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Cooking: What Separates Men From Apes (and Women)

And anthropologically speaking, women are always the cooks

By Evann Gastaldo,  Newser Staff

Posted Jul 29, 2009 1:14 PM CDT
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(Newser) – Cooking—not just eating—meat is what prompted human evolution, Richard Wrangham argues in his book Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human, and he discusses his beliefs—including an opposition to the trend of raw diets—with Salon. “Raw foodists argue quite strongly that it is our natural diet,” the doctor says. “But it was natural 2 million years ago, not a few thousand years ago.”

Cooked food is more nutritionally efficient, Wrangham argues, giving man more energy to develop bigger bodies and brains—and gender roles. “Cooking has this huge impact on households and our system of gender as we see it today,” he says. “In every single society women cook for men,” something so important that "it's more of a breach of social convention for a woman to feed the wrong man than it is for her to have sex with him."

In many societies you can really say that food or domestic promiscuity is far more serious than sexual promiscuity, says Dr. Richard Wrangham.
"In many societies you can really say that food or domestic promiscuity is far more serious than sexual promiscuity," says Dr. Richard Wrangham.   (AP Photo)
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I certainly recognize that raw foodists who live in an urban area of a well-to-do nation can make it work, so it's not that much against our biology. But I do feel very confident now that ... living like a hunter-gatherer on raw food is not possible. - Richard Wrangham

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COMMENTS
Showing 3 of 9 comments
riffran
Jul 30, 2009 5:28 AM CDT
mmmmmm steak tartare, with raw oysters, and a slice of habenero
meliska
Jul 30, 2009 2:47 AM CDT
Raw foodists don't eat meat. Nice try, though.
newsrmandan
Jul 29, 2009 9:17 AM CDT
After reading the article, I can say with clarity that this guy ate something while in Africa that affected his brain. That explains all this silly reasoning. He concludes that women cooking for men is a more natural progression in evolution for safety and protection against other scroungers than is marriage but it also allowed men to be men, so they could hunt and scrounge for sex, I guess...from women who were bad cooks? Evolution is silly

 
evolution • cooking • human evolution • human • anthropology • book • raw food • Richard Wrangham

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