The Perfect Diet (Part 3)

Why do we cook our food?

So far my look into what we eat, or should eat, has thrown up a few surprises. It is like pulling on a thread of loose wool and eventually unravelling the whole jumper. I suppose everything is connected to everything else so I shouldn’t be too shocked that my questions have led me into very strange territory.

In today’s article I am focusing on food and diet. However it is impossible to avoid those bigger questions - but I will get to them later.

In this series I have been writing about whether I should be eating meat, or eggs, or just veggies. In fact that is the easy part. As I looked more and more into this subject, I found a recurring theme that became very difficult to ignore. It is the question of whether to cook your food before eating it - or consume it raw. That’s right, raw. Not just the occasional banana or apple - everything.

Now, cooking food is one of those assumptions I have always considered to be fundamental to our species. Lions tear their prey asunder with their claws and teeth before eating the flesh of, say, an antelope. Gorillas eat berries off a bush or they might chew on the bark of a bamboo tree in their vicinity. But whether they are carnivore or vegetarian, wild animals eat their food raw.

Humans, on the other hand, like their food cooked.

But why?

Is it because it marks our dominance over other species, i.e. humans can cook and animals cannot? Is it just a habit that we have developed over many centuries? Does eating cooked food make us healthier? Does cooked food taste better than raw food? What part does evolution play in how and what we eat?

(Before I continue I should point out that anything processed is usually cooked. Milk for instance is pasteurised and homogenized and that involves heating and boiling before it arrives in our local store. If what you eat or drink comes from a can, carton, jar, etc., it has probably been cooked.)

I have read loads of books and articles and watched numerous videos on the topic of food preparation. Most of these are about humans choosing the raw option. I find these fascinating and, besides, there are not many sources that argue for cooking our food. Whatever the reason, we just do it. Most people, including yours truly, devour anything that tells us how to produce delicious food from the pot or the oven. Is that why recipe books and web sites, cookery shows, celebrity chefs, etc., etc., are so common in today’s culture?

But that “why” question won’t go away. In an effort to answer it I have been reading what a British anthropologist named Richard Wrangham has to say.¹ This guy is a serious academic. He is not a celebrity chef or a famous restaurateur. So I was optimistic when I started reading, and Wrangham does not disappoint.

His thesis is a simple one. It is explained in an interview he gave when his book came out.

While sitting in front of his fireplace preparing a lecture on human evolution, [Wrangham] wondered, “What would it take to turn a chimpanzee-like animal into a human?” The answer, he decided, was in front of him: fire to cook food.²

In the book itself, Wrangham includes this interesting anecdote:

Koko is a gorilla who learned to communicate with humans, and she prefers her food cooked. Cognitive psychologist Penny Patterson asked her why: “I asked Koko while the video was rolling if she liked her vegetables better cooked (specifying my left hand) or raw/fresh (indicating my right hand). She touched my left hand (cooked) in reply. Then I asked why she liked vegetables better cooked, one hand standing for 'tastes better', the other 'easier to eat'. Koko indicated the 'tastes better' option.”³

It tastes better! When you think about it this is hardly surprising. Look at how a pet dog or cat gobbles up tinned food for instance. Even the ducks swimming in a local pond dive on the bread thrown at them by passers-by.

What about other types of animal? Cows eat a lot of grass but, particularly on intensive farms, they are also fed with processed grains. The same goes for animals in zoos. Here is how one expert put it:

In zoos, we can rarely feed animals what they would eat in the wild. We can, however, offer substitute diets containing the same basic nutrients.⁴

Inevitably this means cooked food, whether in the form of biscuits or pellets.

So it seems that many animals, whether at home or in a zoo, eat at least some of their food in cooked form. One way or another those animals have developed a taste for cooked food. A lot of them like it and have grown used to it - but they need human beings to prepare it for them. In his book Richard Wrangham argues that this is down to the fact that we humans, alone among the Earth’s fauna, know how to create and control fire.

However there is a problem with this hypothesis - it is impossible to prove. There is no historical record that the human discovery of fire and its use in cooking food are linked. It is only a theory, but one that Wrangham pursues diligently.

He imagines how the connection between fire and cooking was formed. He speculates that members of a primitive tribe might have ‘occasionally dropped food morsels by accident’ into a fire they were tending and then liked the taste of the heated food when they ate it. He goes on:

Repeating their habit, this group would have swiftly evolved into the first Homo erectus. The newly delicious cooked diet led to their evolving smaller guts, bigger brains, bigger bodies and reduced body hair…and humanity began.⁵

But is that really how it happened? Is this how human beings came to be? Are we a higher form of ape or gorilla that stumbled upon fire as the way to improve our diet and then evolved into the dominant species we are today? Or are we different, fundamentally, from everything else on the planet?

Thanks to the awakening spawned by the covid project a few years ago, I and many others now see through the lies which we assumed to be the truth, the only truth. Since then the questions that have formed in my mind have covered, not only what I put into my body, but also what I was taught as human history. This is the ‘unravelling jumper’ analogy I mentioned above.

The world as it is, with its buildings, its planes, its money, etc., is completely different to anything in nature. No orangutan, no octopus, no pigeon, can do anything equivalent. Yes, birds build nests and chimps fashion tools. There is even evidence that Neanderthals used fire. But there is nothing in the recorded behaviour of other species to indicate development remotely akin to our abilities and achievements. Unlike every other creature on the planet, human beings are not part of the natural world. Maybe we were a long time ago, but today?

So where did we come from if not through organic evolution from other species? Is it possible that Homo sapiens was created specially? If so, by whom? God? Aliens?

In an earlier article, now to be found here, I wrote about Yuval Harari’s book, Sapiens⁶:

But about 70,000 years ago something changed inside the brain of Homo sapiens. This Cognitive Revolution enabled us to gradually eliminate our human rivals, including Neanderthals, and to dominate the Earth. Mankind developed language and began to exhibit extraordinary creativity and invention, producing domestic tools, weaponry, and various modes of transport (which enabled us to spread across the globe). Harari attributes this leap in human development to a random event rather than some conscious external intervention.

The most commonly believed theory argues that accidental genetic mutations changed the inner wiring of the brains of Sapiens, enabling them to think in unprecedented ways and to communicate using an altogether new type of language.

I have written elsewhere about the similar idea that Stanley Kubrick outlined in his film, 2001: A Space Odyssey. However that movie attributed the fast-tracking of our evolution to the intervention of a superior alien intelligence.

Whatever the trigger, we presume our right to dominate all life on Earth. As Harari writes:

Over the past 10,000 years, Homo sapiens has grown so accustomed to being the only human species that it’s hard for us to conceive of any other possibility. Our lack of brothers and sisters makes it easier to imagine that we are the epitome of creation, and that a chasm separates us from the rest of the animal kingdom.

What if Harari’s use of the word ‘chasm’ has greater implications than he suggests? What if we are different, not through ‘accidental genetic mutations’ as he writes, but by calculated design?

In part 4 of this series I will continue to pull that thread. Who knows where it will lead?

1. Richard Wrangham, Catching Fire: How cooking made us human (London, 2010).

2. Sarah Karnasiewicz, ‘How cooking makes you a man’, 29 Jul. 2009, Salon [https://www.salon.com/2009/07/29/catching_fire/], accessed 29 Jun. 2025.

3. Wrangham, Catching Fire, p. 91.

4. Joyce Altman, Lunch at the Zoo: What zoo animals eat and why (New York, 2001), p. 4.

5. Wrangham, Catching Fire, pp. 193-4.

6. James P. Bruce, Into the Memory Hole: Despatches from the “world of lies”, (2023), pp. 146-7.