Today's program is brought to you by Whole Foods Market. For more information, visit Whole Foods Market.com. I'm Laura Stanley, host of Inside School Food. You are listening to Heritage Radio Network, broadcasting live from Bushwick, Brooklyn. If you like this program, visit HeritageRadio Network.org for thousands more.
Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues. This is Dave Arnold, your host of Cooking Issues coming to you live on the Heritage Radio Network, broadcasting every Tuesday from roughly 12 to roughly 1245, 1250 from Robert's Petria in Bushwick. Brooklyn! How are you doing, Jack? We got Jack in the studio today.
Oh, I'm good. That was that was real energy right there. You like the Brooklyn? Like the You know why? It's because I took a uh a horse uh ride over the weekend at Gettysburg along the battlefield.
And so I got the in Wow. Yeah. Horse ride inspired Brooklyn. Yeah. Yep.
You know, a lot of people used to ride horses here. Did you know that? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Uh so I think we have uh Stas on the phone too. Okay, so we do not have Nastasia the Hammer Lopez live in the studio today because uh she is out in Chicago. Uh she's not I was about to lie and say she's covering the James Beard Awards for cooking issues, but that's just a straight up lie. Right? We lost somebody.
Well, I hope we didn't lose either people. Anyway, I don't know if we do we have an extra line for people to call in, or we're done with the case. Yeah, we got we got three lines, so. Alright, so uh the big special guest we have on uh air today is Richard Rangham. Richard Rangham is the uh let me get this uh right here.
The uh Ruth B. Moore, professor of biological anthropology at Harvard. Uh and uh he wrote a kind of um a book that I think was published in about 2010, I think, but I think it's remained influential. And I think it's more interesting actually to have him on uh you know six years after it's been published, so that we can see kind of what the impact has been and and how it's how the theories in it have stayed uh you know stayed the test over time. The book is called Catching Fire, How uh Cooking Made Him uh uh made us human.
Uh and do we uh Professor uh Rangham, are you on the phone? I am. Ah, hi. Good to good to speak with you. Good to speak with you.
Um so i by the way, I don't know whether like how do you how do you do you want to give the elevator pitch for what the book's about for those people that don't already have it, or do you want me to mutilate it for you, or what do you want to do? Well well uh uh sure. Hello? Something's going on with the phone lines. Is that is that Professor Rangham's phone that's cutting out?
Yeah. Both of the lines just cut out, so we'll have to have them call right back. So listen, while we're waiting for while we're waiting for them to call back, I'll just catch a few questions that we had uh in advance. Uh Andrew is another Tandoor question. Andrew wrote in, hello.
I just started listening to the show and I love it. I thought I'd write in a question. I hope this is the right spot. I've decided it's time I bring a tandoor into my life. Good call.
The internet is awash with videos of courageous DIYers building set ovens in their backyards. I have a little DIY experience, but I'm not a half-wit and can follow directions. What do you think? Buy or build? Any tips or thoughts for a rookie learning to feast on Tika and Nan?
Cheers, Andrew. Listen, dude, if you don't like DIY stuff, the only reason to build a Tandor is because you really, really, really, really, really want to build a Tandoor, right? If you'd rather just and you also like how much value does your time uh you know have? Like I bought mine and I am an avid DIYer just because I think in general it's better the first time you use a piece of equipment. If you had been grown, if you'd grown up and used Tandoors your whole life and you knew what the geometry was and you knew how it was supposed to work, and you roughly knew what mass it was supposed to be, and you roughly knew what the k you know the competition of the clay was and how it was reinforced and how it was used over time, and you know, kind of you knew all of those factors, then I'd say, you know what?
Build one. A lot of fun. But in absence of that, if you haven't actually used one before, probably a good idea to just get one from the professionals. The one I have, and they should pay me because I've sent so many people to them. Uh uh, I'm you know, it's www.tandoors.com.
It's Gulati International, and they're in New Jersey. Uh I was lucky enough, I live close enough, I was able to go get one. Uh, but if you don't, if you're not that lucky, uh they will ship it. But I think the shipping is expensive because they're clay and they they really uh want you to ship them by truck carrier. So um, so there you have it.
And uh Jack, are we back yet? If not, I have one more question. We're back. We're back? We're back.
All right. Uh I will get to the second question before the end of the show. Uh it's about uh uh Bazbooza, the Semolina uh uh cake. Anyway, okay, so Professor, we got Stas. We got you on the phone too?
No, hi. Richard Rangham here. Professor Rangam, well, good, good, good. Okay, now do you want to give the the elevator pitch, or do you want me to give the elevator pitch and then you'll say what an idiot I am, or how do you want to do it? Um you should give the elevator pitch.
All right, so so basically, in it here here here's what I what I got out of it. So the question the the question is this: how is it or why is it that human beings have evolved in uh in a very kind of particular way? Why do we have uh big, uh very energetically expensive brains to run? Why is our digestive system short? Why is our jaw muscles puny?
