The Secret of Our Success
Cooking, one of the omnivore’s cleverest tools, opened up whole new vistas of edibility. Indeed, in doing so it probably made us who we are. By making these foods more digestible, cooking plants and animal flesh vastly increased the amount of energy available to early humans, and some anthropologists believe this boon accounts for the dramatic incr
... See moreMichael Pollan • The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
Quick attempt to write out the logic beyond my Food of the Gods review:
Starting 2 million years ago, homo Habilis emerges from grasslands as meat eaters. This is cited as the main explanation for the growth of the brain, but it's not clear how eating meat led to genetic changes that would pass down to offspring.
However, in hunting mammals (ie: cat
Some scholars believe there is a direct link between the advent of cooking, the shortening of the human intestinal tract, and the growth of the human brain. Since long intestines and large brains are both massive energy consumers, it’s hard to have both. By shortening the intestines and decreasing their energy consumption, cooking inadvertently ope... See more