Pegando fogo: Por que cozinhar nos tornou humanos. by Richard W. Wrangham

Jul 25, 2011

Judyta Szaciłło rated it

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Shelves: rate-enjoyable, gnr-pop-science

"Cathing fire" is an interesting book. It presents some ideas that are original and thought-provoking about the phenomena that made us human. Some of them are perhaps too far-stretched and the author is too busy focusing on his main subject - processing the food - to notice the conglomerate of many other influences, not rooted in the food (pre)history. In short, the book offers interesting contents, but it is too biased.
It is also too repetitive - the same arguments appear dozens ...more

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Sep 20, 2011

John David rated it

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My review will set aside the evolutionary and anthropological portions of the book and focus on the first three chapters and Wrangham's claim that "we [humans] fare poorly on raw diets." (p. 53) These chapters are rife with bad science and logical fallacies, and he does not substantiate his claim. It would take pages to detail the many problems in these chapters; I'll restrict myself to the most egregious.

In his attack on raw foodists, Wrangham cites two studies. The first ...moreMy review will set aside the evolutionary and anthropological portions of the book and focus on the first three chapters and Wrangham's claim that "we [humans] fare poorly on raw diets." (p. 53) These chapters are rife with bad science and logical fallacies, and he does not substantiate his claim. It would take pages to detail the many problems in these chapters; I'll restrict myself to the most egregious.

In his attack on raw foodists, Wrangham cites two studies. The first involved unhealthy participants who were put on a mostly raw diet for 12 days (p. 16). Sample size? Nine. Yes, we are going to draw our conclusions from a 12-day study of NINE people. What happened to those nine people? In 12 days, their cholesterol levels dropped 25 percent; their blood pressure, which had been dangerously high, fell to normal levels; and they lost an average of 9.7 pounds. And this proves that humans can NOT thrive on a raw diet? It sounds like the opposite to me. If the subjects were already at a healthy weight, then we might be concerned about the weight loss. I suspect they were overweight since they were chosen for the experiment because of their high blood pressure.

The second was a study of 513 raw foodists in Germany (p. 19). There was a great variety in the actual food intake of these participants, yet they are generalized as "raw foodists." The researchers discovered that the more cooked food a person ate, the higher their Body Mass Index. Men who transitioned from a cooked to raw diet lost an average of 21.9 pounds. The scientists thus concluded that "a strict raw food diet cannot guarantee an adequate energy supply." Where is the evidence? The fact that these people were alive proves that they were in fact receiving an "adequate energy supply." After those men lost 20 pounds did they continue shrinking until they wasted away and died? Or did their weight loss level out after they reached a healthy weight? Given the epidemic of obesity in the United States, we might want to rethink that "adequate energy supply."

Wrangham then shares an anecdote from one woman who complained that she was always hungry on a raw food diet. He even shares her daily menu. She was consuming wheat grass juice, sprouts, some vegetables and very little fruit. No wonder she was hungry! She was not consuming enough calories! The successful, thriving raw vegans I know eat tender leafy greens for the vitamins and minerals, and get the vast majority of their calories from fresh, ripe fruit. There are as many calories in one banana as in two entire heads of lettuce! Throughout his book, Wrangham makes gross over-generalizations. This woman is not eating a healthy raw diet and Wrangham generalizes that all raw foodists eat the same way and experience the same results. This would be like studying the health of a small group of people who exclusively eat food from McDonalds and then drawing conclusions about the effects of cooked food on the human body. Just because someone is eating a raw diet doesn't mean he or she is eating an optimal, healthy raw food diet.

Wrangham leans heavily on his belief that cooked food yields more energy than raw food (p. 55). He admits that "authoritative science" such as the USDA and the nutritional consensus rejects this idea. He calls that "puzzling. Obviously it conflicts with the abundant evidence that humans and animals get more energy from cooked food." His reasoning? People who eat cooked food are fatter than people who eat raw food. Therefore, cooked food has more energy in it. Huh?

He consistently cites weight gain as a sign of health and vitality and weight loss as a problem. He does not differentiate between weight loss in obese people and weight loss in normal or underweight people. It would be more important to know whether a person is approaching an ideal, healthy weight or moving away from it, but Wrangham never makes that distinction. His metric? Weight loss = Bad; Weight Gain = Good.

