Yes but why?

  You'll have to let me know if you found this week interesting or too geeky. For me it's been really fascinating finding out about the history of food. There's a lot that hasn't made the edit, especially as there's a fair amount of speculation going on in the places I've been doing my research. It's obviously difficult to look for signs of burning as the evidence generally gets destroyed by fire.

  There are a couple of things that stand out as incredible to me, such as the ability of the scientists to ascertain from abrasions to the teeth that they've dug up, that early cooking included herbs and spices indicating that taste was important to the early chefs. The other thing is that there seems to be evidence of cooking from over two million years ago.

  Two million sodding years!!! That's pretty unfathomable considering we only started farming about ten thousand years ago. It also means that cooking pre-dates humans as homo sapiens only appeared about 200,000 years ago. In fact, cooking is about as old as the homo genus (species). Oops, I appear to have gone a bit nerdy again.

  However, one question I have trouble finding an answer for is not where or when cooking started, but why. No one seems to have broached the subject. You and I know the benefits, as does the person who produced the above graph giving an indication of how much more benefit there is from cooked food, but none of this was of any interest for any of the beings on the planet two million years ago, who really didn't give a toss.

  It's easy to imagine that cooking probably started when someone/something burned an item of what they considered food, tasted it and liked it, but it's not like there was a TV show where one hairy knuckle dragger was able to tell all the others what a good idea he'd come across that they should all try.

  I'm sorry to say that I'm going to leave you with a bit of an open ending to this one. Why we all started cooking may remain a mystery for a while but do come back tomorrow when I want to bring a bit of practicality to the conversation.

Kirk out

RevoltingFood.com