[thedoc (OP)]

Are we the only animals to cook food, why do we do it and does it give us an advantage over other animals?
Asked by Kathleen, Oregon

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[thedoc (OP)]

We put this to:

Robert Foley, Professor of Human Evolution at the Leverhulme Centre for Human Evolutionary Studies, Cambridge.

Cooking is certainly unique to humans. There’s no other species that does it. There’s obvious reasons for that because we’re the only ones that can make fire which is a pre-requisite. In a away fire comes first and cooking becomes a process after it. It’s becoming clear that really cooking provides quite a number of advantages. Richard Wrangham from Harvard has been doing a lot of experiments looking at how cooking can change the nutritional value of food. What it seems is that the process of warming food up: in a sense denaturing it has a number of effects. One is that food is much more tender. That we know. If you eat a cooked carrot instead of a raw carrot it’s much easier. We can spend less time chewing, we can swallow it faster and we can digest it faster. It seems that it’s an extension of things we see in other animals. Animals who use techniques often in their stomachs to tenderise food seem to try and make it more easily absorbable. If we turn to the other question of when all this happened the real question is when do we first find evidence of fire? That seems to be about half a million years ago or so. We don’t find direct evidence of cooking then but we do see over the next 100,000 years or so the beginnings of things like burnt stone which suggests that meat is cooked. It’s probably goes quite a long way back in our evolutionary history and some people would argue it’s really a very major change in the way we are able to live and survive.

Peter Lucas, Professor of Anthropology, George Washington University, USA

The second possible advantage for cooking is that it improves digestion. We’ve done a model study here particularly with Zhongquan Sui when she was here – she’s now at the University of Perdue. She found that yes, cooking does to a certain extent improve digestion. You only need cook something for a fraction of the time that you actually do in order for it to be digested properly. The cooking times that people adopt when they normally say this is cooked seem to reflect strong mechanical changes in the food. In other words, these are things that affect you perception of food texture and allow you actually to eat it very much easier, very much shorter eating times than you would do if they’re raw. That I think I would give as the essential answer at the moment.

[DanilovesHim]

We Are The Only Animals To Actually Cook Our Own Food, But other animals capture there own.

[chris]

So do we, don't we? Isn;t that what a fishing rod is for?!

[JnA]

While not actually 'cooking' other animal do prepare their food for consumption.

http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/6910/title/Ant_Iron_Chefs_Larvae_fix_dinner_but_dont_sneak_snacks

New videos of ants fixing an entrée of fruit fly stew show that it's the youngsters who do the colony's version of cooking. What's more, they don't nibble as they cook but wait to be served their fair share.

Ants prepare their meat not by heating but by marinating it with digestive enzymes to create a glistening protein slurry. With their hourglass figures, adult ants have such tiny waists that solid food can't pass through to their abdomens. Biologists already knew that the blob-shaped larvae predigest meat. Some scientists had suggested that the adults feed meat to the larvae and return later for some regurgitated protein slurry.



some animal chew and regurgitate for their young, monkeys have been observed washing potatoes, and other animals bury and allow food to rot before consumption.

[chris]

And Steve Yanoviak, whom we have interviewed on the programme previously, reported that the ants he studies in the Amazon like to eat bird droppings because they are mineral-rich (particularly phosphates, which can be in short supply). But, whilst bird droppings often form a "cake" which dries onto a leaf, I guess that doesn't count as cooking does it?

Chris

[JnA]

For the ants it's table service.


Any ideas on why we do it?

Presumably it's because we can. Cooking tends to soften most things, helping our measly little human teeth to chew and therefore aid digestion.
Maybe it assists with an 'eat and run' mentality, just in case another predator gets wind of our meal.


I've been trying to think of a 'preservation' angle, but I doubt that cooked food lasts longer than uncooked food at least enough to make that a 'reason'.

[Don_1]

I think it was a matter of taste. Early man probably had food cooked for him in forest fires, liking the taste of those parts of animals and vegetation which were cooked, rather than burnt he imitated this effect. I should think other animals have found the same, but so far haven't managed to get Curry's to deliver a hob & oven to the jungles and Savannah's.

[RD]

More nutrition can be obtained from food when it is cooked.
Cooking can render indigestible material edible, (or vice versa  [] ).

[RD]

Japanese macaques (monkeys) wash and season their potatoes...

A similar type of behavioral learning through social interaction happened in a group of Japanese monkeys on the island of Koshima in the 1950s. Researchers were studying the macaques and to lure them into the open to better observe their behavior, the researchers gave them sweet potatoes.

