Intro to Cooking

Introduction

Logistical Announcements by Dr. Rangam

• Next year, Binghamton University will host NEET.
• A top-secret game is planned for the banquet.
• There may be first NEEPS tackle football game.
• Joel Wayne will be the program chair next year.
• David Sarah of Plymouth State will host in 2012 in Northern New England.
• The banquet is for NEEPS members with name tags.

Introduction of Richard Wrangham by Killian

Two Ways of Thinking About People (Referencing The Little Prince)

1. Traditional:
   • Job and salary.
   • College and lab affiliation.
   • Number of publications.
2. Alternative (inspired by The Little Prince):
   • Favorite games.
   • Reaction to a drawing of a snake swallowing an elephant.
   • Quest in life.
   • Favorite color.
   • Airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow.

Killian's First Impression of Dr. Wrangham

• Attended a talk by Dr. Wrangham on his book, The Demonic Males, at the University of Michigan.
• Dr. Wrangham's talks are well-thought-out, logical, data and theory-driven, and interesting.

An Unproductive Challenge from the Audience

• A member of the audience posed a shallow, argumentative, irrelevant, and unhelpful question.
• Dr. Wrangham didn't dismiss the person but was patient.
• Killian learned about how a professional scientist presents ideas in a public forum and navigates complex communication.
• It highlighted the complicated route from a scientist's mouth to a person's ear.
• Killian learned how to behave like a scientist in a public forum.

Introduction to Dr. Richard Wrangham

• The audience might learn about diet, dentition, and fire's role in human evolution.
• Or they might learn about how a world-class evolutionary scientist has earned that reputation.

Dr. Wrangham's Response and Introduction

• Acknowledges Killian's charming introduction.
• Expresses feeling abashed because the topic isn't strictly evolutionary psychology but is related.

The Importance of Fire in Human Evolution

• Quotes Rick Potts, an archaeologist, who believes human evolution is primarily about big brains and intelligence.
• Argues that this view is incorrect.
• Humans are adapted to fundamental patterns in their evolutionary ecology, particularly fire.
• Fire is crucial, as evidenced by its role in creating the objects and environment around us.
• Chimpanzees don't process their food, unlike humans who cook.

The Overlooked Significance of Cooking

• Fire hasn't entered our evolutionary consciousness in a major way.
• Textbooks give it only a few paragraphs.
• Cooking is often seen as equivalent to inventing clothes or furniture, not as fundamental.
• Argument: Cooking is fundamental.

Darwin's Perspective

• Darwin recognized the importance of fire, noting that it renders hard roots digestible and poisonous herbs innocuous.
• He called it the greatest discovery ever made by man, except for language.

Why Fire Is Overlooked

• The common view is that fire was a human discovery, so it doesn't explain how we became human.
• Standard evolutionary narrative: meat-eating led to Australopithecines becoming human, relegating fire to a later, less important role.

Archaeological Evidence

• The archaeological record shows inconsistent evidence of fire control before 400,000 years ago.
• Some sites, like Gennet Bashiachov (800,000 years ago), are widely accepted.
• Interpretation: either fire control was sporadic or the evidence is hard to find further back.
• Wrangham believes it's the latter, that current evidence isn't sufficient.

Cooking as a Luxury

• Levi-Strauss argued that cooking is a conceptual division between humans and animals, not a necessity.
• This view was widely accepted.
• Counterargument: While some eat raw food, cooking has a significant impact.

Chimpanzee Diet vs. Human Diet

• Wrangham's experience eating a chimpanzee diet: extremely hungry due to low calorie intake and unfulfilling foods.
• Chimpanzees eat mostly revolting and unfulfilling foods.
• This makes it difficult to imagine that early humans had a similar diet to the chimpanzees.

The Significance of Calorie Value

• It took Wrangham 25 years to consider the significance of the calorie difference between raw and cooked food.
• Nutritional evidence suggests cooked food has the same or slightly less calorie value than raw food, based on bomb calorimetry.

The Problem with Bomb Calorimetry

• Calorie value is assessed by blowing up food in a bomb calorimeter to measure heat.
• This measures chemical calorie value, not biological calorie value.
• Biological calorie value is less because it takes work to digest food.
• The current system is flawed, and if someone dies from following USDA guidelines, they could sue.
• Cooked food provides more calories than raw food biologically.

