Lexie Carroll’s Reviews > Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation > Status Update
Lexie Carroll
is on page 22 of 468
To cook even a bit more than you already do, or perhaps try & make something you only ever expected to buy- will constitute a kind of vote. A vote against the disconnection of specialization, against the total rationalization of life, against the infiltration of corporate interests seeking to organize our every waking moment.
Cooking gives us the rare opportunity to work directly in our own support- & those we feed.
— 19 hours, 27 min ago
Cooking gives us the rare opportunity to work directly in our own support- & those we feed.
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Lexie’s Previous Updates
Lexie Carroll
is on page 111 of 468
The microwave oven stands at the opposite end of the culinary (and imaginative) spectrum from the cook fire. Compared with the mesmerizing draw of a fire, the microwave exerts a kind of antigravity- it’s flameless, smokeless, antisensory cold heat giving us a mild case of the willies. The microwave is as antisocial as the cook fire is communal. Who ever gathers around the Panasonic Hearth?
— 13 hours, 26 min ago
Lexie Carroll
is on page 110 of 468
“Animals need food, water & shelter… we humans need all those things, but we need fire too.” (Richard Wrangham, Catching Fire).
We are the only species that depends on fire to maintain our body heat, as well as to cook our food. By now the control of fire is folded into our genes, a matter of not just human culture but also our biology (The Cooking Hypothesis of human evolution).
— 13 hours, 31 min ago
We are the only species that depends on fire to maintain our body heat, as well as to cook our food. By now the control of fire is folded into our genes, a matter of not just human culture but also our biology (The Cooking Hypothesis of human evolution).
Lexie Carroll
is on page 96 of 468
Ritual sacrifice achieves 3 important purposes:
1. To regulate the potentially savage business of eating meat (encouraging self-control, regulating competition for cooked meat)
2. To bring people together in a community (sharing meat, cook fire draws people together & encourages cooperation/collaboration)
3. Support & elevate the priestly class in charge of it (actual priests or pitmasters- maintain the institution)
— 13 hours, 43 min ago
1. To regulate the potentially savage business of eating meat (encouraging self-control, regulating competition for cooked meat)
2. To bring people together in a community (sharing meat, cook fire draws people together & encourages cooperation/collaboration)
3. Support & elevate the priestly class in charge of it (actual priests or pitmasters- maintain the institution)
Lexie Carroll
is on page 52 of 468
Nowadays we think of sacrifice as a primitive rite, but such cultures practicing them at least acknowledged that something important was happening in eating animals, something demanded their full attention. Just because we moderns pay less attention doesn’t mean something momentous hasn’t happened. In our failure to attend to the process involved in eating meat, you have to wonder who are the more primitive ones!
— 18 hours, 7 min ago
Lexie Carroll
is on page 51 of 468
Animal sacrifice has been a way to make animal flesh “good to think” (not just ‘good to eat’)- to help people feel better about killing, cooking & eating animals, which has never been anything less than a spiritually freighted and deeply ambivalent occasion. Like fire itself all cooking begins with some act of destruction: killing, cutting, chopping, mashing. In that sense, a sacrifice is at its very heart.
— 18 hours, 59 min ago
Lexie Carroll
is on page 18 of 468
Cooking- of whatever kind, every day or extreme- situates us in the world in a very special place, facing the natural world on one side and the social world on the other. The cook stands squarely between nature and culture, conducting a process of translation and negotiation. Both nature and culture are transformed by the work; and in the process so is the cook.
— 19 hours, 41 min ago
Lexie Carroll
is on page 6 of 468
Richard Wrangham’s “Cooking Hypothesis”: cooking was the key that facilitated human cultural evolution.
Cooking allows much of the work of chewing & digestion to be performed outside the body using outside sources of energy, feeding a larger brain &
freeing up time/energy for other activities (creating culture). Heat cooking also created a meal time (v. Solo grazing), which encouraged sharing & group sociality.
— 20 hours, 38 min ago
Cooking allows much of the work of chewing & digestion to be performed outside the body using outside sources of energy, feeding a larger brain &
freeing up time/energy for other activities (creating culture). Heat cooking also created a meal time (v. Solo grazing), which encouraged sharing & group sociality.
