What is the purpose of cooking our food? Does it just make it more palatable and/or destroy potential pathogens, or does it confer some benefit to our digestive process?
If it aids with our ability to digest the food, does that say anything about human nutrition?
I’ve heard it said that we’re supposed to be vegetarians, since we can’t eat raw flesh. But I think that statement has many flaws. For one, humans can and do eat raw meat. Additionally, we do derive benefit from eating animal products, even if we cook them first.
But what’s the straight dope as it pertains to food. Why do we cook it in the first place?
Cooking aids in the digestive process, especially breaking down complex carbohydrates into simpler sugars. Cooking also softens food, making it easier to chew and swallow, reducing the size of our jaws and the associated muscles. And cooking reduces harmful pathogens.
Even with the benefits and convenience of modern life, people who try raw food diets (in the mistaken believe that it is healthier) struggle to obtain enough nutrition.
It generally makes food taste better and easier to eat. Killing pathogens is a bonus, although I’m sure people noticed that you were lest likely to get sick if you cooked certain things before eating them, even before the advent of germ theory.
I’ve heard stupid contrafactual things too. That particular lie is a popular militant vegan special. Our dentition argues to the contrary: we can chew some vegetation and some meats with equal facility, as befitting an omnivore.
And cooking helps with vegetable foods, too, by thermally or chemically degrading some inedible nutrients into more digestible forms.
I’d like to remind the people who are postulating that as an explanation of the fact that Sushi is raw fish, and many people eat Sushi. I’d also like them to look in a mirror and take notice of the fact that they have canine and incisor teeth as well as molars. We are omnivores. I will not repeat the other statements mentioned, but I do agree with them.
At an Ethiopian wedding I once ate a piece of gored-gored, which is a small cube of beef, uncooked and unmarinated. It was hard to chew and I didn’t enjoy it, but I did eat it. So, it’s certainly possible to consume raw flesh.
I eat beef medium rare and, in my experience, it doesn’t overcook and thus toughen the meat. If your raw beef was hard to chew, my guess it was of low quality.
Nitpick: sushi is not raw fish. It’s the vinegared rice that defines sushi. Sushi can have cooked fish (like shrimp tempura or unagi); it can have egg (tomago sushi is said to be the test of a sushi chef’s skill), it can have just vegetables like cucumber or fermented beans like natto.
Sashimi, on the other hand, is always raw. (Usually fish, but can be meat … even chicken.)
Once again I learn something in this place! Thank you!
I was at Wu’s House last night, and all the sushi they had on the menu had raw fish. I guess that’s why I made that connection because most places, here in Chicagoland at least, are the same in that regard.
I knew that sushi refers to the rice and sashimi to the raw fish (or other meat), but I didn’t know that sashimi always means raw. For instance, I might have thought that cooked eel sashimi was a thing, as it is with nigiri sushi. My ignorance has been fought, thank you.
I agree if low quality means the less choice parts. Early humans didn’t eat the farm-raised, high-fat, tender meats that thousands of years of domestication have produced. They killed wild game, lean, muscle-filled, and tough to chew. Nor did they have the luxury of choosing just the best parts of the animals; they ate everything, including the parts we mostly throw away today.
Individual protein molecules in raw meat are wound-up in coils, which are formed and held together by bonds. When meat is heated, the bonds break and the protein molecule unwinds. Heat also shrinks the muscle fibers both in diameter and in length as water is squeezed out and the protein molecules recombine, or coagulate. Because the natural structure of the protein changes, this process of breaking, unwinding, and coagulating is called denaturing.
Even true waygu beef, with all the expensive feed and hand-massaging, can’t get all the meat tender. Part of the cure for this is roasting the meat, especially the tender parts. The rest need slow cooking, usually in liquid to keep it moist or else constantly braised, which is why stews, soups, and barbecues were invented for the less-choice areas.
Roasts are easy to understand, although experience is needed to get the best results. Stews are advanced courses, requiring the idea of containers, the idea of waterproofing, a steady source of controllable fire, and the safety and patience to work for hours on a meal. All those are enormous advances over anything that other animals of the time could implement. No wonder humans leaped ahead in amazing ways.
I posted before what sounds to me a reliable link saying that cooking increases the calories of meat. This would explain why cooking evolved for meat (while not proving whether the evolution is genetic, or just cultural, with meat-cooking cultures surviving).
Since then I googled to see if cooking changes the calories of fruit, vegetables, and grains – without finding clear and convincing results. There is a lot of information on nutrient availability changes from cooking vegetables (some say up, some say down, most from dubious-to-me web sites), but I doubt nutrient levels are evolutionarily anywhere near as significant as the calorie count.
There are many health warnings on the internet saying that eating raw bread dough can make you sick. But I still wonder if populations, on the cusp of fatal starvation, generally have a better chance at survival if their bread is baked. I have to think yes, but don’t really know.
I wonder if surviving hunter gatherer groups just cook their meat, or if they often also cook the plant food they find.
It may actually be that there is need for more research.