He insists there is "evidence that all animals thrive on cooked food." (p. 80) Yet the only evidence cited is rate of digestion and weight gain. Yes, farm animals gain weight faster when fed cooked food. Are they healthier for it? No, they are not. If we did not slaughter them while young, they would become very sick. (Read The Omnivore's Dilemma) He even makes the contradictory claim on page 39 that pets fed cooked food become obese and benefit from switching to raw food.

Cooking does not add any energy to food. It can, however, increase the energy DENSITY of food, not by adding calories, but by removing water, which weighs a lot but has no calories. In other words, it is easier to overeat on cooked foods because they have less mass and volume than their raw counterparts.

Another generalization: "Cooked food is easier to digest." SOME food IS easier to digest cooked, especially grains, starchy tubers and meat. That doesn't mean that ALL food is easier to digest if it is cooked. He doesn't present any evidence that a cooked apple will digest better than a raw apple. Humans are not biologically suited for eating meat and starches; that's why they digest much more easily if they are processed in some manner, such as by cooking. That is also why most raw foodists DON'T EAT STARCHY TUBERS AND MEAT! Most of the touted benefits of cooking in chapter three are concerned with foods that contemporary raw foodists do not eat. Yes, if you want to eat potatoes, pork and plantains. I recommend cooking them. Ripe bananas, berries and leafy greens are ALREADY tender and easily digested. If anything, the need to cook starches and meats before they can be utilized by the body would motivate us to eat more foods that are suited for human consumption in their natural state.(less)

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Jul 10, 2010

Samie Foster rated it

Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human

Overall rating: Just unique perspective of our evolution told in this one.

This is odd review for smoothies reviews, because this time it is on a none fiction book written by Richard Wrangham. it’s called Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human. I didn’t want to read it. I just had to in order to pass a English course.
The book is a collection of scientific essays. It’s about how cooking began ( or thoughts of how it began) The...more

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May 11, 2010

Emily rated it

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Shelves: non-fiction

Dr. Wrangham is a British Primatologist over at Harvard and his book, “Catching Fire,” is an interesting science book full of nothing but science. He starts with a basic supposition that something happened on the evolutionary boundary between the habilines, largely shown as Homo Habilis and our buddy Home Erectus. By examining the skull structure, chest cavity, molar structure, and the analysis of diet, nutrition and food science, his theory states that humanity made two major jumps:

...moreDr. Wrangham is a British Primatologist over at Harvard and his book, “Catching Fire,” is an interesting science book full of nothing but science. He starts with a basic supposition that something happened on the evolutionary boundary between the habilines, largely shown as Homo Habilis and our buddy Home Erectus. By examining the skull structure, chest cavity, molar structure, and the analysis of diet, nutrition and food science, his theory states that humanity made two major jumps:

1. Australopithecine -> Homo Habilis by the introduction of scavenged meat into the diet, well pounded with early tools to make it palatable and digestible.

2. Homo Habilis -> Homo Erectus by placing the vegetables and meat in the fire cook the food.

He marries primatology with food science to show how cooked meat and vegetables greatly reduces the time to chew and digest food while keeping the exact same caloric and nutritional content of food. Experiments show feeding cooked and easy to chew food to animals, especially primates, results in very fat primates who always prefer cooked food to raw. Raw food consumes an enormous time to chew and requires large molars, which Homo Sapiens no longer has, but cooked food needs a smaller digestive system and smaller molars. It also frees Homo Sapiens from the task of chewing all day to doing other things — a rate of spending 60% of the day chewing down to less than 10%. Energy also is conserved in physiology — all animals across all species and genus with access to easily digested food have reduced gut size and put all that energy into increased brain cavity.

Fire provides a whole host of other evolutionary advantages — more hours in the day available to be active, a source of protection at night, a source of warmth, a place for culture to grow and breed, and a clear division of labor between the sexes — hunting and cooking. Dr. Wrangham pulls dozens of examples from many different hunter-gatherer cultures worldwide, from Inuit to Australian aborigines to the !Kung of Africa to South Pacific Islanders, and finds commonalities that involve cooking, meat/vegetable balance, and division of labor and economic trade-offs. All revolves around fire and food.

