Earlier this week Wired wrote about Harvard primatologist Richard Wrangham’s talk at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting. Dr. Wrangham spoke about the evolutionary advantages to cooking.
In a numbered list:
- Kills parasites. (Preventing us from getting sick.)
- Heat softens food making it less energy intensive to digest. (Less energy spent digesting food is more energy for other things.)
- Heat breaks down starch and protein which increases the body’s ability to digest them. (For the same amount of food, we get more starch/carbs and proteins cooked than raw.)
Evolutionarily, when humans learned to control fire (up to 790,000 years ago) and cook their food, eating became more energy/nutrient efficient (2 = less energy in and 3 = more energy/nutrients out). This may well have played a big part in supporting the energy needs of the human brain, allowing us to evolve such big smart crazy connected brains (the accurate scientific phrasing clearly).
Related:
Book sized story from Dr. Wrangham available in June. Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human
To understand the experience of eating, one step is to define the components that go into that experience. Karen Page and Andrew Dornenburg’s description of flavor in The Flavor Bible
(highly recommended!) defines the components more elegantly than I could:
FLAVOR = TASTE + MOUTHFEEL + AROMA + “THE X FACTOR”
Taste = What is perceived by the taste buds
Mouthfeel – What is perceived by the rest of the mouth
Aroma = What is perceived by the nose
“The X Factor” = What is perceived by the other senses — plus the heart, mind, and spirit
Scientific detail on each will follow in future posts, but the basics (summarized from The Flavor Bible and coursework):
Taste happens in the mouth, primarily on the tongue. The taste buds have 5 kinds of sensors (called receptors) which sense sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and umami (savory).
Mouthfeel happens in the mouth. Exactly as the name implies, it’s feeling (or touching) with our mouths, just like we feel with our hands, feet, etc. The sensation include temperature, texture, piquancy (or spicyness), and astringency (causing puckering). Read the rest of this entry »
I want you to like science.
Science in America today is a lot of CSI and House and incomprehensible nerds and fights about evolution and climate change and hospital rooms and different health advice each week in the newspapers and is the Large Hadron Collider going to suck the planet into a black hole?
I’d rather science be simpler, like: ‘Hey, that’s cool. I wonder how it works. Ah, there I go thinking like a scientist.’ I can see the ad now: Science, it’s just like curiosity.
Considering curiosity and science, eating came to mind. Everyone eats. And a lot of people must be a bit curious about eating. I sure am. (Eating questions in my head right now: Why when I smell lemons am I transported to my childhood backyard? Why does having breakfast make me less hungry between lunch and dinner? How do vegetables grow out of just a seed, soil, water, and sunlight? What are the nutritional differences between light meat and dark meat?)
Read the rest of this entry »