Why are our relatively puny to other things like uh great apes? Why uh why is it uh that our teeth are structured the way they're all these kinds of things? Why are we relatively erect? Uh why are we relatively hairless? Why can't we climb very well?
Uh and if you if the question is, is it these these kinds of things started happening a long, long time ago? What caused those things to happen? And the kind of simplest explanation from an Occam's razor standpoint isn't any one of the normal kind of uh things that have been posited, like tool use or any of these other things. Uh really the the most simple Occam's razor thing is uh cooking. Cooking can accomplish all of those things because if you cook foods, all of a sudden they are easy much easier to chew.
You don't have to chew as long, it takes a lot less time, and you get a lot more actual caloric value uh energy out of the foods once they're cooked versus raw. Basically, right, Professor? Absolutely fantastic job, Dave. Yeah, no, that's really terrific. And um, so what it comes down to is this uh what we know about humans is that uh you cannot live on raw food in the wild.
You know, uh if you're a raw foodist, then you can survive uh uh on um uh on your salads and your smoothies and so on uh in an urban environment in which you can take the highest quality food that you can find and uh you can blend it and so on. But but it's not good enough in the wild. That's what we've now realize for the last few years. So humans are unlike every other species, we are adapted to eating our food cooked. We absolutely need to.
So that's one big point. And then the other big point is, well, okay, if that's true, how long has it been true? Is it is it uh fifty thousand years ago? Is it five thousand years ago? Is it half a million years ago?
And uh and actually I think that there's a pretty easy answer to this, which is that it's been true as long as we have bodies like the bodies that we have nowadays. And when did we get those bodies? Well, everybody knows. It was uh just just decided two million years ago. Now one of the questions I have is hit it right at the beginning, and it's uh it's in the in the book, and here's the kind and maybe there's been a lot of research since 2010.
Uh so one of the main arguments that um critics have is there is no evidence of fire remote like f cooking fire, you know, non non-happenstance fire, um anywhere near that long ago. Your counter argument in the book is mostly well, it's the easiest explanation and therefore should be accepted until an easier explanation is is given. Is that still your A is am I ca am I putting your position correctly? And B, has that changed over the past six years? Yeah, no, that's great.
Um so yeah, there's um uh n no one can say yet that uh uh that there is definitely control of fire by humans going all the way back to when I am predicting it, uh uh two million years ago. But uh since since the book was published, uh we have had uh fire, the date of control of fire being pushed uh nicely back. So um we've now got uh a couple of places at eight hundred thousand years ago, uh a place at a million years ago. This is you know quite a lot more than the two hundred and fifty thousand years ago that people have traditionally thought. And uh and I'm uh feeling very excited about reports I've been hearing about um some evidence that is going to take the the evidence for the control of fire back uh to uh to very close to to when I think it um it will eventually be shown.
And and so that that million that eight hundred thousand year old one is is a fairly accepted site? Yes it is uh that one is in in Israel uh and then uh th there's another one uh which has just been published in Spain uh just about the same time and then there's a million year one in South Africa. Huh and let me it's and so this is this is also something that I don't understand. I'm just curious is um what is the difference between a two hundred and fifty thousand year old site that has been easily identified for a long time as having control of fire and a site that's uh a million years uh a million years ago. What's the difference in technology or placement or how how the um how the sites are preserved such that it makes it more difficult to trace it back?
Like why is there that line? I mean basically uh over these immense periods of time that we're talking about then the further back you go then uh the more chance there is that uh everything has been disturbed to the point that you're never gonna be able to find what you're looking for. Um I mean here's one measure of the way in which it's disturbed. Uh the half life of a cave, that is to say the the duration that a cave is going to exist is something around a quarter of a million years. So that most caves have gone uh after that time because of uh erosion of the of the cave rock, that sort of thing.
Um so th there's all sorts of difficulties the further back you go, and the in the end, the way that people are finding evidence for the control of fire in the very early times, like a million years ago, is um uh more from uh microscopic grains of charcoal that uh cannot be explained on the basis of anything else other than humans being responsible for making fire. W what would the difference be on the microscopic level between say a lightning strike and human fire? Well, I mean, natural fires um do can produce uh charcoal, of course. Um, but uh uh they tend to produce charcoal that ends up with uh smaller grains than um than human made fire. Uh that's been shown in um you know actualistic studies.
Um but the the real thing that uh characterizes the evidence for the use of fire by humans at a million years ago in South Africa is the fact that there is a very ancient cave. It's in fact uh it's really the only cave that has been found at that date. And deep in the cave, uh uh thirty meters in, so uh what was that? Uh uh a hundred feet in, uh you have uh lots of buried charcoal, and uh people say there's no way that you could have had any natural process that brought in the fuel. Right.