As for keeping a fire going, experiments show that chimpanzees can keep a fire going indefinitely. If a fire, captured, was brought in to a cave or another protected place and was properly venerated as the God it is, certainly a fire could be kept going. Homo Habilis was a tool-maker and tool-user — if Homo Habilis realized using the gold (pyrite-filled) stones to smash instead of the grey or brown ones, fire would start, and it had enough presence to repeat the process, fire could be made and kept going. It’s reasonable to believe mankind made fire and kept fire far before measured time.

The arguments make sense and they are well sourced with tons of footnotes, a vast bibliography, and references pulled from other sources. The argument is also persuasive — we can find fire pits up to 800,000 years old and after that there is no trace but that means very little. If one little group became Homo Erectus and survived, we would never find evidence of that one small tribe who lived on. Too many evolutionary advantages match with the archeological evidence. Something happened at that boundary between Homo Habilis and Homo Erectus, something that allowed the gut to shrink and the brain to expand and Homo Erectus to spread all over the world. Keeping fire and cooking food makes sense and the arguments are reasonable.

It’s a fairly short, quick read as these sorts of books go at 320 pages. Highly recommended to anyone interested in human evolution and/or food science.(less)

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Apr 04, 2010

Kate rated it

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How did australopithecines develop into Homo erectus? The traditional answer has been that the use of tools allowed them to hunt, and that the increased protein in the diet allowed the developmental spurt toward a bigger brain. But there are two, not one, major jumps in development along this road toward Homo sapiens. Richard Wrangham argues that the first, as has been established, resulted from hunting and eating more meat (and not just consuming scavenged meat), but that the second came from c...moreHow did australopithecines develop into Homo erectus? The traditional answer has been that the use of tools allowed them to hunt, and that the increased protein in the diet allowed the developmental spurt toward a bigger brain. But there are two, not one, major jumps in development along this road toward Homo sapiens. Richard Wrangham argues that the first, as has been established, resulted from hunting and eating more meat (and not just consuming scavenged meat), but that the second came from cooking food, which implies controlling fire.

I almost put the book down after the first chapter, “The Quest for Raw Foodists.” The author denigrates vegetarians and raw foodists in such a way that I wondered whether he had had a relationship with a salad lover that had gone south, which might account for his contemptuous tone. That aside, he uses anecdotal and indirect evidence to suggest that cooked food allowed homo erectus to evolve, and that the species can not longer thrive on a raw food diet for any extended length of time.

Fascinating was the report of the Evo Diet, an experiment conducted in 2006 in the UK with patients suffering from life-threateningly high blood pressure. They submitted to a raw food diet for 2 weeks, consisting of 50 kinds of raw fruits, veg and nuts in huge quantities (except for one man, who snuck chocolate in week 2). The all brought their blood pressure down to less dangerous levels, but the diet had an unintended side effect: they all lost weight, about a pound each day.

The rest of the book argues that cooked food releases more energy (calories) than the same food would release if it were raw. This is true for both meat and plant-based foods. And the implications of this fact/argument are surprising.

1. Cooking softens food, and soft food is more easily digested and requires less energy to utilize than hard food. Among rats that were given hard pellets and the same pellets “puffed” like children’s cereal, the soft-food rats became obese in a matter of months, even through they were consuming the same number of calories as the hard pellet rats.

2. Soft food allowed homo erectus to develop smaller digestive organs. Because of the “conservation of total bodily organ mass,” this allowed h.e. to develop much larger brains.

3. In all hunter-gatherer societies, women gather and men hunt. Cooking food further differentiated the gendered division of labor, so that women also became the keepers of the fire and the cooks. This also made women vulnerable, since smoke from a cooking fire can be seen from a mile away. Women received protection and occasional meat from men, and men received a cooked meal from women, and voila, marriage was born. My question though: if men are off hunting, how can they be protecting the hearth at the same time?

4. This model challenges the convention, as anthropologists usually see marriage as “an exchange in which women get resources and men get a guarantee of paternity.” In this model, however, men marry so that they are guaranteed a hot meal.