Effects of Raw Food Diets

• People on raw food diets often become thin.
• Even when eating high-quality, domesticated foods (which are better than wild foods).

High Quality vs High Calories

• "High quality" in an evolutionary perspective means "high calorie."

Meat Consumption in Raw Food Diets

• Some raw foodists consume meat, and some get 30% of their calories from oil, which is unnatural.
• Raw foodists have less physical activity.

Body Mass Index and Diet

• People eating cooked diets have a higher BMI than those eating raw diets.
• No significant difference between meat-eaters and vegetarians on cooked diets.
• Cooking is a key factor in determining BMI.

Cooking vs. Processing

• Experiment with mice fed raw vs. cooked sweet potatoes, whole or pounded.
• Mice on cooked diets maintained weight, while those on raw diets lost weight, regardless of pounding.
• Cooking, not pounding, is the critical factor.
• $y = x^2$ It is important to note that laboratory mice are not adapted to eating jewel yams

Importance of Cooking for Energy

• In the wild, energy is critical for survival, reproduction, and disease resistance.
• Cooking provides a lot of calories.

Protein Digestibility

• There are no studies on the calorie difference between cooked and raw meat.
• One study on egg protein: cooked egg protein is much more digestible than raw egg protein.

Arnold Schwarzenegger and Raw Eggs

• Arnold Schwarzenegger's mentor, Vince Girondeau, recommended eating 36 raw eggs a day for straight protein without being hardened by cooking.

Method of Measuring of Protein Digestion

• The energy stored in food is utilized both by the individual and the the species of bacteria located within your colon.
• Indigestible protein makes energy of no value to humans.
• Ileostomy patients are required to get data at the end of their small intestine to asses labeled protein remaining after it is digested.

Results of Cooked Vs Raw Protein

• 90% of cooked egg protein is digested at the end of the small intestine.
• 51-65% of raw egg protein is digested.
• Cooking denatures protein, exposing amino acids to digestive enzymes.

Softening of Food

• The objective in the mind of a cook is to create soft food.

Softness and Digestion

• Experiment: rats fed hard vs. soft (puffed) laboratory chow.

Results of Experiment

• Rats on soft diet gained more weight than those on hard diet, despite similar food intake.
• Soft diet rats had 30% more body fat.

Metabolic Rate and Digestion

• Rats on hard diet expended more energy digesting food.
• Increased energy expenditure of the rates eating the hard diet due to the rise of metabolic rate for 20 mins - 1hr and then accumulates.
• Soft diet rats got more net calories.

Food Processing and Soft Food

• Food has become increasingly finely processed over the last 100 years.
• This means we get more net calories.

Meat and Cooking

• Experiment: pythons fed raw vs. cooked, ground vs. whole meat.

Additive Digestive Benefits

• 12% reduction in digestion cost for grinding.
• 12% reduction for cooking.
• 23% reduction for both.
• Hunters and gatherers do both (or equivalent processing).
• The sun crush meat to make it more tender

Importance of Energy Harvest

• Life is mostly a search for energy.
• Natural selection acts strongly on energy acquisition.

Overall Consequences of Cooking

• Cooking increases calorie availability by a lot.
• A lot still has to be researched for this subject.

Metabolic Rate and Cooking

• Humans have the metabolic rates scientists expects from Primates.
• Humans seems as though they expend more energy (total) per day.
• Long day ranges and high rate of milk production may be associated to use cooking food.

Losing weight?

• Eat a raw diet, because every animal on a cooked diet gains energy

Energy Gains in the Wild

• Even small energy gains matter in the wild.
• Chimpanzees with 5% more ripe fruit in their diet conceive four months quicker.
• Cooking provides much more benefit.

Raw Food Diets in Humans

• German study of 600 raw foodists.
• 50% of women eating 100% raw diet were amenorrheic.
• Humans are not adapted to eating raw foods.
• Humans like heroines and cows, are biologically committed to eating cooked food.

Adaptations to Cooked Food

• Compared to other primates, humans have:
  • Tiny large intestines.
  • Smaller teeth.
    Humans are biologically adapted to eating cooked food.

