The Power of Cooking

• The Power of Cooking
• Michael Vick
• The constructs of family (continued)
• The Dead Weather - Horehound
• The Fiery Furnaces - I'm Going Away
• The Fiery Furnaces in general...
• Universal Health Care
• The Death of Paper

So I heard an interesting thing the other day when I was listening to a NPR podcast...the significant event in the evolution of the human mind, going from relatively unintelligent primates, to intelligent societal beings likely wasn't the discovery of fire, but rather, the discovery of cooking. Apparently, a lot of anthropologists think that because cooking unlocks most of the nutrients in foods, all of a sudden, we as a species were able to eat three square meals a day as oppose to eating sixteen hours a day like most modern primates do in the wild. Think about it, that's huge. In order to get the nutrients we need to survive, we were eating sixteen hours a day and then that went down to three at the most. That would give us thirteen extra hours a day to build shelters, form a language, create tools, etc...that's huge!

And think about cooking in the context of just our society. It plays a huge role in culture, it's now entertainment, it's everywhere we go. But then from that...it's also a fading art form. Eating out is cheaper (generally) and easier than cooking at home, time is too valuable to spend all day slaving in the kitchen. What's there to do though? How can we rescue cooking? Is it worth saving?