I’m not a specialist in this field and would have to do much more reading to evaluate this properly, but I wonder just how many of the ideas presented in this book are Richard Wrangham’s. Ailello and Wheeler had (by Wrangham’s own description) attributted the increase in brain size to the invention of cooking. Furthermore, we’ve known for a long time that large-grain whole wheat bread is less fattening than highly milled white bread (because the whole grain bread costs us more energy to digest, and we eliminate many indigestible particles), and that cooked carrots have a much higher glycemic index than raw carrots (which is why some people choose a raw food diet to lost weight).

Richard Wrangham’s greatest contribution might be telling these facts in a series of anecdotes. You’ll have to read about the snake experiments yourself, but I’ll tell you about the Inuit diet. It won’t be too much of a spoiler. The sub-arctic Puiplirmiuts eat frozen caribou dropping like berries (thus raw), whereas most other neighboring tribes find this a waste of good food and take the partially digested lichen pellets (=euphemism) and boil them in blood soup. Maybe the most valuable contribution of this book is that it explains why there are no Inuit restaurants in London.
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Mar 03, 2010

C R rated it

Recommends it for: curious folks, fans of food, human evolution, and mystery.

Recommended to C by: library search

Shelves: evolution, non-fiction, science, food, anthropology

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Jan 04, 2010

David rated it

This is a book that appealed to me mostly as a student of anthropology, but was nonetheless interesting and entertaining from a layman’s perspective. His hypothesis: cooking food was a primary driver in the evolution of the genus Homo. He builds his case mostly by inference, which is about all one can do given the lack of hard archeological evidence. But his inferences are nonetheless impressive and more robust than I might have initially guessed. One of the things I liked most was that the ...more

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Dec 28, 2009

Firecooked rated it

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Sep 01, 2009

Julia rated it

Shelves: foodie-stuff

The only reason I'm not giving this book more stars is that straight-up evolutionary theory is not, in my opinion, the most scintillating thing to read ever. That said, Wrangham has written an excellent and provocative book. Basically, his (apparently radical, although I don't know enough mainstream evolutionary theory to know) theory is that learning to cook, thereby getting more nutritional value out of food for a lowered digestive cost, is what spurred the evolutionary churning that made huma...more

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Jun 24, 2009

Summer Bock, Holistic Nutrition & Herbs rated it

From the first page I liked the writing style. I found it easy to follow and understand, although a good knowledge of either nutrition or anthropology will make it a faster and more comprehensible read.

According to Wrangham, there are no raw food cultures ever recorded in human history. Yes, people eat foods raw but no culture has ever done this exclusively. Using this and other points, he provides an interesting critique to the raw movement.

Throughout the book Wrangham...moreFrom the first page I liked the writing style. I found it easy to follow and understand, although a good knowledge of either nutrition or anthropology will make it a faster and more comprehensible read.

According to Wrangham, there are no raw food cultures ever recorded in human history. Yes, people eat foods raw but no culture has ever done this exclusively. Using this and other points, he provides an interesting critique to the raw movement.

Throughout the book Wrangham impressed me with the quality of the studies he selected to back up his theorizing. His theories were well supported and well argued. He first shows that the evolution of humans was directly linked first to the use of fire and second to using fire to cook food. Perhaps because he is a primatologist, he draws frequent parallels between humans and animals throughout the book. He uses the comparisons as a way to understanding how we as humans ended up in the unique position of being the only animal that cooks and how this has affected and changed us. In particular, he argues that the process of cooking created a fascinating shift in our anatomy that led to bigger brains and smaller digestive systems.

Wrangham also offers an interesting critique of our current method of caloric analysis of foods. In his writing he discusses the actual differences in nutritional values in cooked versus raw food. He also takes into account the amount of work our bodies have to do in order to digest various macromolecules such as protein, fat, and carbohydrates. Fat is the easiest to digest. Protein takes more work to digest if eaten with high fiber foods. Softer food makes you gain weight easier. Harder food takes more work and you will not gain weight as easily. He cites an interesting study in which rats were given the same amount of calories per day. One group of rats had their food pellets ‘puffed’ to soften them, while the other group just ate regular pellets. At the end of the study, the rats that ate the softer pellets weighed more than the rats that ate the harder pellets. The rats that ate hard pellets literally had to burn more calories in order to digest the harder food. Because the puffed pellets were softer, the nutrition and energy from them was incorporated and digested with ease.

