Back, armed with fish.

  Sorry for bailing on you yesterday and thanks for your messages to check I was ok. As I'm feeing more myself, I'll get straight into a bit of a recap. I've been delving into some ancient history and though a lot of the stuff has been interesting, I want to reiterate the main point of looking back in time.

  Simply, we eat therefore we are. More specifically, we ate cooked food so we became the large brained, dominant, sophisticated creatures we are. The process of cooking enabled us to get at so much more of the nutrients locked up in our food that we even ended up with a different digestive system and teeth than our raw food eating ancestors.

Watch its eyes follow you

  It's still a mystery to me why cooking took off to the extent it did but that's something I'll have to try to forget. Cooking not only changed our evolutionary path but also gave us access to a lot more ingredients. The best example is cereals, (grass seeds), which have no interest in giving up their treasures in the form of protein and carbs without a fight. Not even the most moronic monkey was going to sit around chewing them. It's too much work for almost no reward.

  Bash some grains under a rock and boil into a porridge however and you're looking at something a lot more nutritious and filling. Oh, and bland. Really unbelievably bland. As a result it looks like we also learned a long time ago was that we could improve the taste of our food by adding herbs and spices. 

  It would be fair to say that cooking really is in our DNA. Starting next week I'm going to move on from our history and look at how, (with the obvious exception of the creations of the likes of Ferran Adria and Heston Blumenthal), the techniques we use today are effectively unchanged from those we were using thousands of years ago. The equipment may look shinier and more technical and there's more washing up to do but we're still doing the same shit, as you'll see tomorrow.

  

Kirk out

RevoltingFood.com