So it's not it's not like a natural it's not like West Virginia where we have all these coal things that catch on fire every once in a while. This is not like a coal bearing cave or something like this. Right, exactly. So but but you have to be very careful. You know, there's there's a lot of places where uh people have found some evidence of burning associated with humans uh way back 1.5 million, 1.6 million years ago.
But um there's always that possibility that it was uh a tree burning from a lightning strike uh or uh some other natural fire. So that's why you have to be so cautious. All right. So that's the the the first uh you know thing I think that a lot of people bring up. And the the second one, I'm curious whether there's been more research, and this is the core really, and really I was laughing.
Uh actually uh I listened to it when I'm when I was driving the car, I got it on um on Audible. And uh I was laughing out loud with the parts about the the raw diet because uh it's been it's been exactly my experience. I I did the raw diet, I lost a bet and had to do the raw diet for a week. And I'll tell you, uh I I you know I didn't need any uh scientific study to show that I wasn't absorbing my uh calories. Just ask ask my toilet.
You know, it was like it's obviously the stuff runs straight through you. Um it's uh I mean to me it's fairly obvious, and you're eating a preposterous amount of of uh of and this is like as you say, you know, shopping in modern supermarkets and you know, modern having I have a very expensive high speed blender um and taking a lot of times to soak things, etc. etc. Right. I mean, using agricultural foods, and so of course, uh you know the the the quality of foods that are produced in on farms uh is far higher simply from the point of view of producing energy than what you get in the wild.
So so you know, the the fruits in the area that I work on study chimpanzees in Uganda, uh the average fruit has about as much sugar as a carrot and and far less than an apple or an orange and so on. So the raw food is have all these advantages uh that you mentioned uh including eating domesticated foods um and uh yes there's quite a lot of of extra work that's now been done on this and um so uh since the book was published we've got uh very nice data showing that uh if you uh feed mice on uh cooked uh tubers or or on cooked meat or on cooked peanuts then uh they will get more energy uh than eating raw and as you say I mean anybody who's tried a raw food diet knows this but uh it's nice to be able to work out the mechanisms. Right. And uh I think another thing that uh I don't know whether a lot of people bring it up when they talk to you about the book but the another thing I thought was very interesting and I I didn't I you know you expect to hear it um in nutrition discussions and you never do never uh in your book is a basically a huge indictment of the way we and I don't think you even explicitly bring it out this way but a huge indictment of the way nutritional labels are printed. Um because a calorie is clearly not a calorie is clearly not a calorie it depends on the the structure of it, how much it's cooked, uh how it's delivered to you, how much you chew, etc, etc.
What are your do you have any more current thoughts on that? Do you are you even interested in that? Um no, I mean uh I I remain interested. Um it was uh an epilogue in the book uh uh calling for a a more rational approach to food labeling and um R Rachel Carmody and I uh we ran a session at the American Association for Advancement of Science uh uh three or four years ago where we brought together a number of people to to reflect on the fact uh that as you say it's uh it's very clear to all sorts of people, even though it's not very often talked about, uh that the food labeling system does not capture what you want it to know, which is uh how much weight will I put on from eating this particular kind of food. Um it it's all very uh uh ironic because uh the scientists do know too they do understand on the whole that uh processing matters enormously and that the more highly processed your food is uh whether it's by cooking or by um whatever has uh been done by way of grinding it in in uh the food company before you even get it um this will increase the number of calories you get and b everyone knows that so we should have a a modified labeling system but there've been a whole series of attempts to think about what the new system could should be and no one can agree on what it should be.
So it's not gonna happen. Right for the moment. Right. Well the thing is is even if you could uh do that you'd s you still need some sort of uh I mean the body is so complicated it you simply can't really say what's going to happen even there's no way to adjust it at all because uh my favorite you know example I put to everyone is that if I drank uh a gallon of uh vegetable oil right now if I could do it without throwing up I simply wouldn't absorb the vast majority of those calories. Even though they're liquid and I should be able to absorb them fairly well, I'd just be overwhelming my system and it would all uh you know leave relatively unprocessed.
I mean it's just impossible to it's impossible to uh to account for the differences in the way humans consume. I mean you could get probably some sort of close average based on what the aver average person eats and how fast the average person eats, but it's just an incredibly complicated system, right? Yes, yeah exactly. And and that's a great example. And it really does draw attention to the fact that part of the problem with the current system is that it is too simple.
But then by uh the same token uh any change to the system uh in terms of the way that we we put um some kind of numbers on the food labels um is going to be complicated and and complexity is a hard sell. Yeah. So we I I've thought of th things I mean you probably have two uh like a a some kind of traffic light system where uh you have red amber and and green um and uh you uh you associate those with um the particular numbers that you put on the on the food label and say uh I i if it's uh if it's uh if it's the red then uh probably actually you you you know under various circumstances you're gonna get more calories than you expect from this and uh and if it's green you get less or whatever. Oh so base base it on expectations rather than on uh health not don't have it be a because I think most of the health claims are garbage anyway. So it's like uh base it on expectations like uh that's an interesting idea.
