“The Cooking Enigma,” by Richard Wrangham seeks to find the role of cooking in human evolution. The author begins by introducing a view that cooking is insignificant and has no influence on evolution. The alternate view is that cooking is important and led to several biologically defining features of humans, such as small guts, small teeth and slow life histories. Both views agree that cooking improves food nutrionally and makes it easier to eat and digest. Digestion consumes a lot of energy, especially when digesting hard food. Cooking may speed and ease digestion, although further experiments are needed. This may be vital, because minor dietary changes have far-reaching effects. To illustrate, the author offers an example comparing chimpanzees and gorillas. Both are frugivores and can supplement their diet with fibrous foods. However, gorillas can live solely on fibrous foods, while chimps cannot due to digestive and dental adaptations. This difference has impacted the ability to live in diverse environments for chimps and gorillas. It is possible that the need to rapidly develop d...
Chao-Wei Wu Jeffrey McMahon English 1A 23 July 2014 Chef Jeff Henderson_Cooked Chef JH’s personal memoir, Cooked, is a model confirmation that it is feasible for an author to give a moving message without sounding sermonizing and redundant. Cooked takes place after Henderson's rise and fall (and rise once more). The story begins with his alliance with drug merchants of becoming one of the top split cocaine merchants in San Diego by his 23rd birthday. It leads to his capture and inevitably his rising into the culinary business (Ganeshram 42).
Kerry Wade’s essay titled: “The Restoration of Voice in The Kitchen God’s Wife” is a literary criticism based upon Amy Tan’s fiction novel The Kitchen God’s Wife. She asserts that Winnie is able to escape the hardships of a patriarchal society and reshape her identity as she transitions from her past into her present life through the act of speaking up. Wade refutes this by first introducing Wen Fu’s dominance which acquaints Winnie’s oppressed silence, then by disclosing Winnie gaining a voice through Jimmie, and finally, by displaying what Pearl’s reaction is along with what she identifies her mother as after listening to the narration of her life story.
Gardner, Christopher. Notes from the Doc Talks. Stanford University. Web. April 10, 2014. Pollan, Michael. The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals. New York:
Following this central theme of humans and fire, Wrangham shares with the reader the plethora of theories that have been developed in the hopes of explaining the modern human brain. He settles on what he declares most plausible, the social brain hypothesis, which compares brain size with the size of mammalian guts. Following this hypothesis, it is proposed that more effective food preparation, with fire, would have allowed for more advanced digestion, and thus more advanced
As emphasized again and again by author Robb Wolf in his popular book, The Paleo Solution: The Original Human Diet, “Agricultural diets of today make us chronically ill.” The Paleo Diet, by forcing us to eat more like our caveman ancestors, fixes all of our detrimental, highly-processed, ca...
Pollan, Michael. The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals. New York: The Penguin Press, 2006. Print.
Food preparation is a feature of culture that can be seen amongst humans and primates. Humans prepare their food by cooking it as this helps with easier digestion and extraction of nutrients from the food. Although primates do not cook their food, Japanese macaque monkeys have been observed to wash potatoes that are covered with sand prior to eating the potatoes (Boesch, 2003). This behavior not only displays culture amongst the macaque monkeys, it also
Madeleine Thien’s “Simple Recipes” is a story of an immigrant family and their struggles to assimilate to a new culture. The story follows a father and daughter who prepare Malaysian food, with Malaysian customs in their Canadian home. While the father and daughter work at home, the mother and son do otherwise outside the home, assimilating themselves into Canadian culture. The story culminates in a violent beating to the son by his father with a bamboo stick, an Asian tool. The violent episode served as an attempt by the father to beat the culture back into him: “The bamboo drops silently. It rips the skin on my brothers back” (333) Violence plays a key role in the family dynamic and effects each and every character presented in the story
This essay explores the advantages of following a Paleolithic type diet. That is, to eat the foods our bodies have been ingesting and evolving on over the last 10 million years. Today’s highly refined grain, sugar, and carbohydrate based diet has been introduced into our lives only in the last .4% of the time we have walked upright on this planet. This drastic shift in our nutritional intake is the basis of many new age diseases of modern man.
The following essay examines the evolutionary approaches of anthropologists and neo-evolutionists Leslie White and Julian Steward. Although, Leslie White and Julian Steward debated against each other over their respected evolutionary approaches, both approaches do share several similarities amongst each other, even though both anthropologists disregarded any relationship between the two.
Ungar, Peter S. Evolution of the Human Diet: The Known, the Unknown, and the Unknowable. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007. Print.
Cooking is the art and science of making food for eating by applying heat. Cooking techniques are a set of methods and procedures for making, cooking and presenting food. The origins of cooking are unclear. Early humans may have savoured roast meat by chance, when the flesh of an animal killed in a forest fire was found to be more palatable and easier to chew and digest than the raw meat. Food hadn’t been invented , though until long after they had learned to use fire for light and warmth. It has been analyzed that Peking man roasted meats, but no clear evidence supports this theory. From whenever it began, however, roasting spitted meats over fires remained virtually the sole culinary technique until the Palaeolithic period, when the Aurignacian
Eating behaviour is a complex behaviour that involves a vast array of factors which has a great impact on the way we choose our meals. Food choice, like an other behaviour, is influenced by several interrelated factors. While hunger seems to drive our ways of food consumption, there are things outside of our own bodies that influence our food choices and the way in which we eat. The way we eat is controlled by and is a reflection of our society and cultures. I explore this idea through a food diary I created over a few weeks and the observations made by several anthropologists that I have studied.
So what exactly did cavemen eat, and why should you eat like them? Modern man has advanced significantly in food production, we have discovered ways to make food in all shapes and flavors. We have so many options on what to eat, and so many opinions on what’s good for us and what I not good for us. From the consumer view, nutrition is chaotic at best. One day something is good for you, the next it can cause disease. Eggs increase cholesterol, Eggs do not increase your cholesterol. Pizza is a healthy food, Pizza is junk-food. With so many different methods and practices it can get rather confusing. Take the USDA food pyramid for example, his poster can be found in school cafeterias and hospitals across the country. However an article from Scientific American magazine that was written by scientists from the Harvard school of public health was actually condemning the dietary recommendations of the food pyramid. (Cordain & Friel, 2005) At one point and time there were 30 million Americans following the Atkins diet by eating more fat and losing more weight. However in utter contrast Dean Ornish says that fat and meat cause cancer, heart disease and obesity, and that we would all be better off by converting to vegetarianism. (Cordain & Friel, 2005) In other more well-developed scientific disciplines, universal paradigms help guide researchers to informative end points while they design their respective experiments and theories. For example in Geology the continental drift model established that all current continents were at one time joined as one large continuous landmass that eventually drifted apart to form our current continents. These concepts are not theories but undisputed facts that serve as an orientation for other inquiries r...
In general, veganism is understood as eating strictly vegetables and abstaining from animal products altogether. Anthropologists believe, according to their studies of many human fossils around the world, that sixty five million years ago most humans ate mainly plant foods, being more likely gathers than hunters. In fact, the human digestive system resembles this early vegetarian condition from other plant-eaters in the coprolites and rudimentary tools discovered through archaeological findings at primitive human settlements. As climate changed, physical structure also changed: the discovery of fire and the increase of brain size modified diet to include meat products. These facts, argue proponents of banning animal products, illustrate that humans are not meant to be meat eaters.