Just Cured - Experience Fine Foods

If you have any interest whatsoever in cooking, its history and its social context, you will want to read the recently released Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human by Richard Wrangham.  Wrangham is a professor of Biological Anthropology at Harvard University.

In Catching Fire, Wrangham presents and defends his thesis that the act of cooking drove the biological and sociological changes that made us human.  Contrary to the popular view among anthropologists that humans have been cooking food for 250,000 to 400,000 years, Wrangham has our ancestors cooking much, much earlier.  He makes a compelling case that cooking food is the only reasonable explanation for the physiological changes present in Homo Erectus when it emerged approximately 1.9 million (!) years ago.  Wrangham also covers the sociological changes that cooking permitted, evidence of which changes are with us even today.

Catching Fire is a fascinating read; I couldn’t put it down.  Too bad I didn’t get around to writing a bit about it until others started jumping on the bandwagon.

Link to page at Amazon.

Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human