Wednesday, July 1, 2009

Richard Wrangham's Catching Fire.� - By Christine Kenneally - Slate Magazine

Richard Wrangham's Catching Fire.� - By Christine Kenneally - Slate Magazine: "Similarly, the more cooked food we ate, the less industrial-strength digestion we had to do, and the smaller our guts became. In the same way that our bodies evolved to better walk on two legs, our bellies changed to better handle well-done over rare. This had two enormous payoffs. First, as our guts got smaller, this freed up energy for our brains to operate on a larger and larger scale. (Leslie Aiello and Peter Wheeler first discovered the relationship between gut size and brain size, dubbing it the Expensive Tissue Hypothesis.) Second, as we spent less time eating, we had more time to do other things with those rapidly expanding brains."

Food production and cooking are foundational to our civilization. I am getting more and more annoyed at those who seek to restrain and control this more basic cornerstone of our humanness.

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