Usually, the monkeys would brush excess dirt off the potatoes with their hands before eating them because the grit hurt their teeth. But one day in September 1953, a female the researchers named Imo took the rudimentary potato cleaning a step further by washing hers in a freshwater stream. Five years later, six out of nine members of Imo's family practiced the same potato-washing habit [source: Carpenter]. By 1965, not only had the washing habit been passed to new generations of the macaques, but they also had started rinsing with saltwater instead of freshwater. The monkeys would repeatedly dip their potatoes in the water, then take a bite, implying that they enjoyed the salty flavor. For that reason, researchers suspected that the purpose behind the saltwater habit had evolved from merely cleaning the potatoes to actually seasoning them.

http://animals.howstuffworks.com/mammals/japanese-monkey-season-food.htm/printable


The Japanese macaques do have access to hot volcanic water, so it is perhaps a matter of time before they are boiling their veggies.

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onsen

[markoky]

I believe we are straying from the question.

As far as I know we are the only animals that cook our food, advantage to it would likely be lowered chances of food borne diseases especially since our digestive systems are pretty delicate as compared to other creatures.

[atrox]

I think, we are the only animals that actually cook their food, because we are the only ones who took controll of fire...

...but some animals benefit from fires whenever they can. In africa for example you can watch storcks searching for burned animals right behind the fireline...

[InCharacter]

I believe this can be boiled down to simply that although we as humans are omnivores, our roots lean towards herbivore lifestyles somewhat more than carnivorous ones.  This fact can be seen in our teeth, in which those of the leaf eating variety outweigh those for tearing flesh. As well, our intestinal set up more closely resembles a herbivore's.  All of these factors can be seen together when people eat a lot of raw meat they often contract problems because they simply don't have the proper enzymes to fully digest all of the many things inside flesh.  Therefore it is presumable that our ancestors who discovered roasting meet by the heat of fire thus breaks down the meat so that is easier and healthier to consume, had a great advantage over others that didn't. Of course every metabolism is different, and the healthy and desirable ratios of cooking very on the individual, echoing the fact that different cultures will have evolved in different ways to best accommodate they're unique circumstances.  Based on this, people will have tendencies to pick the degree of cooking to their meat which are purely biological, and peppered with upbringing and exposure, result in what they choose to chew, or eschew.   

[Bored chemist]

Welcome to the site.
I'm not sure about the validity of your point since we often cook vegetables too; but I'd like to thank you for starting your post in this thread with the phrase "I believe this can be boiled down" which made me smile.

[InCharacter]

I'm glad you enjoy it, I was hoping someone would. However, the fact that we will also cook vegetables does not undermine the validity of the point.  When the vegetables are cooked, they become easier to digest, and often more nutrients are extracted.  Another benefit to those that discovered this process. Of course sometimes it will be done for pure culinary pleasure, but often the previous point is a factor.  If animals could do this, and it be to their benefit, it's presumable they would.

[Onlyinterestednotdevoted]

I believe we are the only animals to cook our food, but I have heard of some primates washing their food.

We cook our food to kill off germs, and because I would really not enjoy a raw steak.

WE are not, however, the only creatures to colonize (for lack of a better word) other creatures; some breeds of ants will enslave and raise other ants and even other insects. They are used as slaves to gather food and even raised for consumption.

[Morgan]

I do not agree that we cook our food to kill germs as i do not think humans knew about germs half a million years ago. Perhaps the humans who cooked their food survived where as the humans who ate raw meat died out. However this would raise the question - why would humans not evolve like meat eating animals to be able to live off raw meat? Before we dicovered fire, surely we were eating animals raw. I cant imagine that once humans discovered how to make fire they declared: 'Right! I'm sick of roots and berries - let's have one of those four legged things!'

[bananafish]

RD - "More nutrition can be obtained from food when it is cooked."

That is completely false, the opposite is true.

[Joe]

I agree with the most recent post and I cannot believe it took that far down the thread for someone to bring it up... cooking kills nutrients. I happened upon this site after googling why we cook. I recently watched the movie "food matters" and it says when we cook foods the changes they undertake make our bodies think they are invading when we eat them. As such our immune systems mount an attack, but that this does not happen with raw foods. So I wanted to see if cooking was required to kill bacteria OR if it's required by our factory farmed food because of the higher incidence of harmful bacterias, etc. If there was a better way to keep our foods from getting germs on them and we fed our bodies more healthfully by eating raw, would we? I'm sure there's a better way!

[Bond]

Bananafish and Joe have a some review to do.  
Go live and thrive without fire.  Go live in a native wild without fire and animal product/flesh.