"Catching Fire"

(How Cooking Made Us Human)
-by richard wrangham
2009
A fascinating argument for how crucial the development of fire and cooking was for our species. Indeed, much of wrangham's case can be boiled down (ha!) to this - we are the animal who cooks. Mind you, i'm not impressed by "sets us apart" arguments. They're generally self-serving rationalizations, and are almost always (or just always) wrong. But richard's most coherent contribution to our understanding of humyn nature seems to be a de-pantsing of the standoff between meat-eaters and vegetarians. He shows that the caloric intake between those two groups is essentially identical, and that the only genuine dietary divide is between cookers and raw-foodists. With incomplete and occasionally contradictory evidence that's compelling nonetheless, he shows that a raw diet is a ticket to oblivion, and that we're entirely adapted to cooked food, and the much higher caloric intake it provides. He argues that cooking was the gateway to our large brains, as cooking frees up time and energy for intricate, brain-building social activities (indeed, it demands such, as surplus resources and differentiated social roles require much higher social sophistication). Other apes spend hours a day simply chewing, and digesting raw food requires higher amounts of energy. Ergo, cooking is the key to more time and energy. Wrangham also negates the theory that sex is the basis of our mating system (wimyn get resources/protection/status, while men get a guarantee of paternity). He argues that food is what drives mating. In virtually every humyn society, wimyn are the ones who prepare the reliable daily calories without which we would perish. In return, wimyn get a male's protection. He takes some leaps of intuition regarding gender roles and brain growth, but his essential point, that mating is about economics rather than sex, seems unassailable.
Wrangham, a biological anthropologist, also dives into the flaws in our nutritional-labeling system, and how those approximations ignore the higher metabolic costs of raw food. He contributes to the obesity discussion, proposing that our innate preference for high-calorie foods is our downfall when surplus becomes too great. Fat has the lowest digestive cost of any food, so we're particularly susceptible to too much fat. Thin people tend to burn more energy during digestion - there's a chicken/egg relationship there we don't yet understand, but in any case there seems to be a level on which thinness and obesity are both self-maintaining.
He offers fascinating particulars along the way. He says that bread is one of the few cooked foods that chemically reverts to a harder-to-digest state, which explains our preference for fresh (or freshly-toasted) bread. It turns out that's not just taste preference.
Wrangham's writing flows seamlessly, and this book is a necessary addition to our understanding of humyn nature.