About 'Catching Fire' and our Evolution as Cooked-Fooders: Introduction

It was pure coincidence that I got my hands on Richard Wrangham's 'Catching Fire: How Cooking Made us Human' right around the time that I found myself going back to raw foods. As I dove into it, I quickly realized that there was a lot that I would want to write about it.

As it turns out, there is so much to say that it's going to take up three posts! In this one, I'm just giving a teaser of a brief overview. In the next installment, I'll give a more complete outline of the book, a summary of the arguments he presents and some closing comments. In the second part I will address both his own comments about raw foodism and his book's implications for raw foodism, as I see them, in more detail.

This is a fascinating, erudite, broad-ranging and very readable book, in which Wrangham argues - convincingly, in my view, that the introduction of cooking was the change that enabled the evolution of our ancestors from habilines to homo erectus, as much as 2.5 million years ago! If cooking has been practiced for that long, and has played a part in our evolution, it has huge implications for other questions as to our adaptation to toxic by-products of cooking, as well as for the 'historical' basis of many raw food and 'paleo' ideologies.

In the course of setting out his arguments and evidence, Wrangham gives raw foodists and raw food diets a bad rap. Evidently he feels that he needs to do this as a part of the motivation for his hypothesis, and he does briefly concede that in the modern world, with modernized fruits and vegetables, raw foodists can do well - but then repeatedly returns to his 'finding' that raw food diets are energy deficient as part of his argument.

On this one count, I believe that Wrangham is mistaken, but I find his arguments about the role of cooking in human evolution quite convincing. In other words, I believe that it is possible to thrive as a raw foodist today even if cooked food has played a role in our evolution for 2 million years. I also think that the reasons he adduces for the importance of cooking in our evolution should be very interesting to raw foodists in particular, as well as to anybody who wants to understand how and why our bodies are as they are. These reasons have implications for making food choices, whether in the context of raw foods or cooked, and are worth paying attention to.