How Cooking Made Us Human

There are those in the world who believe that a food blog is less than a vital contribution to the world of letters. Looking down from their ivory towers, these critics view the art of culinary writing as fodder for idle hedonists--as pornography for those more concerned with satisfying their stomachs than their intellects. We at the Donkey have not escaped such criticism. Earlier this month, an editorial in The European sniffed:

The Hungry Donkeys appear content to do nothing more than mess about in the kitchen with the unseemlier aspects of food. They can be likened to two special needs infants confined to a play pen, gleefully smearing themselves with their own feces. Perhaps a little more parental supervision is called for.

We could do little more than endure these barbed attacks. We feigned indifference, but deep in our hearts, we wondered if perhaps there was a grain of truth in these assaults. Could we not be directing our efforts towards more worthy causes, such as decoding hieroglyphics or composing epic poetry?

All traces of this self-doubt were erased with the publication of 'Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human' by Richard Wrangham. Wrangham asserts that cooking is not simply one among numerous traits that are unique to the human species, but rather that cooking was the primary behavioral adaptation that spurred our evolution from Homo Habilis to Homo Erectus. Simon Ings from the Telegraph, outlines Wrangham's argument:

Good, big ideas about evolution are rare. Often they’re merely 'just so’ stories, stringing specious skeins of cause and effect over a much more complicated intellectual landscape. At first glance, Wrangham’s argument seems to have been fished from that dodgy pot. Nobody can know for sure when cooking got going because the chances are minute that anyone will ever stumble upon an ancient half-eaten spit-roast and recognise it for what it is. (That archeologists have found earth ovens more than 250,000 years old is startling enough.)
Wrangham’s task, then, is to come up with compelling evidence that the invention of cooking is the only possible explanation for the transformation that stood us on our feet, shrank our guts, gave us silly teeth and receding jawlines, and swelled our brains to their current, horrendously fuel-inefficient size. The big news – I think it is big news – is that he succeeds. Catching Fire is that rare thing, an exhilarating science book. And one that, for all its foodie topicality, means to stand the test of time.

How the tables do turn. One day, you are a scatological infant, and the next, a leading researcher, poised before the very fount of human evolution. We at the Donkey will not stoop so low though, as to take advantage of this change in intellectual climate. We would take no pleasure in ridiculing our enemies as they have ridiculed us. These lowly beasts could do nothing other than carry out their instinctual attacks; for they are simply not as evolved a species as the Hungry Donkey.