Yes the uh something that that you know emphasizes that um nothing very precise is going to come out but you here are some ways to think about what it's gonna do to you. Yeah I mean I think the real damage and you know you touch touch on this, but the real real damage is this is that um once you apply numbers to something and this is my problem with much of nutritional science in general once you apply numbers to something then the average person believes that those numbers have meaning. And so now there is this idea that there is a simple number that has a a meaning and in fact uh it it doesn't and and so you can't go back and tell someone well your whole you know m you your whole mentality about the way uh food works is based uh on this thing that you think is simple and is accurate but in fact I can't give you any good number sorry. People will won't buy that. You know what I mean?
Yes. Well I mean I mean to me the you know the ultimate example of this of course is the fact that um that uh what uh my group and I have been emphasizing is this enormous difference between raw and cooked and if you just look at the numbers in the USDA website which is the source for where uh a lot of the materials or a lot of the food labels come from uh what you will see is that uh you are supposed to get the same number of calories from uh raw food as you do from cooked. So if you take you know a carrot and you cook it raw uh you sorry you eat it raw and uh and then you cook it, according to the USDA website you're gonna get the same number of calories. Well it's completely absurd. Yeah of course and and uh you know this is actually ultimately could be dangerous because people who believe in numbers and as you say, you know people tend to believe in numbers once they're given them uh will uh stick to their guns and use them to support their philosophy and what could be dangerous is that uh you could as a result get uh too little food from uh eating it raw and that's a choice if you're an adult and if you're a child it's um something that your your parents give to you and that's where it really could be dangerous you know and we we have cases uh that have been reported of um of infants dying from eating raw food right because well right I mean so I have a question when you're ready to I don't think it's related but when whenever you're ready oh if it's it's not related to uh we'll we'll we'll get what are they we'll get in a minute if not if it's not really all right so let's let me because if people haven't read the book yet I encourage them to go out and uh and get the book it's uh it's a fun read it's uh well written uh and uh right now we're really talking about the f the except for the nutrition labels we're talking about the first half so the first half I would guess Professor is more um contentious in the scientific community and the second half is more contentious in the kind of sociological uh in the community uh community and the second half is more contentious kind of sociologically would you say that's true or no?
Yes probably that's right uh uh yeah I mean you know it's not that contentious but but nevertheless uh that that's where it's provocative let's put it that way. Yeah yeah okay that's a better way to put it so let's stay with the the first half and the first half is really about this this thesis of um cooking and and I was completely fascinated because uh Professor you you spent a lot of time actually hanging out with uh with great apes uh you know chimps and whatnot in in in Africa observing them eating the way they eat uh do doing these sorts of things how long how long per day how um how much time per day does the average uh great ape take eating? Um so a chimpanzee which weighs um I don't know uh something like a hundred pounds, uh, will spend uh roughly five or six hours just chewing. Just chewing. Not gathering, just chewing.
Just chewing, yeah. So so uh you know, don't time up into three and that sort of thing, um, but uh but literally with food in their mouth, just moving their jaws up and down, uh it is about half the day. And so this is one of the incredibly striking things about uh the difference between us and uh our cousin primates, because uh it's all related to body size. You know, the bigger you are, then the more time you've got to spend chewing, because you've got to get more food into your body. And um, so if we were eating our food raw in the same way that uh chimpanzees and gorillas and orangutans do, then we would be spending something around seven or eight hours chewing per day.
Now now the reason, uh for those of you that haven't read the book yet, that you would that we would have to chew more than uh the chimp is I mean, I would guess not just because our muscles are less strong, but because we require more energy to run our brains, yes, and we have a less efficient uh intestinal system. Well, okay, now here's the funny thing about our brains. Um they're incredibly expensive to run, and you can never turn them off, unlike a computer. And so, you know, they're expensive to run when you're asleep, they're expensive to run when when you're awake. Um, but uh even though they are costing uh something like uh between a quarter and a fifth of all the energy that you eat, um when when you're resting, uh something like um uh twenty five percent of the energy i in your body is you being used to run your brain.
Nevertheless, the total amount of energy that humans are using when they're asleep is the same in proportion to body weight as it is in any other primate. Huh. Is that because we're spending less energy on digestion? Exactly. So so the the solution that many people like and it seems to really uh have a lot of sense to why it is that we are able to afford to run a big brain, which is obviously so important, is that uh we cut back on running our guts.
And and this makes every sense because we have the smallest digestive system in relationship to body size for any primate and we have the largest brain in relationship to body size for any primate. And the gut is one of the most uh expensive parts of the body. And our is it is uh it's been a while, but isn't it also true that our brain is more more um calorically expensive to run per gram than uh most other brains we just run it at a faster rate we overclock ourselves yes uh no no that that's not right um we i it's the same uh a a gram of our brain uh it costs the same as a gram of mouse brain okay good nice all right so like a whale just a whale takes a lot more energy to run their brain but but they have a much bigger body so it's a smaller percentage uh for which one for like a whale anything something with a huge brain an elephant something with a giant yes yes exactly yes right all right cool so we are not overclockers so uh interesting uh okay now uh so on this uh let me s some recent papers that have come out and uh see what your response is uh your c uh colleague, uh colleagues, I guess. Uh uh Lieberman, Professor Lieberman, uh, who I guess is in your same building or in the building next to you at Harvard. Absolutely, yes.
