Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human (2009)

This is good research but not a great book to read. Basically, an entire book making the case that cooking food enabled humans to become smarter, by trading longer time eating and physical structures required for digesting uncooked foods for higher intelligence. Other than that, it's a bunch of boring details. ( )

This book offers a compelling case for the idea that cooking is the main reason why we evolved from australopithecines to Homo erectus and then to Homo sapiens. It challenges at several points the mainstream notion that meat-eating was a keystone of (at least some parts of) this evolution, for having comparatively limited explanatory power. Besides the anatomical changes it uses cooking to explain some things I wouldn't have expected, such as marriage and the sexual division of labor.

I thought the point was generally well-argued and at the same time the book provided enough interesting bits to keep a wide audience interested. There are plenty of anecdotes (favorite example: the author adds tough leaves to a raw goat meat meal to test that they make chewing easier), and many references to actual studies in the endnotes for the true nerds.

It has a problem that might be unavoidable in this kind of pop-sci book: there's always a lot of uncertainty in modern science (especially in something with as little archeological evidence as fire), but, because the author wants to make their case as persuasive as possible, diverging points tend to be omitted or minimized. As a result, it's sometimes hard to know what's well established and what's controversial. For example, a core point in the book (why is the human brain so unusually large?) relies on the expensive tissue hypothesis. The author does note that it's a hypothesis, but there's no exploration of why it's still one, or how accepted it is in the field.
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I found this an interesting and fairly short look at how humans became humans. The author's hypothesis is that when hominids learned to use fire for cooking that they changed physically to become Homo sapiens. Eating cooked food allowed the digestive system to get more energy from the same amount of food and that energy allowed the developement of bigger brains. There were additionally changes in the structure of the jaw, teeth and gut because of the easier digested and softer foods. He also has a theory as to why women do the cooking in practically all cultures.

The author is fairly persuasive in his arguments but the book is ten years old in a field that has been moving fast of late. I would like to know how his ideas are seen now.

How cooking made us human

This book was interesting and well-researched (the endnotes are about a third of the book), but details were a bit repetitive and beyond the scope of my interest in the topic. I think i would've preferred it as a long magazine article. Still, it provided much food for thought (can't resist!), particularly in the ways cooking has influenced human relationships and gender roles. ( )