Timing of Adaptations

• Smaller guts are thought to have appeared with Homo erectus.
• This is also when the largest drop in tooth size occurred.

Alternative Explanations

• Humans may have found a way to process meat to make it soft.
• Or they became marrow specialists.
• Or relied on honey and fruit.

Homo Erectus Obligate Terrestrial

• Homo erectus also became an obligate terrestrial.
• They must have slept on the ground.

Chimpanzees and Gorillas Love Cooking

• Apes prefer cooked food.
• Cooking, along with meat, was responsible for the generation of Homo erectus.
• Either way, humans have been adapted to using fire for a long time.

The Habiline Phase

• Cut marks on bones and stone tools suggest increased meat eating by Homo habilis.
• Wine Industries did a lot of non-thermal processing.
• They demonstrated pounding meat to reduce it increasing its digestibility and reducing the cost digestion.

The Argument for Cooking

• We can't just say we're intelligent and choose to cook because it makes our food taste nicer, its apart of our biology at work.

Benefits of Cooking

• Micro energy.
• Softness of food.
• Light for protection against predators.
• Warmth at night.
• Shifts food into a food pile, changing social relationships.

Brain Evolution

• Humans use a higher proportion of their resting metabolic rate to fuel the brain.

Eiloh and Wheeler's Theory

• High food quality allows for small guts and more energy for the brain.
• Humans have the smallest gut mass and the largest brain mass.

The role of Mead in Food Processing

• Food processing depends on the particular digestive adaptation that is present.

Psychological and behavioral effects of cooking

1. Taste - Spontaneous like for certain food tastes and textures
2. Smell - Are humans drawn to the smell of food in a specific way?
3. Fire - Are humans specially drawn to fire in a spontaneous way.
4. Partnering - How has fire shifted the quality of relationships and mating?

Evolution of Cranial Capacity

• Homo erectus showed a rise in brain size.
• Cooking was responsible for the first rise.
• Cooking techniques have improved over the last two million years.

Patience Tolerance and Cooking

• Cooking requires patience.
• Humans have lower rates of impulsive aggression than chimpanzees.

Children & Childcare

• Cooking allows for earlier weaning.
  Sarah Hurley would say that this is associated with cooperative breeding aspect of human.
• This leads to higher birth rates.

Chewing & Cooking

• Cooking reduces chewing time, freeing up hours a day to do other things.
• We chew food as apes is around 6 hours.
• We chew around 1 hour as humans.

The Cooked Evening Meal

• It’s a human universal
• Most calories are from cooked food in the evening meal.

Sexual Division of Labor

• Women exchange the time cooking for the spared time eating it
• Men have much less direct obligation in the household
• It is found that across societies Men feel that they require to be fed by woman, and if the food isn't ready they get beaten

Darwin's Perspective Revisited

• The greatest discovery (fire) wasn't made by humans but by pre humans.

Q&A

Cycling & Diet

• Women in persistent societies cycle less often
• Women in the modern societies on cooked diet cycle high rates all the time

Brain Size & Cooking

• For human to be able to get cooking going its expected a slight incline in size

Research Potential

• There is a whole reserach agneda that should be worked upon

Food Perception Systems

• Food perception, tastes. Particularly interesting smells specifically cooked foods, since there is clear reason why food and textures get a spontaneously reaction.
  How are we spontaneously to fire, and how cooking changes relationships.
• How does cooking change relationships.

Spontaneously liking Cooked food.

• It was found that that Mices was 50/50 in what they desired but after being exposed to the diets there was 100% agreement to what diet was desired.

Obesity and Hunther and gathers

• It appears hunter and gathers tend to not be Obese

Chimpanzees Process Food?

• For Chimpanzees, the two Bonobos are really into cooking while other bonobos only use rough walls to cook. And a barbecue is located close to their enclosure.

Reactions to Fire

• It has been seen that Chimpanzees are found licking at ash
• It has also been seen that they also can tell were a fire is headed and treat it like a slow moving animal

Stick Collecting Birds

• There is an account of birds collecting bits of wood in order to start new fires.

Fire and Civilization.

• Pottery changed a lot to do with agriculture
• The earth oven which emerged has people uncertain was great when putting fire under leaves in the oven over for over a number of hours.