Has it been shown that a preference for cooked food is a passable genetic trait? Given the huge range of food prep methods and tastes across different cultures, I have my doubts.
Do other omnivores and carnivores show preference for cooked meat after natural fires?
(Serious question; I have no idea, and don’t really know where to look. Anybody else know where to look?)
My cats like cooked turkey. But they mostly like wet cat food, which is probably a degenerate variant of “cooked meat”.
They do not show any liking for raw-type meat.
Small sample, I know.
Small sample, and semi-domesticated species.
Mine don’t seem to have a preference – will happily eat cooked meat, yowl at me for raw though they don’t usually get it, and eat raw with apparent enthusiasm what they catch for themselves.
It might be a passable cultural trait. Cultures also evolve to take advantage of successful strategies.
And in a very broad sense, it’s not just humans who pass “knowledge” to the next generation. Cats mostly prey on the animals their mothers taught them to hunt. This is a significant factor in humans rarely being the preferred food of carnivores. (We kill individual carnivores who eat people , but might just keep a wide berth from others.) My father grew sweet corn for many years, until one hungry squirrel discovered it was good to eat. That knowledge quickly spread to all the squirrels, and he had to struggle to grow corn after that.
Evolution clearly acts on culture as well as on genes.
It is entirely possible that while we have partially evolved to benefit from cooked food, but that many, many other animals could (and in some cases do now that they’re our companions) benefit more from cooked food than raw. All my dogs and cats have eaten prepared pet food and they did great.
The difference is that humans were smart enough to figure out how to do it. It is pretty clear that the genus Homo was getting pretty smart BEFORE cooking. The earliest evidence of cooking dates to about 800,000 BC; it probably started a bit before that. While there were no true modern humans then, there were some pretty clever Homo sapiens-adjacent folks; tools date back twice as far as that.
So I suspect that cooking just happens to be good for a lot of animals, and Homo erectus or some other precursor humans figured out how to cook for themselves.
And obviously there’s been a ecological niche for larger “great apes” well beyond central Africa for millions of years. Here’s one identified in Spain 12 million years ago, long before cooking was utilized.
Wikipedia also mentions (in Australopithecus) evidence of animal butchery and possible stone tools at 3M years ago, give or take, although fossil tooth indications are a primarily herbivore diet. So it’s possible adaption to cooked food was a regression in the last 1M or less years from eating raw meat.
Not that this is a ‘both sides’ thing, but this kind of nonsense is common from anyone pushing an agenda where they have accepted as truth that you absolutely must, or absolutely must not eat or do some specific thing. ‘We’re not supposed to do that’ is an easy, but often fallacious debating point. There is a smaller, but also vocal (and wrong, and absurd) faction that argues we should eat nothing but meat, as well as people who argue we shouldn’t ever eat wheat, or probably any other food you can think of.
Insofar as there is any ‘supposed to’ with the human diet, we are adapted to survive on a very wide range of foods. It seems fairly clear that we should eat fruits and vegetables, because we can’t synthesise vitamin C, and we die without it, and it seems equally clear we should eat some animal-based foods, because that’s where vitamin B12 is commonly found, and we die without it.
I have a friend in this camp. He’s not quite that extreme. I think he believes it’s okay to eat a limited amount of fruit. But he once subsisted on nothing but raw meat for several months to prove that he could get enough vitamin C from fresh raw meat. (Maybe organ meat) And he thinks that since vegetables mount chemicals defenses against being eaten, they are bad for us. Completely ignoring that we obviously evolved to eat some vegetables, AND that modern vegetables have been bred to be less toxic AND that cooking vegetables greatly decreases the effectiveness of the remaining toxins.
Spoiler alert: the guy has a lot of weird health problems. I don’t think any have been directly linked to his weird diet, and it could certainly be coincidence. But he’s not a stunning endorsement of the carnivore diet.
I think it was Heinlein who was making fun of “…we weren’t meant to…” logic when one of his characters said “If humans were meant to eat cooked food, we’d have an oven in our throats.”
I’ve found that the more eagerly someone tells you that you have to adjust your diet, and the greater severity of terminology they use, the less they are really worth listening to (medical professionals excepted).
I find it instructive that the whole world wide and through history, the only cultures or groups that are vegan are either those subclasses who cannot afford meat, or those groups who have a particular religious conviction that eating meat is immoral.
Indeed, and they survived by getting their B12 from accidentally eating insects or insect poop (in grains or other stored foods)
I wouldn’t even exempt all the medical professionals; especially if they’re not talking about a diet needed because of some specific physical problem (such as failing kidneys, not such as obesity.)
The Owsley diet, he was famous for that. He thought plants were trying to kill us in that sense, they have all sorts of defense mechanisms to try and discourage (generally) being dined upon. Cooking some vegetables and roots or tubers definitely takes the digestion stage along a little farther, breaking them down, making them more palatable, and nutrient bioavailability. Roasting nuts pretty much destroys aflotoxin.
Depending on the time and place, it is extremely difficult if not impossible to obtain the necessary nutrition for heavy exertion on locally available plants alone. A key example of that is the 1803-1806 Lewis and Clark expedition. Practically lost in the Rocky Mountains in the winter, the luxurious plains buffalo, elk and deer were practically nonexistent. So were many of the plants or tubers that stood in for say, potatoes.
They did have some elk and deer meat, but they were in such poor emaciated condition, the meat was so lean or devoid of any fat, each member of the expedition was consuming up 8 to 10 pounds daily and they were still hungry. A party of about 35 or 40 people were actually starving, and ill, because an excess of protein without fats is toxic. In cold weather especially, sufficient fat is required. They were reduced to eating their horses, and dogs, skins, leather etc. Maybe there are better examples but it is well documented.
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In attempting to source this information, I found an article that actually discounts the theory. (My bolds)
Isn’t this what happens with rabbit starvation?
One reason that fish is so good to eat, I surmise, is that fish contains essential fatty acids along with protein.
The funny thing is that while I’m sure wild rabbits can be very lean, leading to the name “rabbit starvation”, the couple of times I’ve had (farmed, domestic) rabbit meat, it was quite fatty.
Yes, and Lewis and Clark definitely sought out fish and berries as much as they could. Highly sought after trade goods, they were able to source pacific caught dried fish well into the interior West.
But 30 or 40 people in the winter, in the mountains, hauling canoes up waterfalls and stuff like that day after day will really take the starch out of your sails. Even with modern supply routes and improved nutrition it would admittedly have been difficult not to lose weight/muscle due to their calorie expenditure. As someone has pointed out while there are no “essential carbohydrates”, without adequate fat and protein we will die.
This is also where Lewis broke out the “portable soup”, an early bouillon/beef with a fair amount of fat, perhaps. Sealed in metal tins and purchased in Philadelphia, it might have been the largest single expenditure for the expedition. Everybody hated it.
I recall one article denigrating the Atkins diet, saying the only reason it works safely is because those following it are consuming a substantial amount of fat along with their meat protein. IIRC they also mentioned the “liquid protein diet” fad (not that one, get your mind out of the gutter!). At the time, it involved celebrities consuming nothing but a disgusting-looking pink protein liquid. Not the best thing when everyone else around the table is having a regular meal, but apparently rich people can get away with a lot. It apparently stopped fairly quickly when some of the participants started exhibiting interesting medical issues, including organ failure(?).
Apparently the same happened with the doomed Scott Antarctic expedition. They were hauling sleds across the snow themselves, having killed all the animals, and were using 8,000 to 10,000 calories a day; not the best time to be running low on food and cooking fuel or warm dry clothes.