A lot of the posts in this thread are treating ‘tastes good’ as if this was an attribute of the food. Whether something tastes good is entirely determined by our tastes buds, it has nothing to do with the food. It just tastes, period. It is an evolutionary development that ensures we enjoy (and thus seek out to eat) what’s good for us, and dislike (and therefore avoid) that which is not.
So either we have evolved a taste for cooked food, in the limited time since we started cooking, or something about cooking enhances a taste that is already there in the food.
I’d say it was a bit of both. There are obvious benefits to cooking that could easily prove to be an evolutionary advantage. And cooking starts the process of breaking food down, making the constituent and beneficial nutrients in it that more obvious. Thus we’re fooling our tastes buds to a certain degree and what was raw meat with probably nice fats and digestible proteins becomes cooked meat with so much obvious fat that it’s dripping off it and melt in the mouth proteins that’ll digest just lovely!
[Sheer speculation]
I don’t think I’ve seen these angles on it addressed yet:
(…Say, do you suppose heated water came before cooked food as such?)
Our ancestor, call him Fred, has just come into the cave from the cold outdoors, accidently drops the carcass a little too close to the fire, fetches it out, and Fred is hungry enough that he figures he better not waste it. It tastes a little funny, 'specially the black bits… but there is one more part to it: the hot fire has made the food warm, which in turn warms up Fred a little bit. This just plain feels good. Oh, and the tough meat is a little softer, and this is great because Fred’s teeth have really been bothering him lately.
[/speculation]
The only problem I have with the “dropped the dead animal in the fire” scenario is that it takes a lot longer than “Oops! Someone get that wildebeast out of the fire before it’s ruined!” to cook meat. Meat cooked over an open fire takes a bloody long time to cook (says Camping Girl).
It didn’t have to be an entire carcass. Just a small piece of meat dropped in the fire would be sufficient, and not necessarily that easy to retrieve quickly. I think by far the most likely scenario for the discovery of cooking was an accidental burning of meat somehow.
There’s all the possibility that bones or especially tough bits of meat were discarded into the fire and people started noticing that it smelled good when those scraps got hot and roasty so they began to experiment.
Right. But once you have proto-humans managing fire and dragging animals home to eat, it can only be a matter of months before the fire and the meat come together. Even if there’s some reason why they should try to prevent this, accidents will happen.
So cooked meat almost has to coincide with the use of fire. If there are advantages to it (and a number have been suggested) then you have evolutionary pressure toward more cooking.
Humans, like other living things, weren’t “designed” to do anything. Those who had a combination of behaviors and attributes conducive to survival did so and passed these traits and behaviors on to their offspring. It’s not a matter of A causing B or vice versa; it’s a matter of both positive and negative feedback. What works survives. I have not come across anything that suggests a clear concensus on exactly what led to the evolution and success of homo sap. There were undoubtedly many interrelated contributing factors.
and I’d suggest that one of those factors is an ability to handle fire without fear. Don’t know how that developed, either, but being able to come close to it, move it from place to place, sleep near it, put food into it and fish it out, etc. was definitely part of it. Maybe that’s one of the early stages of intellectual development that precursed our present state. And that may have been occurring coincident with this cooked-meat development. xo C.
Why is it accepted as a fact that it it harder to chew raw meat than cooked meat? It confuses me as I have not experienced this in my own mastication. A slab of almost uncooked filet is buttery smooth and melts in your mouth. A filet ruined by application of fire can be very chewy.
Raw fish is very tender.
Raw chicken feels quite squishy and tender, although some basic desire not to spend the evening hunched over the toilet has prevented me from attempting to eat it.
Modern livestock is pampered to an unbelievable degree, specifically for puposes like texture of meat. Wild game is tough, stringy, gristly, and sinewy, and could be very hard to chew without being cooked first. Cooking breaks down connective tissue in the meat. Compare the resiliency of raw beef with beef that has been roasted or stewed for several hours – the latter you can literally cut with a fork, while the former, even if it’s nice and juicy, still has all of its collagen and so holds together very well.
