Well, they are as an alternative to A) Cooking meat or B) Eating it fresh, both alternatives presented by t-bonham@scc.net
Apparently, the skin of beluga whales contains as much vitamin C as an orange. I didn’t know that until I read the column myself.
Whales are harder to peel, though.
I think it’s less that we are fragile and more that we lived so removed from nature that we need to make certain adaption to compensate.
We can definitely eat raw meat (and raw plants). Cooking serves several purposes - 1) it can enhance taste 2) in some cases cooking can denature toxic elements (or chemically alter some nutrients to make them more bioavailable) in raw foods but this is not universal - it’s just an adaption for the fact that we choose to eat a more varied diet than we originally evolved for 3) cooking food, especially meat, makes it last longer which is useful for eating animals larger than appropriate for one meal or for climates or situations where food will not be available consistantly 4) cooking kills germs that would appear if the meat were not eaten right away - and humans are more likely to eat meat a long time after it was killed whereas animals that are not scavengers tend to eat their kill fairly soon if not immediatly after the kill
that’s true, but the animals in general are not scavengers. scavenging is done bya particular subset of animals adapted biologically to
i think the advent of humans living together in cities incresed the likelihood of epidemic style disease which is what antibiotics are properly used for. the use of antibiotics for your every day malady is probably not a good thing.
i think this is a combination of 1) the way our populations live together make them uniquely able to spread disease and 2) some of the things we should be immune to we aren’t because of over-sterility of environment in childhood
as far as washing the food itself, because of the way the food is collected, and sits next to a large quantity of other food for a long time before getting to you, the chances of contaminations are greatly increase compared to say foraging or hunting.
animals don’t wipe. on the other hand they do lick each others butts. maybe if we did that we’d build up an immunity. actually…
But it isn’t a weak digestive system that makes salting, smoking, pickling etc. valuable - it’s the fact that unpreserved food isn’t available for consumption weeks or months later. A two-month old carcass is going to be just as useless to a wolf as it is to a human.
Indeed. You’ll also note that wolves stubbornly refuse to pickle or cook their meat, and we see where THAT has gotten them! 
Err… NO.
Not for taste, and arguably not optional. The prevailing theories among anthropologists state that cooking opened up a broader range of edible foods to early humans, allowing such humans to improve the nutritional quality of their diet and better support the nutritionally expensive brains they were so fond of lugging around.
Cooking neutralized some plant toxins, and made difficult to digest tubers, roots, and other plants viable sources of food. Yes, anthropologists also generally agree that plants were the first, and most important, cooked foods.
The fossil record supports these theories, with teeth and jaws becoming less robust even as humans became physically larger animals with even more proportionally largish heads.
I thought you were in the sciences or something?
Gabriela was referring to the application of fire to meat. You seem to be referring to the application of fire to vegetable matter.
The answer there is much the same. While meat was arguably not as important as vegetables to early humans, cooked meat assisted digestion and allowed humans to stretch its nutritional value further. Taste? I am not aware this was a concern for early humans.
Why wouldn’t it be? You don’t think some things tasted better to early humans than others, just as they do today? If not, why not?
We do have bigger brains but how do you conclude that there is a direct trade-off with the digestive system?
How so? What is the mechanism by which a freshly killed piece of meat is made more digestible with cooking or it’s nutritional value “stetched”? (What does “stretched” mean, anyway?) I can see why it’s good to heat the outside of old meat, as bacterial growth may have gotten hold there, but the inside is just fine raw.
I eat my meat pretty much raw, if we’re talking beef and pork and lamb. (OK, we call it “rare”, but in my book that’s about a mm of cooked flesh surrounding a hunk of cold blue meat. It makes me feel better to act like it’s cooked, but the majority of what I’m eating is raw - and not a bacterial concern like the outside of the steak.) I eat my chicken fully cooked because that’s what I’m used to, and raw chicken makes me go “urg”, the same way cooked insects do, but that’s straight up cultural conditioning.
I can absolutely guarantee that after a lifetime of this, I am not suffering nutritionally. I am, in fact, overfed, like most Americans. 
And I think it’s fair to say that “taste” was the ONLY motivating factor for early humans. After all, they didn’t understand nutrition, or counting carbs, or eating Part of This Nutritious Breakfast. They understood “Fire pretty, steak yum!”, like any animal. My cat isn’t begging for teriyaki beef jerky 'cause she’s trying to get extra protien in her diet to slim her waistline, she’s begging because she likes the taste!
Apparently, this is some sort of weird cat thing. Teriyaki jerky is the only people food that she aggressively tries to coax from me. Pretty much anything else gets sniffed and either ignored entirely, or half-heartedly licked. But, rip open a Slim Jim and she’s on it like white on rice.
I mean, do dogs livbe longer lifespans than wolves? Considering that a domestic dog doesn’t have to run down and kill its food, does the dog enjoy a longer lifepan than its genetic cousin?