He had a few random judgments that stood out to me as unnecessary and unprofessional. His comment “Life can be unfair” in regards to how two people can eat the same amount of calories and if your digestive tract works harder (as is the case with most lean people) then you will gain less weight. And vice versa. This flippant and unpleasant side note should have been left out.
He also made the statement that you rarely find amenorrhea in women who eat primarily cooked food. Amenorrhea is a pathology where a women stops having her period, which is linked to osteoporosis. He says that it is common among women on a predominantly raw-food diet. I believe these statements to be completely unfounded. I have worked with a number of women with amenorrhea and they are not raw-foodists. I have a hard time believing I have found the very rare ones. From everything I have read, it is not a rare condition in women.

All in all, I really thought this was a great read. It got me thinking and his anthropological prospective was a welcome shift from the nutrition centric books I’m usually pouring over. I enjoyed the historical and evolutionary approach to understanding our relationship to food. I also enjoyed learning about the evolution of human anatomy in direct correlation with the foods we eat.

I’d like to take a moment to expound upon my own theories on the subject of cooking and raw food inspired by the topics of this book. Keep reading if you are interested in hearing how some of my thoughts shifted from Wrangham’s work....

I think all health counselors should read this book to gain a more well-rounded perspective on the history of cooked food and how cooking effects the nutritional value of food. I appreciate the shift in my viewpoint. It filled in a lot of blanks for me with regard to the raw food movement. I love eating raw, but have never quite gotten into it as a full-time dietary change other than a few month-long cleanses. Currently, I eat at least 75% of my food raw and this is fabulous for me. And I also notice that I enjoy the option of eating warm foods regularly. I like how grounded I feel after soup or grains.

What if the raw food movement is another dietary fad that is the answer to the high consumption of refined, chemicalized, pesticide-ridden, homogenized, and heavily processed foods. The Standard American Diet laden with meat and animal products left the United States feeling clogged and sluggish. Our country is host to millions of people who have a lot of gunk to cleanse from their intestines and the raw food diet offers this in a great way that doesn’t require you totally fast from food. You are cleansing and eating at the same time, which allows you to cleanse while working or doing your other day to day tasks. I think it is important to eat raw foods, but I also think it is important to stay balanced and build digestive fire. Sometimes a continual diet of raw foods can dampen digestive fire. If you already experience compromised digestive function eating 100% raw foods may be very difficult because it can further impair digestion. When I read raw food books, I seldom see this important issue being addressed.

I also get concerned for my clients who experience alienation from their families from eating a healing diet while overcoming health concerns. People connect and come together around food. This builds community and defines culture. For this reason it is important to find common ground within your family and eat food together. This strengthens family and community and creates a place to connect. This has been happening for thousands upon thousands of years. The nurturing of family and community is very important in holistic health. It strengthens our relationships, which are one of the main facets of primary food. (less)

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May 28, 2009

Moussa rated it

"“Catching Fire” is a plain-spoken and thoroughly gripping scientific essay that presents nothing less than a new theory of human evolution, one he calls “the cooking hypothesis,” one that Darwin (among others) simply missed...cooking increases the amount of energy our bodies obtain from food...The extra energy gave the first cooks biological advantages. They survived and reproduced better than before. Their genes spread. Their bodies responded by biologically adapting to cooked food, shape...more

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Jan 14, 2011

George rated it

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Anthropological studies are often interesting to me. A case is made for the origin of our species being connected with the use of fire to cook food, which as a form of pre-digestion allows us to get sustenance with far less effort than other simians and similar mammals. Our cultural norms involving family and village group in society have evolved with our reduced need for digestion (it takes us an hour to digest that which other animals take ten or more hours). This frees humans to pursue other ...more

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Apr 06, 2010

Nicole McCann rated it

I don't know why I can't find a listing with the English title, but it's "Catching Fire: How Cooking Made us Human."

