Humans can consume most raw fresh mammalian, ‘true’ fish, and shellfish that do not contain pathogenic bacteria or human-adaptive parasites without concern. Most concerns about consumption of raw food products is exogenous bacterial contamination during the butchering process or the growth of pathogenic bacteria during an excessive period of unfrozen storage. Raw fowl, reptile, many insects, and gastropods should not be consumed raw because of intracellular pathogens and parasites. Humans are inarguably evolved to consume some amount of meat as evidenced by the length of the colon, which at 20 feet is an intermediate ratio of body torso length as compared to herbivores and obligate carnivores, and also adapted to a microbiome that aids in the digestion of meat products as well as lacking the bacteria and/or features that aid pure herbivores in breaking down lignocellulosic material.
If any thing, cooking is more critical for vegetable and some fungal matter that is difficult to break down (or even toxic in some cases) in the the raw state for humans. Prehistoric cooking would have been purely roasting/broiling or primitive baking in pit ‘ovens’; boiling, stewing, and other pot cooking came along with the development of crockery, and later frying, more sophisticated baking, and other modern methods of food cooking to break down indigestible structure, release nutrients, improve flavor and texture for human palates, et cetera. Anyone who has ever tried to subsist on a ‘raw food’ diet can attest to the limitations of what is available, and that is even considering how many fruit and tuber cultivars and processed foods that would not have been available to prehistoric humans and proto-human hominids. The fruits and vegetables found in the produce section of the grocery store are almost all highly modified by millennia of selective breeding and hybridization to provide high density of nutrients (particularly digestible carbohydrates and fats) and do not look or taste much like their naturally evolved antecedents.
Good points, and I agree. However, I’m assuming Zimaane isn’t an early human so, by our modern standards, he just had some tough beef. Perhaps I should have taken into account that he was in Ethiopia and not the U.S., and it may be harder to get high quality beef there.
From the imagination of a teenage girl trying to see how a created being learns about the world. But I think she got this right – People found that even partially cooked food tasted better and, as noted above, was easier to chew and digest. (Without fire, things like the liver, brains, and bone marrow are easily chewed, but other muscle tissue would put up a fight. I just re-read King Solomon’s Mines, and it annoyed me that the starving heroes – who had no fire – deliberately ate the heart of an animal they killed, which has to be the toughest chewing they could have chosen, but say nothing about these easier-to-chew morsels.) In addition, his mentioning nuts is significant’ Not only does the taste change, but cooking nuts and grains will prevent them from sprouting.
It unarguably does for starchy vegetables like tubers by making those starches easier to digest. Evidence suggests that it works for lipids as well.. So proteins, carbohydrates and fats all become easier to digest with cooking.
It was actually in the United States. Iirc, it was the leg of a cow hanging on a hook, and someone with a sharp knife went up and removed small pieces that were passed around, with a dry rub of spices.
There was also kitfo, raw marinated ground beef that was quite tender and much nicer to eat.
I’ve eaten plenty of raw beef in the form of tartare, as well as very rare (blue) steaks. If it’s a good cut of meat, it’s easy to chew and can be very tasty with good seasoning. I’ve also eaten a wide variety of raw fish sushi, nigiri, and sashimi. I find them very easy to chew, and delicious. I wonder if cooking was used partly to preserve fresh foods. Cooked food remaining edible for a time after cooking.
That’s very surprising to me. They don’t have any vegetarian options? They don’t have any tempura
shrimp, softshell crab, ebi nigiri, unagi nigiri, tamago nigiri, California roll, etc.? I’d be surprised by one sushi restaurant like that, and the idea that all of them in your area are is really unbelievable to me.
ETA: looking at the menu online, assuming it’s the right place, there’s a variety of cooked things -tempura shrimp and softshell crab, crab, deep fried fish, and unagi.
I live in Chicago, and I’ve been to a reasonable number of sushi places around here, and they all have non raw-fish options. A sushi place that doesn’t serve, say, tamago (omelet/egg), I would not trust. And tempura shrimp or unagi is pretty standard for the folks who want cooked fish. It’s possible I’ve been to a place that didn’t have all three, but I can’t think of it. And, of course, vegetable rolls with no fish/meat in them.
