# Why do humans cook food? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [December 11, 2004, 5:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-humans-cook-food/279326 "2004-12-11T17:48:36Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Loopydude](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/e56c9b/32.png) [@Loopydude](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Loopydude)\ **Post date:** [December 12, 2004, 2:31am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-humans-cook-food/279326/21 "2004-12-12T02:31:28Z")
Some staples of our early ancestors, like certain tubers, are actually poisonous unless cooked, so cooking certainly expanded their dietary horizons (not to mention their habitat), as well as made the food generally easier to eat and more palatable. I think **QED** ’s hypothesis about the ultimate “why” is probably as good as any I’ve seen, but we’ll probably never know. It’s hard to imagine early hominids digging up poisonous tubers and thinking “Hey, if I cook this, I will be able to exploit more readily-available food resources!” But “Mmm, this is tastier, and way esier to chew” seems plausible enough. ---
**Author:** ![GorillaMan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/50afbb/32.png) [@GorillaMan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GorillaMan)\ **Post date:** [December 12, 2004, 2:33am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-humans-cook-food/279326/22 "2004-12-12T02:33:46Z")
> [@Diogenes the Cynic](#): > > There’s also the fact that cooked meat keeps longer than raw meat. Whatever wasn’t eaten immediately after a kill would stay edible longer if it was cooked than if it wasn’t. Does that apply for meat kept at ‘room temperature’ (whatever that means in prehistoric terms)? And anyway, I’d have no problem eating 4-week-hung beef, but I’d turn down a joint that was roasted a month ago. There’s plenty of situations where preserving meat is a simple option. ---
**Author:** ![Diogenes\_the\_Cynic](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/e99b99/32.png) [@Diogenes\_the\_Cynic](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Diogenes_the_Cynic)\ **Post date:** [December 12, 2004, 2:42am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-humans-cook-food/279326/23 "2004-12-12T02:42:28Z")
> [@GorillaMan](#): > > Does that apply for meat kept at ‘room temperature’ (whatever that means in prehistoric terms)? And anyway, I’d have no problem eating 4-week-hung beef, but I’d turn down a joint that was roasted a month ago. There’s plenty of situations where preserving meat is a simple option. A roasted joint might not last a _lot_ longer than a raw one but it would ok for a few days while a raw one might go bad within hours under a hot sun. ---
**Author:** ![GorillaMan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/50afbb/32.png) [@GorillaMan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GorillaMan)\ **Post date:** [December 12, 2004, 2:54am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-humans-cook-food/279326/24 "2004-12-12T02:54:47Z")
We’re in danger of going off-topic. Homo sapiens has always cooked food. I presume we can accept that. The question is why evolutionary ancestors found cooking to be beneficial. Maybe it’s because the food tasted better. Maybe it was easier to digest. Maybe something else… > [@](#): > > It’s hard to imagine early hominids digging up poisonous tubers and thinking “Hey, if I cook this, I will be able to exploit more readily-available food resources!” It’s hard to think of anyone managing to find the right balances of yeast to make bread, but it happened…in general, it seems that if it were a reaonable possibility , that someone over the course of evolution will have done it. ---
**Author:** ![MLS](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/919ad9/32.png) [@MLS](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MLS)\ **Post date:** [December 12, 2004, 3:16am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-humans-cook-food/279326/25 "2004-12-12T03:16:49Z")
Okay, imagine this scenario: A group of people or proto-people has (accidentally or otherwise) found out how to cook food. Maybe some meat fell in a fire, or they sampled game killed in a forest fire, whatever. Some of them like it, and some don’t. The ones who like it can digest it more efficiently and return to other activities. They also are slightly less likely to become ill from food gone bad. So the cooked-meat eaters have a few more offspring than the raw food eaters. Do we see a trend here? Those who do not have a taste for what’s good for them will not thrive as readily. It’s the same reason we find the taste of putrid flesh nauseating. Those who liked that smell and taste didn’t last as long. Imagine an individual who actually enjoyed rotten meat, tree bark, and grass, and other things without much nutritional value, and who hated the taste of fresh roasted meat, honey and ripe fruit. Do you think he/she would have many offspring? ---
**Author:** ![Loopydude](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/e56c9b/32.png) [@Loopydude](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Loopydude)\ **Post date:** [December 12, 2004, 4:06am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-humans-cook-food/279326/26 "2004-12-12T04:06:20Z")
> [@GorillaMan](#): > > It’s hard to think of anyone managing to find the right balances of yeast to make bread, but it happened…in general, it seems that if it were a reaonable possibility , that someone over the course of evolution will have done it. The point I was making is it’s unlikely our ancestors had much of a notion of why, at least at first, cooking things was a Good Thing[sup]TM[/sup] beyond the simplest motivations. Gustation and mastication fit the bill; complex concepts of food chemistry do not. ---
