Catching Fire

This book was the inspiration for my book and was written by a professor of Biological Anthropology at Harvard University. It sets out a convincing argument that cooking may have been started by the earliest humans about 2 million years ago, which is far earlier than most anthropologists believe. Much of Wrangham’s arguments are based on his own research that illustrates how cooking provided better nutrition resulting in the expansion of the human brain by 60% over thousands of years giving humans a head-start over all other living species. 

Wrangham collected the evidence that the ability of early humans to control fire was the key to the evolution of our large brains, because it made it possible to soften food to make it easily digestible, which had two advantages: the food had higher energy, which enabled humans to develop larger energy-demanding brains with a larger cortex and greater cognitive abilities, and it freed humans from lengthy chewing of uncooked food so that they could devote their time to exploring and exploiting their habitat and social organization

Cooking also gave food heightened flavors, which added to its attractiveness and was… show more.

Wrangham upended everything I thought I knew about nutrition and calories. In his provocative book, he discusses the actual differences in nutritional values of cooked versus raw food and how we must also take into account the thermic effect of eating (the amount of work our bodies have to do in order to digest various macromolecules such as protein, fat, and carbohydrates) and oxidative priority. 

Overall, this book will have you looking at processed foods--all kinds, even hummus or rice cakes, in a different way. You may also, like me, welcome the pivot from nutrition centric thinking to historical and… show more.

Wrangham makes a powerful case that the critical cultural innovation underlying the evolution of distinctively human intelligence was the capacity to harness fire and cook food. Since cooking makes food more digestible, the practice enabled our ancestors to swap out the large guts that are characteristic of the other great apes like chimpanzees, replacing them with much larger brains instead.