten raw food.
The Cook's Body: We have much smaller mouths and teeth than other primates and our digestive system (particularly the colon) is much smaller than you would predict from our size. We're also much more susceptible to food bacteria.
The Energy Theory of Cooking: Goes through the biological ways in which cooking "pre-digests" food, breaking it down into more digestible morsels. And how we have evolved to like the taste of that cooking.
When Cooking Began: This felt more speculative to me given the lack (or weakness) of archeological evidence and some of the limitations of what you can learn from the fossil record of humans. But Wrangham argues that fire was domesticated around the same time the Homo Erectus emerged and was a key to that emergence.
Brain Foods: A super interesting chapter whose main point is that there is an inverse correlation among primates between how much energy they use in digesting food and how much energy their brains use. This leads to the convincing speculation that we reduced the energy used in the digestive process (see the smaller colon, among other evolutionary developments) and our brains grew in proportion. And the brain growth was, of course, key to humans as social learners.
How Cookings Frees Men: Cooking frees up men to hunt or possibly even engage in leisure by being more calorie-intensive and also by enabling cooking/eating after dark because of the light provided by fires so can get more done during the day.
The Married Cook: Wrangham argues that in every known society women do the cooking, even as other aspects of gender roles have varied widely. He also points out that in all of them women specialize in collecting different foods than men do. And that husbands and wives share food. All of this is unique to humans--other animals do not specialize in types of food collection by gender and don't share food between adults, in fact generally eating it where they find it rather than brining it "home".
The Cook's Journey: Speculative on how fire developed and spread.
Epilogue: The Well-informed Cook: A fascinating account of how the modern version of calories were developed in the early 19th century by assigning an amount of energy per gram to the three major macronutrients (protein, carbohydrates and fat) and how this technique has been refined but in ways that change the numbers trivially since then. But that the amount of energy in food is very different than the amount of net energy your body gets from food because of the energy used in digesting it and because not all gets through. Wrangham advocates, or wishes, for a measure that would capture this but acknowledges the difficulties, including that it depends on how the food itself is prepared. But it left me wishing there was a simple summary statistic, like calories but more meaningful, we could label everything with.
At points the book is a bit too repetitive or takes longer than needed to make certain points (although it is still a relatively svelte 200 pages). And it is necessarily speculative, especially about the very early history of development of cooking, just how pivotal it was in human evolution, and also the ways in which it shaped gender. It would be nice if a wider array of evidence all lined up to support the speculation.
I would recommend Richard Wrangham's The Goodness Paradox: The Strange Relationship Between Virtue and Violence in Human Evolution even more highly than this book, it is longer but the argument is more subtle and the evidence it marshals more impressive and counterintuitive.
What follows is a brief summary of the key points of the chapters:
Quest for Raw Foodists: A completely convincing account of how it is basically impossible for humans to survive on raw food. Even sophisticated, modern high quality food with blenders and even low temperature cooking leads to tremendous weight loss and often loss of the ability to reproduce. And no known human society has ever just eaten raw food.
The Cook's Body: We have much smaller mouths and teeth than other primates and our digestive system (particularly the colon) is much smaller than you would predict from our size. We're also much more susceptible to food bacteria.
The Energy Theory of Cooking: Goes through the biological ways in which cooking "pre-digests" food, breaking it down into more digestible morsels. And how we have evolved to like the taste of that cooking.
When Cooking Began: This felt more speculative to me given the lack (or weakness) of archeological evidence and some of the limitations of what you can learn from the fossil record of humans. But Wrangham argues that fire was domesticated around the same time the Homo Erectus emerged and was a key to that emergence.
Brain Foods: A super interesting chapter whose main point is that there is an inverse correlation among primates between how much energy they use in digesting food and how much energy their brains use. This leads to the convincing speculation that we reduced the energy used in the digestive process (see the smaller colon, among other evolutionary developments) and our brains grew in proportion. And the brain growth was, of course, key to humans as social learners.
How Cookings Frees Men: Cooking frees up men to hunt or possibly even engage in leisure by being more calorie-intensive and also by enabling cooking/eating after dark because of the light provided by fires so can get more done during the day.
The Married Cook: Wrangham argues that in every known society women do the cooking, even as other aspects of gender roles have varied widely. He also points out that in all of them women specialize in collecting different foods than men do. And that husbands and wives share food. All of this is unique to humans--other animals do not specialize in types of food collection by gender and don't share food between adults, in fact generally eating it where they find it rather than brining it "home".
The Cook's Journey: Speculative on how fire developed and spread.
Epilogue: The Well-informed Cook: A fascinating account of how the modern version of calories were developed in the early 19th century by assigning an amount of energy per gram to the three major macronutrients (protein, carbohydrates and fat) and how this technique has been refined but in ways that change the numbers trivially since then. But that the amount of energy in food is very different than the amount of net energy your body gets from food because of the energy used in digesting it and because not all gets through. Wrangham advocates, or wishes, for a measure that would capture this but acknowledges the difficulties, including that it depends on how the food itself is prepared. But it left me wishing there was a simple summary statistic, like calories but more meaningful, we could label everything with.
October 30, 2022
It was a pretty good book! I wouldn't have picked it out for myself, but having to read it for class was pretty interesting! I appreciate how Wrangham supports his thesis and develops it really well, and then goes into the effects that his theory has. What I like even more is how he treated the sexual division of labor. Rather than stating it was all "sexism," there was some account that there is empowerment in this split of cooking. Unlike some other authors I know, it doesn't feel like domesticity is being blamed or shamed, as there are a lot of women who find homemaking their calling. I don't really like how he ended the book. Kinda feels preachy and out of place for a conclusion on a book like this. I wish it had been a reiteration and maybe some talk about weight gain and food awareness on the side, rather than a full chapter dedicated to the flaws of our modern food industries.
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