**Author:** ![Q.E.D](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/q/51bf81/32.png) [@Q.E.D](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Q.E.D)\ **Post date:** [December 12, 2004, 5:00am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-humans-cook-food/279326/27 "2004-12-12T05:00:31Z")
> [@scr4](#): > > But _why_ does cooked food taste better? Isn’t it possible that natural selection taught us to like cooked food, because there was an evolutionary advantage to eating cooked food? Don’t be silly. How can there be an evolutionary advantage for something that doesn’t exist in nature to any significant degree? ---
**Author:** ![Q.E.D](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/q/51bf81/32.png) [@Q.E.D](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Q.E.D)\ **Post date:** [December 12, 2004, 5:03am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-humans-cook-food/279326/28 "2004-12-12T05:03:52Z")
> [@GorillaMan](#): > > Homo sapiens has always cooked food. I presume we can accept that. No, we cannot. Can you offer some reasonably authoratative cite for this assertion? AFAIK, it’s anything but clear exactly how long _H. sapiens_ has cooked his food. ---
**Author:** ![Diogenes\_the\_Cynic](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/e99b99/32.png) [@Diogenes\_the\_Cynic](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Diogenes_the_Cynic)\ **Post date:** [December 12, 2004, 5:11am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-humans-cook-food/279326/29 "2004-12-12T05:11:30Z")
> [@Q.E.D.](#): > > Don’t be silly. How can there be an evolutionary advantage for something that doesn’t exist in nature to any significant degree? I think you misunderstand the point. What **scr4** was saying was not that an evolutionary advantage lay in cooking food _per se_ but just in having an incidental _taste_ for it. Individuals who _happened_ to like the taste of cooked food were more likely to cook it, slightly less likely to die without reproducing and more likely to produce offspring who liked the taste of cooked food. I don’t know whether that scenario is accurate or not but I just wanted to clarify what was being suggested. ---
**Author:** ![Q.E.D](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/q/51bf81/32.png) [@Q.E.D](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Q.E.D)\ **Post date:** [December 12, 2004, 5:15am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-humans-cook-food/279326/30 "2004-12-12T05:15:13Z")
> [@Diogenes the Cynic](#): > > I don’t know whether that scenario is accurate or not but I just wanted to clarify what was being suggested. Ah. That makes some sense. I’ll warrant that it’s at least plausible. ---
**Author:** ![Loopydude](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/e56c9b/32.png) [@Loopydude](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Loopydude)\ **Post date:** [December 12, 2004, 5:57am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-humans-cook-food/279326/31 "2004-12-12T05:57:21Z")
> [@Q.E.D.](#): > > No, we cannot. Can you offer some reasonably authoratative cite for this assertion? AFAIK, it’s anything but clear exactly how long _H. sapiens_ has cooked his food. This [article](http://www.leakeyfoundation.org/newsandevents/n4_x.jsp?id=2765) is kind of interesting, though Dr. Wrangham is pushing the history of cooking back a long way before the conventional wisdom (which says cooking is about 300,000 years old, give or take). ---
**Author:** ![Q.E.D](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/q/51bf81/32.png) [@Q.E.D](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Q.E.D)\ **Post date:** [December 12, 2004, 6:18am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-humans-cook-food/279326/32 "2004-12-12T06:18:13Z")
> [@Loopydude](#): > > This [article](http://www.leakeyfoundation.org/newsandevents/n4_x.jsp?id=2765) is kind of interesting, though Dr. Wrangham is pushing the history of cooking back a long way before the conventional wisdom (which says cooking is about 300,000 years old, give or take). Interesting, if hardly conclusive. I can’t dismiss his hypotheses out of hand, but as even he admits, the evidence is weak as yet. Still, definitely a neat article. ---
**Author:** ![Loopydude](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/e56c9b/32.png) [@Loopydude](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Loopydude)\ **Post date:** [December 12, 2004, 6:19am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-humans-cook-food/279326/33 "2004-12-12T06:19:41Z")
I guess a salient point is there appears to be some consensus about the age of cooking, though I don’t know much more about it than that. ---
**Author:** ![Tim\_T-Bonham.net](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/46a35a/32.png) [@Tim\_T-Bonham.net](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Tim_T-Bonham.net)\ **Post date:** [December 12, 2004, 9:45am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-humans-cook-food/279326/34 "2004-12-12T09:45:15Z")
It seems to me that the homo sapiens body is designed to eat cooked food. Compare the length of human digestive system to that of animals. It’s much shorter than vegitarian animals, like cows, horses, sheep, etc. And also shorter than the meat-eaters who consume uncooked meat, like lions & tigers & wolves. Humans can get by with a shorter, less complex digestive tract _because_ they cook their food. So this allows them to have a smaller part of their body mass involved in digestion. And to spend more energy on a bigger brain, and a better blood supply to it. It seems unlikely that this coud have developed within the homo sapiens species; more likely, this combination is what led their ancestors to evolve into homo sapiens. ---