This book was definitely my least favorite I've read in a while. There were some parts that had me completely engrossed, such as through evolution how our brains grew so large due to our stomachs getting smaller; while other parts just bored the hell out of me and were repetitive, such as softer cooked food giving our bodies more energy. I will say that it was...more

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Sep 04, 2009

Abby rated it

Shelves: non-fiction, dnf

From the first 75 pages, it seems that this author has a vendetta against raw foodists. While this lifestyle would seem a key point to address in light of his overall hypothesis (that it was the use of fire on our early food sources that helped up to evolve the way we did) it doesn't need to be at the detriment of his argument. He spends more time in the first quarter of the book systematically pointing out everything that's bad about raw food and no time discussing his very interesting premis...more

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Aug 03, 2009

Ann rated it

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Shelves: didn-t-finish

This is another one that started out pretty well, but about half way through I got bogged down again. I think he's right on with his premise that cooking is the thing that made us human but he really beat it to death. Even though he brought up many things that clearly support this theory in many other cases it seemed to me that he was bending the evidence to fit. He could have left out about half the book and made a nice clear case.

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Aug 30, 2010

Dave Riley rated it

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Shelves: ecology, food, history

Great review of the possibilities of our origins with a persuasive argument about cooking being a driving force for human evolution. Cross species comparisons make a lot of sense as Wrangham develops his argument.

Essential read, especially when he addresses gender issues. He sidesteps the challenge of the origins of language but nonetheless locates humans in the context of changing and challenging environments.

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Jan 07, 2010

Nick Weeks rated it

Recommends it for: Anyone who has an interest in science, evolution, food, or history.

Recommended to Nick by: NPR

Shelves: science, history

Excellent book. I enjoyed reading it so much that I was actually sort of sad to finish it. Wrangham uses this book to support his general thesis that man's evolution has been closely intertwined with his/her ability too cook. Using excellent and well thought through support, Wrangham shows the enormous benefits that early man derived from the ability to cook (smaller stomachs, larger brains, and most importantly, more free time) and shows how those advantages allowed humans to take a uniquely di...more

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Aug 06, 2011

Corin rated it

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Shelves: non-fiction-science

This is another great read I discovered thanks to CBC Radio's ¬´Quirks and Quarks¬ª science show. It's one of those brief, fascinating books that sheds more light on the impact of Darwin's evolutionary theory. in a nutshell, Richard Wrangham argues that cooking food was probably the biggest evolutionary leap made by our species since we climbed down out of the trees. (Not necessarily the wisest move we've ever made given the current state of the world...;) ) Cooking food gives us more calories, ...more

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Oct 15, 2009

Bill rated it

This is a very provocative book arguing controlling fire fundamentally pushed us along to evolutionary line into homonids. His scientific and physiological data is enormous and compelling; he has studied primates for decades and his references are exhaustive. His sociological arguments are most provocative and perhaps open to argument. He says that the division of labor we see in human societies (men hunt, women cook) is not a benign sharing of the work load but one created by the dominant males...more

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Apr 26, 2010

Elaine Nelson rated it

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Shelves: history, non-fiction, psychology, science, sociology, health

Review of the evidence for cooking as an important part of our evolution, looking at the fossil record, the habits and physiology of other primates, and the practices of modern hunter-gatherer groups.

He spends a chapter taking down the raw-foodist movement, mostly based on a German study, before getting into the evidence for cooking in our evolution. Most of that study's participants were at a chronic energy deficit, and a number of the women suffered from amenorrhea...and they had a...more

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Aug 12, 2009

Nomi rated it

Shelves: nonfiction

Very interesting analysis (based on tons of biological and paleontological evidence) by a Harvard anthropologist about how the cooking of food by our primate ancestors (homo erectus) enabled the development of larger brains, greater intelligence. He compares raw diets to cooked diets and demonstrates that although some nutrients are lost in cooked food, the payoff is greater: we can consume more calories more efficiently thus storing more energy much of which goes towards our brains. Also, Wrang...more

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Sep 28, 2010

Dee rated it

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Shelves: non-fiction

I like Wrangham's style --- lots of explanatory notes at the end of the book that contain more interesting stuff, but keeping to his main points in the body of the chapters. This is an interesting idea --- that we became human when we learned to cook our food. Wrangham postulates that it was the cooking of food that led to the shift in the skulls in homo erectus. The big jaw muscles that were necessary in earlier forms to chew raw meat and vegetables were no longer necessary, shifting the i...more

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Jun 29, 2009

Shelly rated it

Another in a long line of interesting evolutionary theories that cannot possibly be tested or proven. Still, the author makes a compelling argument using all sorts of anecdotal evidence.

