Food Fight!!

No, not THAT kind! Whether it is frustration-fueled tirades from a year ago or contemplation of health-related considerations today, it seems food is often on my mind. It was with some surprise, then, that the Delancyplace daily email that I got today was so tuned into what I was thinking about. Delancyplace is a daily email service that sends out thoughtful and intriguing quotations from different literary sources each day. Usually they are historically oriented, with the piece's respective authors whining about some historical nonsense, who did what wrong and when, in the vain hope of inciting some sort of social change that, in 4000 years of human history, has utterly failed to materialize. The entry I came upon, though, ran much deeper than the usual fare, though the implications of what was being said was well beyond the author's own realization. He was writing about the first human technology ever, fire, and its immediate impact on food.

J.M. Roberts, in his A Short History Of The World, states:

"Cooking became possible. As a result, eating became easier; marrow can be sucked out of cooked bones but getting it out raw is a laborious experience. Gibbons and gorillas have to spend much of their time simply chewing their raw food; cooking saved time, for food softened by it did not have to be chewed so long."

Well that is all fine and good, but cooking saves time? How does one reason so? Did we have to chew so long that we spent an extra 45-60 minutes per meal, just chewing? Cooking is an endeavor that is, itself, a significant time consumer. How much time, annually, if one disregards "free" cooking time managed through cooks and chefs at restaurants, does one lose to cooking meals? In a lifetime? Unless you're The Barefoot Contessa, who I think derives sexual satisfaction from cooking, you probably don't want to know the answer. But, ok, fine J.M. Roberts, I'll assume your roundabout logic is concrete and figure that "cooking saves time." So what?

"[Thus,] Time was made available to do other things."

Oh, you mean, like laboring in fields to produce all the cooking supplies? Like, um, time to invent work specializations that lead to complex social hierarchies that allow for subjugation, repression, and inter-tribal war activities? Let's just pretend I didn't read that last line of his. (Though I do highly recommend Bob Black's The Abolition Of Work and, of course, the indomitable "Thirty Theses" for further insight into how modern food production helps form the buffet line of our modern choose-your-own-slave-state.)

FINE, J.M., I'm with ya'. Keep filling me in about the value of cooked food.

"More important still, substances indigestible in their raw state could become sources of food; distasteful or bitter plants could be made edible."

At first glance this line seems difficult to refute. The ability to increase one's food supply is certainly an important thing, multiplying that individual's evolutionary fitness by decreasing his chances of starvation. But when you sit back and think about this from an unbiased perspective, isn't the idea of eating food that is naturally inedible a ludicrous thing for a species to go around doing? That food is considered inedible for a reason, after all. If you take a minute to look into any field guide for the harvesting of wild greens and other vegetables (which, I'm sad to admit, I have), you'll find that at least three quarters of the listed "edible" plants have taglines like "Indigestible prior to cooking" or, better yet, "Toxic and hazardous to health prior to sustained heat levels of 150 degrees Fahrenheit for a minimum of 10 minutes." Joy! Give me some of that! Nature has, over billions of years, built up complex, multi-celled organisms like ourselves, and with infinitesimally rare exceptions (such as certain ant colonies that chemically "cook" fungus that they grow), none of these myriad species cook their food. If a member of one of these species were to come across what they consider an inedible food source, they wouldn't sit down and contemplate different preparation methods to make it edible. They'd save themselves an amazing amount of time by spending two seconds to turn around and eat the plant (or unlucky mammal) behind them instead. Cooking saves time, indeed! Eating foods that one is not genetically adapted to eat is illogical and, in my opinion, one of the fundamental mistakes on which our entire civilization, pre-Biblical era to now, is based on. Show me a human being that was born with a microwave lodged in the side of his rib cage, and I'll consider changing my mind on this one. Of course, this line of thinking justifies my personal philosophy regarding the invalidity of all things that civilization has to offer, but I'll save that one for another time.

Further proof that nothing good ever came out of taking (a lack of) control over fire.

J.M. had another little tidbit, though, regarding the value of producing soft, easy to chew cooked foods:

"Finally, in the long run, eating cooked food helped to alter the shape of the face and the form of the teeth."

I find it inexpressibly odd that this line is delivered in what seems to be a positive manner. How have mouths changed? Well, if we look at our evolutionary ancestors, we find that our jaw lines have decreased in size and strength and that our teeth have become markedly smaller and less robust.

Before...

...and after.

Well thank goodness for that! Who wants a strong, muscled jaw line? Hardy, decay-resistant teeth? Nah, I'd much rather have a degenerating jaw line, glittering with metal-filled, rotten teeth, that is suited only for the consumption of Velveeta. Seriously, though, this is a good thing how? Is it any wonder that clean, shapely jaw lines are, in both men and women, almost universally considered physically attractive? Like almost all of the physical attributes that attract people to one another, this is the result of the desire to have a partner that has successful genetic traits. (In this case, that being a strong jaw that has the ability to chew up the tougher, raw foods that we are designed to eat.) For all of the human-instigated evolutionary processes that humanity has undergone, we still have yet to purge the animal. We still find human beings with genetic traits most beneficial to the uncivilized, primitive, and wild world, to be the most physically desirable. Do we listen to our internal urges? Should we heed Mother Nature's call, the real Godhead, and consider the fact that we are evolutionarily altering ourselves in ways that even WE find unappealing?

I once had a discussion with someone over the fact that I believed mankind would be significantly better off if it consumed more raw food products and less cooked, processed, shelved goods. He was almost offended by this, declaring that our modern food sources were perfectly adequate and were, in fact, a "progression." He continued, fully ensconced in human, self-righteous fervor, saying that we now control our own evolutionary destiny and are on our way to perfecting our species in a way that nature had long ago failed to. Right. Mankind currently has a higher percentage rate of cancer than it ever has before. Among these rates, the highest appear in what are considered the highly successful, first-world nations, who are fed, more than any other peoples, primarily by processed and packaged "food" products. Debilitating genetic diseases like autism are at all-time global highs, percentage-wise. Obesity in wealthy nations, especially the global processed-food capital of America, is quickly becoming a leading cause of illness for the population. But what does that matter in the face of our imminent "progression"? If, indeed, man has taken control of his evolutionary destiny (which, I have to agree, seems fairly accurate), to what destiny is he taking himself?

I once had another discussion with another individual about the nature of healthy eating, to which he responded, while cringing through a whiskey-induced hangover, "Who wants to live forever?" "I could care less about living longer," I replied, "I just want to live better."