Fired Up

Nicky caught a fascinating clip on Radio Four about a new book Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human by distinguished primatologist Richard Wrangham.

Put in a nutshell, Wrangham’s thesis goes like this.

Humanity began when our primate ancestors started cooking. As they became “cooking apes, the creatures of the flame”, their digestive tracts shrank and their brains grew.

And Bob’s your uncle, apes morphed into humans.

This is “the cooking hypothesis”, Wrangham claims, missed in Darwin’s theory of evolution.

Well, what do you make of this? Wrangham’s book apparently ranges across nutritional science, paleontology, and studies of ape behaviour, and has been acclaimed by many.

And I’m sure we’ve all felt the primal thrill of lighting an open fire while camping. It makes sense for scientists to credit the incredible impact of fire on the evolutionary process.

But it turns out Wrangham has put the cat among the pigeons by rubbishing raw food. The raw food lobby is up in arms. They’d like to see the author spit-roasted.

So we’ve been asking - what do we think on the raw/cooked food question?

Truth is we’re not sure. As we understand it, cooking releases the nutrients in some food While other raw foods in a growth state - like beansprouts - are packed with good stuff.



We follow a diet of cooked meat and fish mixed with raw fruit, veggies and pulses. But is that right?

Perhaps only time and the evolutionary process will tell.

But we do have one further problem with Wrangham’s anti-raw food invective.

By his thesis, TV chefs ought to be more intelligent than lesser mortals. The Gordon Ramsays of this world should possess an intellectual advantage through all their time spent at the cooker.

And does that wash?