He's uh he's about uh twenty yards away. Ah, yes, you two can duke it out in the real life. You don't need to write papers. You can just go uh have it out with each other. Absolutely, yes, right.
And uh and Professor Zink uh wrote a paper basically saying that they think that uh chewing, uh uh pounding rather and and beating things with tools prior to um uh prior to consuming them is enough to um allow us to get the extra energy out rather than uh cooking. Uh what are your thoughts on that? Well, my my thought is that uh it's a very odd idea. I mean, I you know, they're they're both uh good friends and uh and Katie Zink was my my student at one point um and uh so you know I I I like what they do. But I think it's this particular conclusion is odd because uh it doesn't seem to pay attention to uh what we know about raw food.
You know, we know that um that uh even with incredibly high class food uh you put into electric blender, uh you as a human will still lose weight. And what they're saying is that way back in the Paleolithic, when you're using incredibly crude stone tools, that people could have done enough by way of pounding and cutting their food to um increase the uh ease of digestion and um and get enough food out of it. Yeah, I mean, I think the uh the study, by the way, if people want to read it, is called Impact of Meat and uh Lower Paleolithic Food Processing Techniques on Chewing in Humans in uh nature. I you know, I think to me one of the main things about the the paper that I didn't get was they're really just they were focusing on time to create a bolus to swallow, right? Which is not necessarily the the the only thing that's important.
It's part of it, right? Decreases is the amount of time you have to chew, but not the amount you have to consume to get it to to get the um the calories required, right? Is that is that that is absolutely right. Um so it's very awkward with humans because it's very difficult to get permission to be able to study what happens when people eat raw meat, say, because the authorities are so worried that people are going to get uh some kind of a worm for something from eating raw meat. Yeah.
So they were stuck with um seeing what happens in terms of the time spent chewing. And you know, they did very nice experiments uh showing that that if you pound your meat or or even just slice it, then you will spend less time chewing. But it doesn't c come to the heart of the matter, as you said. Uh, here's another problem. Um we actually uh have uh very good evidence as a profession that stone tools of uh the type that they're talking about were used long before humans uh emerged into the present body form.
So the genus Homo um you know were Homo sapiens and an earlier form that had the same basic body shape as Homo erectus, and that happened around one point nine million years ago. But then prior to that, all the way back to three million years ago, you've got uh stone tools being used by somebody, and those somebodies um were pre-human ape-like forms. And so, you know, that's another difficulty that uh that if they were using those tools to modify their food, it didn't do anything for them for a very long time. Yeah, you know what you know what you should do, Professor? You should gat you should let people know here, like on uh this or any other show, we will volunteer to chew raw meat.
We don't have to spit it out because we're not part of a a sanctioned study. Like isn't there some way to just create a voluntary study or is that completely unethical? No, unfortunately we're not allowed to do that because when we tried to publish it, um the uh journals will ask for the statements showing that we did it all ethically. Yeah, exactly. That's right.
And you'd be run out of the community on a rail, I presume. Yeah, that's not a bad idea. Yeah. Because the the thing is, right, yeah, if you're if you're writing books, right, I mean clearly you you are, because I mean you could get a bunch of volunteers. I could probably find uh, you know, a hundred volunteers like today who would be willing to chew and swallow the meat and not worry about it.
But you know, then the question is how would you trace our uh how would you trace our um you'd have to do it inside of a s uh chamber to measure how much we were absorbing, I guess, which is that. Yeah, you know, it becomes complicated, but uh but I I appreciate the thought and uh hey, maybe I'll get get back to you with some some studies. I mean, you know, we'd we'd love to be able to to follow what happens um to uh the microbiome of people eating raw food and people eating cooked food. So you know what we're talking about there. Yeah, yeah.
The uh the bacteria in the colon. And uh there's increasing evidence that this is quite important, um a contributor to uh the amount of energy we get out of our food. Uh very little is known about um anything that differs between the raw and the cooked uh foods. So shifting people from raw to cooked diets and vice versa, um and uh recording their microbiome would be yeah, it's certainly something that people are going to be wanting to investigate soon. Yeah, well maybe we could find some quasi-ethical way to do it.
Well, yes, exactly. Right. Yeah. Um so uh see if I have any more uh like uh pressing questions on the on the first section. Um let's let's move to the the second section now and then we can we can move back and forth.
