John Burns Blog - 4th March 2010

John Burns' Blog

Horizon

Horizon
john burns I’ve just been watching a BBC2 Horizon programme which was billed as an investigation into the role of cooking in Mankind’s evolution. Being a long-term adherent of the macrobiotic view (q.v.) that we developed our superior brain and intellect as a result of cooking and eating whole grains I thought this might provide some mainstream validation for that view.

As a scientific investigation it was a complete dud. The research workers and the programme portrayed the development of human nutrition as going from raw fruit and vegetables to raw meat and then cooked meat. There was no mention of grains which have been our staple food for hundreds of thousands of years. It featured a Harvard professor who has a “controversial new(sic) theory that it was cooking rather than introduction of a new food which gave our ancestors their truly human characteristics”. According to his theory, man discovered cooked food by accidentally dropping a piece of raw meat into the fire. (I think he got that idea from an essay by Charles Lamb 1775-1834 “A Dissertation upon Roast Pig.” - except that Lamb was joking.)

Another professor advanced his “small gut-big brain” theory that as cooked meat was easier to digest than raw, the energy saving allowed the gut to be smaller and the brain to be bigger. That doesn’t explain why dogs have both a smaller gut and smaller brain than humans. In any case, man has a comparatively long gut which has evolved to digest and absorb complex grains.
To round off this claptrap, the programme made much of our attraction to high-energy foods especially fats. This allowed humans to reproduce more and get ahead of other species. As if primitive ancestors had access to a super abundance of rich pickings. Perhaps they were living in the Big Rock Candy Mountain.

4th March - Horizon

John Burns' Blog

Horizon

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