Why cows don’t write operas

Food and wine have always struck me, at their best, as art forms – things that make life more civilised, more valuable. They turn the process of storing energy from a chore into a delight.

I discovered quite recently, that the invention of cookery may be the principal reason why man was able to develop a brain large enough to invent things.

In most animals, the gut needs a lot of energy to grind out nourishment from food sources. Bovines have to spend all the daylight hours grazing, so you don’t often hear about cows writing operas or building cathedrals. But cooking, by breaking down fibres and making nutrients more readily available, is a way of processing food outside the body. Eating cooked meals would have lessened the energy needs of our digestion systems, thereby freeing up calories for our brains.

I always suspected the raw food movement had it wrong!

There is a downside however; scientists wonder if our cognitive spurt happened too fast. Some of our most common mental health problems, ranging from depression and bipolar disorder to autism and schizophrenia, may be by-products of the metabolic changes that happened in an evolutionary “blink of an eye.”

C’est la vie.