Honestly, my prejudice as someone who’s lived near an ocean all my life shows in that I’d expect the opposite – that sushi places in a deep inland area would be more likely to serve more cooked options. But I’m know that fish that’s to be served raw is deep frozen, so really it could go anywhere.
And yes, I would think a place without tamago and, to me, unagi, would be very unusual.
It’s interesting in the context of the OP that, even in a cuisine where raw protein is common, there are also many cooked proteins. I wonder if there’s a difference in when they developed.
As I understand, the “Just So Story” of evolutionary cuisine goes something like this - early humans would come down from the trees into the nearby savannah to forage. One of the things they found was the carcasses of fresh kills abandoned by larger predators. After a day or so in the hot sun, the meat was breaking down, easier to chew. As humans evolved further, a gradual process - they learned to use fire to reproduce the same effect on fresh kills - so we’ve never heavily adapted to eating raw meat. We also figured out how to do the same to vegetables. (One example was that to extract sufficient nutrition from shoots and roots, herbivorous gorillas chew about 11 hours a day. We are faster eaters.)
Also, the concentration of protein from meat eating helps feed our large brains, which use a third or so of the calories we consume. Bigger brains made us smarter hunters, and better tool users, making sharp-edged stone knives for turning carcasses into meals. Presumably, cooking veggies in the mix was a fortuitous discovery that they were easier to chew and digest also.
Crab stick, shrimp*, smoked salmon, and eel are all cooked. And if you scroll down to the rolls, you’ll see the tempura, deep fried fish**, and eel rolls.
*Shrimp can possibly be uncooked, but only if it is amaebi.
ETA: ** I think I misinterpreted the 007 roll. The whole roll is deep fried, rather than it being made with deep fried white tuna.
From what I’ve read over the years, it seems sushi started out maybe in the 4th century with the Chinese, and was fish that was fermented (and thus preserved) in fermented rice. It wasn’t until the 19th century or so that the modern nigiri sushi started taking shape, with the raw fish and vinegared rice. So the food there went from a preserved form to a raw form.
Well, that is a “Just-So Story” alright. Unfortunately, it doesn’t match the available evidence. While hominids (and humans up to the advent of agriculture) are opportunistic scavengers, there is little evidence of routine secondary carrion consumption, and humans do not have any of the characteristics associated with carrion-eaters (sharp beaks and claws for tearing, regurgitation of food to aid in digestion and feeding of young, defensive measures to compete with other carrion-eaters, immunological resistance to pathgenic bacteria and the toxins they produce which are typically found in decaying bodies). Most paleoanthropologists believe that early hominids started getting more protein than ape cousins by collection shellfish and capturing sealife trapped in tide pools which could be eaten raw, then later moved onto deliberate harvesting and hunting going back to over 2 MYA.
The breakdown and purification of meat by natural catabolism is not much like even primitive cooking, and pathogenic bacteria such as Escherichia coli and Clostridium botulinum are ever-present in entrails and the soil, and would have been just as harmful to early humans as they are to modern ones. It is debatable whether early humans would find the taste of moderately spoiled meat as objectionable as we do, but they certainly wouldn’t find meat that has become rancid and cadaverinous to be appetizing.
Although the availability of protein is certainly a key contributor to human evolution and brain size, the human brain consumes between 350 and 450 calories per day but primarily in the form of glucose, which is one of the reasons we are naturally hungry for sweet foods and sugar. Large lipoprotein intake in terms of brain function is mostly an issue of natal and early childhood development, and the brain can function effectively on a relatively modest protein intake compared to protein needs for the haematopoietic system and tissue maintenance/regeneration.
Something to note is that you don’t need pots to boil foods as it’s possible to use an animal skin to do the job. It’s entirely possible our ancestors consumed some sort of rudimentary soup long before they invented the pot.
While you could certainly bake food in an animal’s stomach and you might be able to get a stew simmering, any organic ‘vessel’ is going to break down pretty quickly under enough heat to boil water within it. This is why pottery for cooking, serving, and storing food was such a great technological advance in human evolution.