So the first section describes um you know uh a bunch of reasons why um the best explanation uh the cooking hypothesis, I guess you call it, the best explanation for how we got to be the way we are is that we started cooking. Yeah. Uh now the second section of the book deals with what the um cultural impacts of that are. Uh and so you know that's the part where you know it seems like uh it's it's interesting, get but it gets in in uh hot water for you know, or could potentially get in hot water because it deals a lot with um gender difference. Uh and so uh I'm not gonna take a stab at uh cliff noting that one.
So you want to give a basic uh rundown of what what cooking allowed to have happen in Yes. Well, sure. So uh h here's the first observation that uh even though nowadays in uh enlightened places in um in Western Europe and United States and so on, uh you have men who are really interested in cooking. Um the fact is that uh in every culture around the world, in every society, um it is uh almost entirely a woman's role to do the d ordinary domestic cooking, the ordinary household cooking. And um this is uh uh the most striking of all of the economic differences between men and women.
That women do the cooking. They the times when men do the cooking are special occasions when you have feasts, when you have uh some kind of great public affair and um uh men come out and and jointly uh roast the elephant as it were. Right. What uh uh and uh in the book, right, you point to the fact that the ability to not spend a lot of time chewing and having like uh your basic uh like some basic staples and calories already cooked allowed more time for uh one gr it's one group, the males to go out and hunt and therefore the other section devolved on the females to do that the kind of we know it's gonna be their uh cooking. Is that accurate or no?
No, that that is right. That if you look at small scale society, uh it it's kind of ironic in a way, because uh I I mentioned earlier that that uh if we were eating our food raw, uh then we'd be spending uh something like seven or eight hours uh chewing. And so now we eat our food cooked and we can save lots and lots of time. I mean, instead of seven or eight hours, it's one hour a day, if you look, or less than one hour a day, all around the world, doesn't matter where you are. Uh it's just the human condition.
Uh one less than one hour a day chewing your food. So what do you do with all the spare time? Well, here's the irony. The irony is that the women are mostly spending that time uh gathering food and cooking it and preparing it. But but meanwhile the men uh in some ways get off lightly.
And the reason the men get off lightly is not that they don't do anything, uh they do. They they do a lot of uh uh complementary ways to get food. I mean if you're living in a very simple way in a small scale society, uh as a hunter and gatherer, then the men are doing a lot of hunting. But they have options. Women don't have options.
They are absolutely required culturally to be there every day producing the the basic food um but the men if they want to they don't have to hunt you know they can go off and and uh lie under a tree and gamble or visit girlfriends in the neighboring area or or go to war or whatever else it is. And for for those of you that are listening to this and ha haven't read the book I encourage you before you draw any sort of opinions to go read the relevant sections of the book because uh Professor you go through uh a series of um societies that appear to contradict what you're saying but then you you have arguments uh as to how they actually kind of fit into the general pattern correct yes I mean th there are astonishing consistencies I I I would say that that's right. Um and so what we we do in the book is to uh uh I try and think about where's this pattern come from why is it that uh universally in in human societies it is the women who are doing the cooking and uh the men who have relative freedom and are able to absolutely rely on women providing food for them uh which is so unlike any other animal and uh I I come to the conclusion that uh this has got something to do with a very basic feature of cooking that once you rely on cooking then there's something funny about the way the food is produced and that is this that it is very easily stolen. It's very easily um used by people other than the ones who collected the food. So compare this with um oh if you're a chimpanzee, say you you climb into a tree, you uh pick up fruit and pop into your mouth and nobody can take it from you.
But if you're cooking food, you absolutely have to put the food onto a fire and just sit there for however long it takes for the food to cook. And during that time someone else can come along and take the food. So that means that uh the people who are doing the cooking and people who've collected as food are vulnerable to social competition. And so this is now, you know, a very strange kind of concept compared to thinking about us uh actually in the kitchen, but nevertheless, it is a reality of cooking on the campfire. And I think that reality leads to the following dynamic.
The women end up uh needing to be socially protected from the kids from the woman next door or from some lousy bachelor who doesn't have a a wife or from some other visiting man, and the person who protects her is the husband. So in the end it does fall back on the old the men do that kind of labor because of just physical strength. Well, physical strength is part of it, but it probably even more important is just the compact among men. It's the uh it's the consensus among men that uh they will uh act as a sort of unified body uh to declare that uh if somebody has been accused and found guilty of um uh pinching food from behind a woman's back, uh then they will punish them. And so the thing is that they can act in consensus, you know, because when when a wife says to a husband, Look, you know, th somebody's always taking food from my fire, then he doesn't necessarily go and confront them himself.
He'll go to the elders and say, We've got a problem in the camp, and then the elders will do something jointly. And that's where the real social power comes from. And and in your book you say that most uh most historical and um you know uh small societies, current small societies that are studied, the um the cooking, keeping the cooking in the family unit unit, the food, is more important even than sex. Yes, I mean, you know, well, we think of marriage, of course, as uh something that is is really purely about sex and having babies, and obviously that's a hugely important part of it. But it's very striking, finding places where um from a man's point of view, what is absolutely more important than raising a family when he first you know enters his twenties and so on and is becoming a man, um, is that there is somebody to cook for him.
