Cooking our food has evolved beyond a simple biological advantage
Q. Calling all you polylinguists out there: In the category of “When pigs fly,” can you cite any other fanciful nevernever phrases from other languages? A. According to “Mental Floss” magazine, “Farfetched idioms aren’t limited to English.” 1. “When the cows are dancing on ice.” (Dutch) 2. “When the donkey climbs the tree.” (Georgian) 3. “When hair grows on the palm of my hand.” (Hebrew) 4. “When an owl’s tail blooms.” (Latvian) 5. “When the crow will fly upside down.” (Malayalam, India) 6. “When horses grow horns.” (Afrikaans) 7. “When it rains pocketknives.” (Portuguese) 8. “When crawfish/lobster whistle on the mountain.” (Russian) 9. “When the fish climbs the poplar tree.” (Turkish) 10. “One afternoon in your next reincarnation.” (Thai) Q. In 2013, Dartmouth football coach Eugene “Buddy” Teevens challenged the Thayer School of Engineering to devise a technology that would let players practice their tackling skills without injuring each other. What was the result? A. Elliot Kastner, an engineering student and one of Teevens’s defensive linemen, invented with others “a robotic tackling dummy that could move like a real player and take the hits during practice sessions,” he writes in “IEEE Spectrum” magazine. Dubbed MVP (Mobile Virtual Player), the 150-pound bot looks like a giant padded bowling pin on wheels, with a shape and weight distribution like a roly-poly children’s toy so it bounces right back up after being tackled. Guided by a handheld remote control operated from the sidelines, MVP can zip around at up to 20 miles per hour – fast enough to mimic a real player – and turn on a dime.
Now Kastner is busy offering his bot for sale to football programs at all levels. The Pittsburgh Steelers, for example, are giving it a go. “American football is in jeopardy of losing a generation of participants because many parents have concluded that the game is too dangerous for their kids. If the MVP allows young players to put on their helmets and take the field with a lot less risk, it will earn its title as most valuable player.” Q. As you cook your holiday turkey, did you ever stop to wonder what if you didn’t? What’s the point of cooking? A. ”All cultures from the Inuit of the frozen Arctic to the hunter-gatherers of sub-Saharan Africa are sustained by food that has been chemically and physically transformed by heat,” as taken from “New Scientist” magazine’s book “The Origin of (Almost) Everything.” Cooking was an incredible invention, and as primatologist Richard Wrangham argues, without it the body of Homo sapiens couldn’t exist.
“To understand why, imagine eating the same diet as a chimpanzee. (Breakfast: fibrous and bitter leaves; fruit. Lunch: bark; fruit; raw monkey meat and brains. Dinner: grubs; leaves; fruit.) To gain enough calories to fuel your energy-guzzling brain, you would have to devote almost all of your daylight hours to searching for food.”
So why cook? Heat makes food softer, so less time is needed for chewing, and more calories are released, meaning more weight gain. Plus, heat makes food safer: When scavenged meat is roasted on hot coals, it kills off germs that cause food poisoning. Then, too, cooking renders otherwise inedible food, such as tubers, edible, and overall makes food taste better.
“Cooking has evolved into one of the most varied and inventive elements of human culture. We cook thousands of different types of animal, plant, fungus and algae using a dazzling array of techniques … and spend far more hours planning and preparing food than actually eating it.” As the book put it, “We cook; therefore, we are.”