Professorn i biologisk antropologi vid Harvard Richard Wrangham har skrivit en bok, Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human, som får starkt beröm i en recension i New York Times:

“Catching Fire” is a plain-spoken and thoroughly gripping scientific essay that presents nothing less than a new theory of human evolution, one he calls “the cooking hypothesis,” one that Darwin (among others) simply missed. Apes began to morph into humans, and the species Homo erectus emerged some two million years ago, Mr. Wrangham argues, for one fundamental reason: We learned to tame fire and heat our food.

Fascinerande hypotes. Varför är då kokkonst så bra? Ur kapitel ett:

Cooked food does many familiar things. It makes our food safer, creates rich and delicious tastes, and reduces spoilage. Heating can allow us to open, cut or mash tough foods. But none of these advantages is as important as a little-appreciated fact. Cooking creates increases the amount of energy our bodies obtain from our food.

Kokad mat gjorde också matsmältningen mindre energikrävande, vilket ledde till att energi frigjordes för att hjärnan skulle kunna utvecklas ytterligare. Det där med raw food, som är poppis numera, ger inte Wrangham särskilt mycket för, särskilt inte i ett evolutionärt perspektiv.