And if he doesn't have a mother who is still alive providing his food or occasionally a sister, then he needs someone else to do it. And uh he he will somehow arrange that. And in some societies you find that his first wife will be someone who is post-menopausal. She might be in her sixties, uh no way that she's going to provide him any children, but he provides she provides him with food, and that means that he can go away and do manly activities during the day and uh be as masculine as he wants to be. Otherwise, he's forced to do the cooking himself and and uh in a world of stereotypes, then uh that means that uh he can't really adopt a male role.
And and also you say in these traditional societies, going back to you say when men cook, they're the ones or when they bring back food, hunt hunted food, meat, it's typically shared in the community, whereas they've gathered food, staples, cooked foods that the women would are not and er not ever shared, typically. Yes, I mean there are a number of ways in which uh the relationships among men in in these small scale societies are um are full of cooperation in a way that is is strikingly not so true of the women. So it tends to be the case that each woman has her own fire. She puts her own food that she has gathered with her own personal hands uh onto that fire, and she shares that food with uh her own children and uh maybe uh well definitely her husband and uh maybe one or two other close relatives. But it's pretty limited the sharing, whereas the men are much more likely when they catch something, uh if it's big enough to share, then they will share it very widely with um the other men uh in the community and then they share it with their own families.
All right, now let's get to the crux. Here's the here's here's the big question. So if that was the case for how we evolved not just physically but as uh culturally as a society to be where we are now, right? It let's just assume it's all that it's all completely accurate. What does that tell us about the way we need to, or does it tell us anything about the way that we need to um interact today in a society where most people they cook if they want to, they go to a restaurant if they want to, they order out if they want to.
I'm talking in richer societies, like you know, here in the US, um, where we're completely unhinged from any of these uh needs, right? We all have actual jobs that take up uh, you know, eight hours of the day, and cooking and eating is a relatively small proportion of uh of time spent is there I mean clearly there are echoes of what happened more than echoes right but is there is there any is there anything for the future like need we be bound by it anymore? No I I don't think there's any reason to think we have to be bound by the social patterns. I mean we would we would have to acknowledge them if in fact there was any evidence of a of an evolutionary impact on our psychology. I don't I haven't seen any such evidence so far.
So it seems to me that um that we should look at what happens in uh the human species in the past and in many societies today and uh and be sort of conscious of the fact that we want to get away from it in a world of uh of egalitarianism between the the sectors right I mean i i I don't remember whether you state that uh explicitly in the book but I mean the interesting thing to me is that we that there really doesn't seem to be once it's once it's no longer a physical necessity we no longer need to act that way anymore right yeah no that's exactly right uh on the other hand you know you might say that there are benefits to it I think one of the loveliest um uh papers uh studies that came out in the um time since the book was published was one that drew attention to the way that um eating around the fire uh is uh a is that system that is conducive to the most lovely kinds of stories and uh conversations that occur in uh the hunters and gatherers of South Africa. So the Bushman there, studied by Polly Wiesner, uh she recorded what people talk about all day. And basically, during the day, people talk about very little. Uh there are a few words just uh involved in uh organizing each other as to where we're going and what we're doing and uh how to cut up a piece of meat and so on. But the all the interesting conversations, she said, happen around the fire in the evening.
And that's when uh the stories are told about uh the original myths of the society, or of some tremendous hunt that happened, or some hilarious incident happened uh with someone in another group, uh, whatever. So, yeah, that reminds me of the fact that people do say that uh the conversations around a meal uh with your children are enormously important, and that there's something that is you know very sadly lost when everyone just watches television um w while they're eating. Oh, yeah. No, that's that's for sure true. I mean, the thing is is that there's there's the good and the bad of what used to be, right?
So it's uh the I mean I would hope that we could degender the idea of sitting around a uh a campfire and talking or or sitting around a meal. It I mean it's a it's an interesting thing. You don't want to throw out the baby with the bathwater, right? Yeah, exactly. No, I mean, you know, we're s we certainly should not be bound to the notion that women are the cooks.
Um that has been true in our past, and and that that's you know, that's bad from the point of view of uh stereotypes and uh assigning people to a particular role. Um hopefully we can get way past that as we move into uh uh a post gendered world. What are your thoughts on the kind of observation I've heard many times that uh most of the time in modern couples in the US um when there is going to be a shared um a shared uh uh shared housework between uh the man and the woman in a couple uh that the man almost always takes the cooking and the women almost always take the uh cleaning role on that. This is not my observation. I've heard this from from many people.
Uh do you think that's because cooking now is seen as a high prestige thing? It's just yet another I mean that yeah that's a really fun speculation. I mean one of the questions I think is fascinating, which I haven't seen any really satisfactory answers to is why do men tend to do the barbecuing well you touch on that in your book, right? That meat cooking has since time immemorial meat cooking if men were going to cook anything it was going to be the meat. Yeah I mean it it's one possibility.