Right. I’ve been challenged. I’ll buy a steer and put it through an extensive exercise program. Buff it up, burn off the fat, toughen up the muscle. Then eat part of it raw and see how tough it is to eat.
(Or maybe a piece of raw deer meat. Hmmm.)
Except I don’t think it would have necessarily smelled good to most of them. If they had no previous experience eating cooked meat, there would be no reason to have evolved with a preference for that smell. The meat must have been cooked either accidentally or just as a random experiment, like, “Hmmm…Og wonder what burned meat taste like.” That has to be the way humans figured out what’s good to eat and what isn’t; at some point, somebody must have just arbitrarily tried eating just about everything, and figured it out by trial and error. A few people maybe would like the taste of cooked meat just by random chance. Maybe the meat had some nasty germs in it, and the raw meat-eaters died. Then there’d be a natural selection for cooked meat-eaters, and then people would start to like the smell.
As for the smell of food, I think it would be an enticing smell even the first time. After all, it is meat (even if it smells different when “burned”) and the hunter would probably be hungry.
The preservation aspect seems like the most convincing argument to me. saving food for later would be very appealing to a primitive hunter who has killed far more meat than he and his buddies can quickly eat.
This thread is really making me hungry for a prime rib or some stew.
Eating cooked meat could have begun very early. Lightning strikes cause wildfires. Animals are killed and their carcasses partially cooked. Hominids investigating the charred remains of the forest/grassland/brush find charred carcass of small animals. Being wild omnivores (like dogs, bears and pigs) they may well have collected the animal carcasses from the ashes and added them to their normal food supply.
1st, I like WAG #54, it has a likely feel. But I thought up WAG #55, so here it is.
People, especially kids, will play with both fire and food. Assume in times of plenty, the kids took some of the extra meat and put it in the fire, or held it in the flames on a stick, and then maybe tasted it. Given a few repeats, said kid really likes cooked meat better, and that’s how it starts. It wouldn’t have to take generations of Darwinian selection; notice how most of us catch on to high-calorie foods as preferable (chocolate, sweets, fatty sausages, etc are so much nicer than lettuce…). And it would apply to foods other than meats.
Alternately (WAG #56), they had found dried meat would keep, and tried drying it over fire to hurry it up. Again, bits were sampled.
And shijinn asks when stew was invented. It didn’t need to wait for metal pots; the California Indians didn’t have waterproof pottery, so they made waterproof baskets and cooked by putting hot stones from the fire into baskets filled with water and stew fixings or polenta equivalents. Fairly laborious, so there must have been benefits to it.
Drat. One post too late. This was going to be my WAG. It makes sense.
Primitive man used to make and eat lots of dried meats and fish. They probably noticed that they dried quicker on warm days in the sun. So they get fire and decide to try to speed up the process themselves. Who can wait for weeks after a fresh kill to have a meal. The faster I can heat this stuff the sooner I can eat.
They notice it changes color quicker over a flame, try it out, and ta-da it’s good.
Now why you would want to heat up vegetables that are already edible is another question.
But, again, how would you know that before cooking them? WAG 54 seems to cover this, as well. A burned field would yield some cooked yet edible stuff. Perhaps a really, really hungry group of hominids ate some of that “ruined” stuff 'cause there was nothing else to eat. And lived to reproduce, while the picky raw foodists starved.
I like the kid playing with fire scenario, though! My kid will certainly put anything he can get his hands on into the fire, including styrofoam (bad!), candle wax (good!), abandoned rusty-hinged wooden chairs (what?) and occasionally glass bottles (cool!). He certainly would have put a strip of wildebeast flesh into or over the fire if he hadn’t felt like eating it. I, being a mom, may have made him eat it anyway, to teach him a lesson about wasting food and playing with fire. And thus it (maybe) began.