QUOTE(GlassBeadGame @ Fri 8th January 2010, 12:35pm)
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Boy, does he sound whipped or what? Raw food is a harsh and trendy cuisine cut off from all traditional vegetarian cuisines. These traditional cuisines take hundreds or even thousands of years to develop. The application of heat to food to make it more attractive is up there with language as milestone for our species. Ignoring this does fit in with the Wikipedian "let us remake everything as we go along" without due consideration of what has come before. Very much in line with the cult of the amateur.
Oh, boy, how true that is. Humans have been using fire for so long we have odd genes and behaviors that keep us close to it. Have you ever considered how weird it is that people sit around a fire, mesmerized by it, for hours? I think that's because our bored ancestors who yawned and went out into the darkness left fewer offspring.
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I thought about that this year as I spent New Year's night on a tropical beach in a little Caribbean country, doing a conga line around a bonfire.
It's even more-so when it comes to cooking, which kills all kinds of parasites and bursts vegetable cell walls to release all kinds of other nutrients that your digestive tract (which can't get through cellulose) would otherwise be denied. People who didn't like the taste of cooked food apparently left fewer ancestors as well.
What is the taste of cooked food? Well, that bottled smoke in a bottle they use for barbecue sauce. General browning and glazing and all the surface stuff produced by grilling and broiling, from meat to toast. The smell of cigarette and cigar smoke (which may actually contribute to tobacco addition). By the time this stuff gives you cancer, you've reproduced already, so the selective pressures are all acting in your early life where you need the nutrients and not the parasites.
Thinking about it, I'm shocked at how many ways we've found to sneak the taste of burned wood into things, from smoked meats to burned wood casks for wine to charcoal filtering for whisky to the smoke that turns barley to malt for beer (just about any alcoholic beverage which isn't transparent has been smoked or "cooked" in some way-- I drank rum around that bonfire). We retain those backyard barbecues alongside our microwave ovens for a reason!
Interestingly, domesticated dogs have been with us around the fire for some many thousand years that THEY have developed a taste for cooked food, too. Cats haven't, yet. They're newer companions and this is another way they show it.
Interesting, eh?
MR