The size, capacity, and effectiveness our digestive system is comperable to other omnivores, like bears. (And as a point of note, our digestive systems are definitely not shorter than those of a canid; intestinal length for humans is around 28 feet, or about a ratio of 9:1 with mouth-to-anus distance in anatomy. For dogs and wolves, the ratio is about 7:2, owing to their more carnivorous nature.) Homo sapiens has been foraging/scavenging/hunting for ~200,000 years, and H. erectus before that, but the skill of cooking and preserving foods appears to have emerged in only the past ~20,000 years. Before that, humans were largely limited to environments in which they could either forage for food year-round or depend on hunting/fishing for fresh food. (There are some limited instances of “natural” food preservation but skillful methods of preservation like smoking, curing, freeze-drying, et cetera came much later.) There is no sign that innate intelligence (based on brain size) of H. sapiens has materially increased in the last couple hundred thousand years, long before food preservation or preparation skills became prevelant.
We’re not evolved to eat cooked food; we’re evolved to forage natural fruits and hunt in the temporate-to-equatoral savanahs of Central to North Africa, the Fertile Crescent, and comperable habitats in Southern Europe and Asia. Our big brains have allowed us to develop the ability to thrive in harsher (to us) environments by enhancing our natural capabilities with tools, protective clothing, and methods for survival outside our natural habitat. The husbandry of animals, domestication of grains and fruits, and processing of food to make it easier to store and consume has allowed us more leisure time and longevity to do things like write sonnets and make Internet porn, but it’s not intrinsic to our survival. The survival rates of prehistoric humans were just a handful of years past puberty; 20-30 years, which is roughly 25% of our “natural” lifespan. The same factor largely holds true for wild animals in a natural habitat versus in captivity.
As for animals not needing antibiotics or medical treatment, you might want to check in the phone book under “veternarian”; you’ll see a huge listing of people whose exclusive profession is the treatment of animals.
To the implied superiority in the human “dominat[ion] over the animal species,” one must note that said domination has been (in reproductive terms) at least as advantageous for the animals species as it has for humanity. Sure, you’re going to end up as a steak on someone’s plate, but in the interim you’ve had a dozen or more offspring who survived to adulthood, you’ve been well-fed, cared for, and possibly sheltered from the elements. Seems like a pretty cushy life to me.
You are so amazingly primitive…
Stranger
As in more part parts of the animal become viable food, and those things that are eaten are less likely to go through the digestive system with valuable nutrients undigested and unabsorbed. This is especially true as the teeth and jaws became less robust.
There is probably little resemblance between a select cut of meat, served what you would consider rare, and a carcass that must be butchered and shared amongst a group. You don’t think they all ate filet and let the dogs have the rest, do you? And, importantly, how do you make that gristle, fat, and sinew edible for the little cromags?
Do you have a cite for this? I can agree that a correlation between what tastes good and what is good for you will develop through a process of selection, but don’t loose sight of the fact that it is the preference for what is good for you that is the evolutionary advantage. Correlations isn’t causation and all that.
I don’t recall seeing too many plants and animals in the wild with nutrition labels on them, so how do you propose that early humans knew what was good for them, if not by taste and smell?
No doubt early humans (like other animals) select their food based upon taste and smell (and adaptively, these selections are those which contribute the greatest nutrionally); however, it has to be recognized that the vast majority of foods we eat today were not available to prehistoric humans. When you drink a sugary soda (or one sweetened with a sugar substitute) you are fulfilling an evolutionary need for fructose and other easily digested carbohydrates, but that doesn’t mean that processed, refined sugar cane or corn syrup (and especially not aspertame) is good for you. It’s also true that many of our tastes as civilized humans are developed rather than innate (it’s unlikely prehistoric humans were melting cheese over broccoli), but by and large our palattes are determined by evolutionary impetus to things that taste like the high calorie fats, proteins, and carbohydrates we would find in our evolutionary environment.
Stranger
Not really. If you got an infection and didn’t take antibiotics, you’d probably have the same chance of surviving it as an animal.
First off, animals don’t have ‘hands’ - most eat with their mouths. Second, unless I touch something toxic, I rarely wash my hands before eating, and I never get sick.
Animals don’t wipe their ass, either.
Humans are not as fragile as you seem to think, despite the claims of paranoid germophobes.
In addition to, potentially taste and smell, there would be knowledge passed on from elders, religious beliefs, and of course there is a difference between a taste and smell indicating “I’m edible,” and “I’m yummy.” Only the former is necessary.
Are we agreed that the reason people today cook is because those who developed this behavior were better suited to survival than those who did not? Are we also agreed that the benefit that cooking offers is nutritional in nature, not flavoriliciousness? Finally, do we agree that a learned correlation between nutritional value and shared knowledge, religious practices, scent, and mere edibility are all at least as likely as “mmm… this tastes great!”