Yeah another possibility is that uh because uh meat tends to be the the center of attention for the the meal uh the thing that makes that particular meal special then the men want to be in charge of it because you know they get all the excitement of uh of of producing it. Right. So even as we go towards less less gendering of things we actually still maintain this sort of problematic uh gender differences. Yeah I mean you know of course uh you know there are there are many other dynamics involved about uh who's looking after the children, who's taking children to school, you know, who's getting the jobs and so on. But um but the the point I would certainly want to emphasize is that um there's there doesn't seem to be any reason why our evolutionary past of uh women doing the cooking has to be the evolution it does not have to be the evolutionary future.
Okay. We gotta wrap up, but I do have a caller with a question for the guests. All right, cool. You're on the air. Hey, uh David, Professor Rangham.
Uh this is uh scooter in Montana and actually uh professor, I'm a uh Harvard anthropology grad, though I don't think we crossed paths there. Um but I this actually a question that was uh some some folks in the chat room were kicking around is uh uh just sort of generally, how does fermentation play into um uh kind of caloric uh benefits? Oh I think it's terrific question because we don't know that much about fermentation. Yeah, it's very clear that um uh that when you uh uh uh ferment your grains uh in water to producing a beer or you you ferment your meat um that it increases the net energy gain for the eaters. So there's looks like there's all sorts of ways in which uh fermentation is a sort of functional equivalent of cooking.
The the question in my mind that is unresolved is how far this goes back in time. You know, as you probably know, uh pottery only goes back to something like uh twenty, twenty-five thousand years ago. Sure. Um could people have been fermenting in skin bags uh for some tens of thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands of years before then? Uh could they have found ways to ferment uh even without containers like that?
Uh th there's all sorts of research uh possibilities that we still don't have any very good ideas about, I think. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Great question. Um Yeah, but was is there evidence of food stockpiling? In which case there would be auto fermentation or redding and things like natural wells or hollows or anything?
Uh right, no, I I don't think uh, you know, only very, very recently for that sort of thing. Uh th that would be wonderful to to find evidence um of the kind of thing that you see in the South Seas nowadays or or relatively recently where um cooked starches could be kept for I think people sometimes think a hundred years uh in underground uh cruel places. That's a great question. So uh we're gonna get kicked off the air. One question on the way out, Professor, and uh thank you so much for for being on.
Do people pester you about the paleo diet all the time? Oh, uh uh they occasionally ask and um yeah, I mean I like a Mediterranean diet myself. All right. I just I had to be I'd be remiss if I didn't because uh it seems to me to be completely not uh in uh you know part of what you talk about there, but I'm sure people pester you about it because they see the word paleo. Well, yes, that's true, right.
No, I I'm not wild about the paleo diet myself, and and uh I mean I think you know there's a lot of fantasy about the paleo diet that um uh i like so much of nutritional science, you know, people get hold of a of a very particular idea and really push it and uh it it's still an incredibly primitive area. I mean, it amazed me that uh when I started getting interested in cooking, there was uh no systematic literature looking at the impact of cooking on uh the energy production uh on the food. And we've had to do that work ourselves. I mean, just really brings home the fact that this is a very exciting area, the whole area of nutrition uh that uh still has a tremendous uh way to go before we really understand it well. All right, well, uh, we've been uh speaking with uh Professor uh Richard Rangham uh from Harvard University, author of uh Catching Fire, How Cooking Made Us Human.
Professor, thank you so much for being on the air with us today. Had a great time. Really appreciate it, Dave. Thanks a lot. All right, thanks.
And uh on the way out, I want to mention two things. Uh Shy wrote in about uh Bazbooza, which is a semolina cake soaked with uh syrup. He wanted to make it less sweet. Use a low DE, that's dextrose equivalent glucose syrup. You can get it on Amazon.
It's about 40% as sweet, it's about 81 bricks. You can water it down a little bit. It'll be uh a little more than half a little less than half the sweetness of the sugar that you want to uh add. And one shout out the Museum of Food and Drinks, two shout outs. Museum of Food and Drinks Spring Benefit is uh next week.
There are still tickets available. And uh my son, the quad has uh who's uh on the autistic spectrum, uh, goes to a twice exceptional school called the Quad Preparatory School. They're having their third annual Founders Gala. I'm gonna be making cocktails, Franklin Becker's gonna be cooking. Uh Mark Ladner and Christina Tozi are putting stuff out there, and you can go to eventbrite.com and type in Quad Preparatory.
Thank you so much, Cooking Issues. Thanks for listening to this program on Heritage Radio Network.org. You can find all of our archived programs on our website or as podcasts in the iTunes store by searching Heritage Radio Network. You can like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter at Heritage underscore radio. You can email us questions at any time at info at heritageradio network.org.
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