**Author:** ![ambushed](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/3bc359/32.png) [@ambushed](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ambushed)\ **Post date:** [December 12, 2004, 11:21am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-humans-cook-food/279326/35 "2004-12-12T11:21:07Z")
We started cooking most of our food when we stopped our nomadic ways. The higher energy vegetables we needed when we stopped moving, such as potatoes, required cooking in order to extract any food value at all. So we non-nomads started cooking and haven’t stopped since. ---
**Author:** ![GorillaMan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/50afbb/32.png) [@GorillaMan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GorillaMan)\ **Post date:** [December 12, 2004, 11:30am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-humans-cook-food/279326/36 "2004-12-12T11:30:00Z")
> [@ambushed](#): > > We started cooking most of our food when we stopped our nomadic ways. The higher energy vegetables we needed when we stopped moving, such as potatoes, required cooking in order to extract any food value at all. I don’t think there was much cooking of potatoes being done outside the Americas until relatively recently 😉 … ---
**Author:** ![Barbarian](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/e19adc/32.png) [@Barbarian](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Barbarian)\ **Post date:** [December 12, 2004, 2:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-humans-cook-food/279326/37 "2004-12-12T14:29:17Z")
I don’t know about that **ambushed**. As **loopy** points out, cooking has been around for at least 300,000 years. H. sapiens is roughly [200,000 years old.](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_Homo_sapiens) And farming is really only 10,000 to 7000 years old. In fact farming is so recent that some biblical scholars interpret the old testament as a warning about the dangers of abandoning the nomadic pastoral life in favour of going down to the farm. ---
**Author:** ![tremorviolet](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/e47774/32.png) [@tremorviolet](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tremorviolet)\ **Post date:** [December 12, 2004, 3:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-humans-cook-food/279326/38 "2004-12-12T15:03:43Z")
> [@Loopydude](#): > > This [article](http://www.leakeyfoundation.org/newsandevents/n4_x.jsp?id=2765) is kind of interesting, though Dr. Wrangham is pushing the history of cooking back a long way before the conventional wisdom (which says cooking is about 300,000 years old, give or take). Yeah, that’s the guy from the [article](http://www.harvard-magazine.com/on-line/050465.html) I mentioned above. Relevant quote: > [@](#): > > Softer food has many implications. Imagine what a nonhuman, raw-food-eating primate like a chimpanzee consumes in one day. “It’s a great big pile of leaves, seeds, and roots,” Wrangham explains, gesturing with his hands to suggest a mound the size of a small shrub. Humans, with generally larger bodies, nonetheless fuel themselves with a far smaller volume of food. “Compared with other primates, we are evolved to eat foods of high caloric density—meats, roots, seeds,” he says. Cooking makes this possible by changing the brittleness of collagen fiber, softening it and making meat far easier to chew. “People who think that meat dominated the diet of early Homo may well be right,” he says, “but they would have to have spent five hours a day just chewing. Raw meat is very hard to chew, and presumably raw wild meat is even harder.” > > Consider again the chimpanzees, who spend as much time eating as one would expect for primates of their size and weight (100 to 120 pounds). “In primates, there’s a nice relation between body weight and the amount of time spent eating,” Wrangham explains. Chimps spend about six hours a day chewing. Humans, who typically weigh more than chimpanzees, should theoretically eat more and spend even more time at it. Instead, data from 15 cross-cultural studies indicate that on average, human beings spend about one hour a day chewing food. This thread seems to have inspired a lot of WAGs with very little linked cites… ---
**Author:** ![Shalmanese](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/45deac/32.png) [@Shalmanese](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Shalmanese)\ **Post date:** [December 12, 2004, 3:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-humans-cook-food/279326/39 "2004-12-12T15:08:10Z")
> [@MLS](#): > > Imagine an individual who actually enjoyed rotten meat, tree bark, and grass, and other things without much nutritional value, and who hated the taste of fresh roasted meat, honey and ripe fruit. You mean, the people I see at McDonalds? ---
**Author:** ![WhyNot](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/c77e96/32.png) [@WhyNot](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/WhyNot)\ **Post date:** [December 12, 2004, 3:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-humans-cook-food/279326/40 "2004-12-12T15:15:45Z")
> [@Shalmanese](#): > > > [@MLS](#): > > > > Imagine an individual who actually enjoyed rotten meat, tree bark, and grass, and other things without much nutritional value, and who hated the taste of fresh roasted meat, honey and ripe fruit. > > You mean, the people I see at McDonalds? As McDonald’s sucks nutritionally, it is a caloric goldmine - and we’ve evolved to like lots of calories. Lots and lots of calories to feed our babies and get us through the long winters with little fresh food. So McDonald’s tastes good and is addictive. We have to exercise lots of brain power and will power, not to mention long-range thinking and an understanding of food chemistry and nutrition, to not want to eat McDonald’s whenever possible. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-humans-cook-food/279326.md?page=1) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-humans-cook-food/279326.md?page=3)