In a cave in South Africa, archaeologists have unearthed the remains of a million-year-old campfire, and discovered tiny bits of animal bones and ash from plants. It’s the oldest evidence of our ancient human ancestors—probably Homo erectus, a species that preceded ours—cooking a meal.
It’s a long way, of course, from that primitive repast to preparing a multi-course meal on your kitchen stove, or sticking a quick snack into the microwave. But without our early ancestors’ innovation, you might not be here now to enjoy that broiled chicken breast and side of sweet-potato fries. Cooking, some scientists believe, played a crucial role in the evolution, survival and ascent of early humans, helping to transform them from a ragged, miniscule fringe of struggling hunter-gatherers into the animal that dominates the planet. Moreover, since then cooking has continued to exert a powerful influence upon human civilization in numerous ways—not just by filling our bellies, but by helping to nourish the culture and rituals that form humanity’s social nature.
Early humans may have been motivated by a simple benefit. When food was cooked, it probably tasted better to them. But Harvard University professor of biological anthropology Richard Wrangham, author of the book Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human, argues that cooking had far more profound benefits for humans. By using heat to chemically alter their food, human cooks softened the cell walls of plants to enable them to release their stores of starch and fat, and broke down the connective tissue in meat, making its nutrients more accessible as well. As a result, they got a greater caloric payoff from their food; a cooked portion of oats, wheat or potatoes provided 30 percent more energy than the raw stuff.
As a result, Wrangham and others believe, human ancestors were able to consume enough energy to fuel the evolutionary development of successively larger brains. At the same time, because they didn’t need big guts to digest all that raw stuff, their body shape evolved to become more slim and lithe. And by cooking and making their food easier to chew, they avoided having to spend four to seven hours a day on mastication, as other great apes have to do. That freed up enormous amounts of time that they could use for other purposes, such as learning and developing language.
Cooking, Wrangham has written, may also have led to the division of labor along gender lines and mating practices. By providing quickly-produced calories, it enabled male hunters to get back into the wild and stalk more prey, while females stayed behind and concentrated upon cooking the meat and whatever plant foods they could gather. But that division also left the female cooks vulnerable to marauding, hungry males who might be attracted by the smell of the food. In order to protect themselves and ensure access to the food for themselves and their young, a female found it advantageous to bond with a single male protector and provider. That may have been a factor in development of the basic human pattern of monogamy that continues to this day--as well as gender inequality, he believes.
But that was just the start of cooking’s influence upon civilization. In ancient Rome, fine dining became a status symbol, and the society developed a class of highly-sought-after slave cooks who competed against one another to provide the tastiest dishes to the rich, in addition to bakers, grinders, buyers, carvers and others who worked beneath them.
In 14th and 15th century Europe, what people cooked in their kitchens became an even more pronounced dividing line between economic and social classes, and nobles even began to collect and publish books of recipes of dishes “which are more delicious than others and more suitable to the tables of kings and princes than the lowly and men of little property,” as one culinary writer of the time explained.
In 19th century America, the experience of cooking for ordinary people was altered by technology. The development of the mass-produced cast-iron cook stove, which provided a raised cooking surface that required less bending and heavy lifting than cooking at a hearth, enabled a cook to perform multiple tasks, such as boiling water while baking, on a single coal or wood fire.
At the same time, railroads enabled people in cities and towns to get relatively fresh food from farms that were many miles away, which gave people more good ingredients to cook—meat, poultry, fish, vegetables and fruits—than ever before.
By the turn of the 20th century, new labor-saving gadgetry such as egg beaters and mechanical apple peelers also became the vogue; one cookbook author, for example, recommended 139 different utensils that every homemaker supposedly needed. That undoubtedly made Americans healthier and happier.
In the decades that followed, kitchens shrank in size and cooking for the family, once a communal activity that often involved multiple generations, became increasingly the job of the lady of the house. Canned soups and packaged convenience foods became common, which undoubtedly drained some of the pleasure and feeling of achievement from cooking. But after World War II, things again began to change, according to food historians Elizabeth Demers and Victor Geraci. Americans visited Europe and brought back the French ideal of eating fresh foods and savoring meals. And immigrants from Central and South America and Asia introduced new foods to the American palate. As a result, Americans began to seek out new tastes and new cooking techniques, and more of us came to see cooking and eating as a sensual, artistic experience that was an important part of our lives.
That trend toward viewing cooking as a source of pleasure and enjoyment, rather than just a source of nourishment, has become even more prevalent in the 21st century. Food writer Michael Pollan notes that since the mid-1960s, the amount of time spent preparing meals in the typical American household has decreased by half, to just 27 minutes per day. But at the same time, paradoxically, “We’re talking about cooking more—watching cooking, and reading about cooking, and going to restaurants designed so that we can watch the work performed live,” he writes. Additionally, top chefs increasingly are household names who star in their own reality TV shows. Cooking, he argues, “Has somehow been elevated to a popular spectator sport.”