Conventional wisdom has it that man first began hunting and only later learned to use fire. Wrangham argues that just the opposite is true, and he bases his arguments mainly on logic and comparative analysis of modern man and great apes.

Favorite argument:
Without cooking, primit...more

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Apr 30, 2011

Aaron added it · review of another edition

An interesting read.

I did not understand the critique mentioned on wikipedia (There is also evidence that human brain size has decreased by 8 percent in the last 10000 years, correlated with increased consumption of starchy grains following the invention of agriculture – this contradicts Wrangham's theory, that in an earlier period in human evolution an increased consumption of starchy foods (cooked tubers) led to an increase in brain size. - [they are arguing two separate condition...more

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Oct 09, 2010

Emily Mellow rated it

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Shelves: nutrition-health, politics-history, science

I just finished the chapter on how women in every culture, with exceptions in the most modern and urban cities, are solely responsible for cooking for their families. Cooking has always been woman's work, ever since we learned how to do it. The theory, and I am going to mangle it, is that having a woman to cook allowed a man to be a more successful hunter, thus beginning the family economics that we inherit today. I am glad we know at least one family where the father does all the cooking, just ...more

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Feb 11, 2010

J rated it

Wrangham writes about how important cooking was and is to human development. He makes a compelling case. Though the book is heavily referenced, his style is mostly anecdotal, and I feel he didn't argue most of his points fully, leaving many open questions and counterarguments incompletely reubutted. Nevertheless, it's an easy read and an interesting concept that is relevant today.

The fact that stuck out most in my mind is that you get roughly twice the energy from a cooked potato ...more

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Jan 19, 2010

Adrian added it

Anthropologist Wrangham posits that man's control of fire and use in cooking meat goes back nearly 2 million years and played a far bigger part in evolution than formerly thought. Cooking food reduced the need for big teeth, jaws, mouths and guts mainly because it takes much less energy to digest soft food. The extra calories we ingested were directed to building a bigger brain. Fire changed man socially too and brought about sexual division of labour-and more work for women-but also helped brin...more

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Feb 03, 2012

Cynthia rated it

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Interesting, but another one of those books that gets a little too detailed - or in this case goes on and on. I recommend reading the first half and then skimming. The basic premise is that we became human because we were able to divert more food energy into supporting brain activity, and thus a gradually larger and larger brain, and less into digestion. How? By eating high quality food that was cooked, allowing us to get more nutrition from that food. That sounds reasonable, and I'm personally ...more

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Dec 19, 2011

Tony Espy rated it

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This was a great book that espouses the viewpoint that cooking actually triggered a series of evolutionary changes which contributed greatly to the rise of our species from our earlier ancestors. In other words, as the sub-title says, this book is about "How Cooking Made Us Human". If you're looking for a book primarily about cooking, or you're into Intelligent Design, then this book probably isn't for you. However if you enjoy the occasional scientific book, and want to know more ...more

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Jul 25, 2009

Cindy rated it

Shelves: non-fiction, science

An interesting look at how the evolution of cooking, namely the use of fire, has effected the evolution of human beings. One of the parts I found interesting was his discussion of raw food diets as they are practiced today. I have a friend who has tried the raw food diet, and who has urged me to try it too, as a help in the various health problems that I have. But I've never been interested in trying it for myself. It was good to read his account, which takes modern research into raw food, and o...more

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title link	preview: Pegando fogo: Por que cozinhar nos tornou humanos.
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BBCode	[url=http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6059004-pegando-fogo?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_book][img]http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1270213523m/6059004.jpg[/img][/url] [url=http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6059004-pegando-fogo?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_book]Pegando fogo: Por que cozinhar nos tornou humanos. by Richard W. Wrangham[/url]

Pegando fogo: Por que cozinhar nos tornou humanos.

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Pegando fogo: Por que cozinhar nos tornou humanos.

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