ANNABEL LANGBEIN
The first barbecue
I’ve been reading Catching Fire: How Cooking
Made Us Human, by Richard Wrangham, a book that hypothesises (very eloquently) that the single thing that made us human stemmed from the control of fire and the advent of cooked meals.
Wrangham talks about cooking being responsible for changing the shape of our bodies and our brains, our use of time, our social habits and, perhaps most importantly, the nutritional value of our food. He argues that the extra energy from cooked food gave the first cooks a biological advantage that made them stronger and able to reproduce better.
Popular thinking has the start point of humans’ relationship with food and fire as a relatively new activity on the evolutionary scale — some time in the past 100,000 years — and thus not that relevant to our evolution. Homo sapiens stepped on the scene some 200,000 years ago but new evidence shows that our early predecessors, the prehistoric hominins, were using controlled fire much, much earlier. In an ancient cave in Israel that was home to several lineages of prehistoric hominins, artefacts have recently been found that suggest that the controlled use of fire became routine about 350,000 years ago.
It’s little surprise that we are so enamoured with barbecueing — it’s almost programmed into our DNA in that ancient brain we still carry around. Add in the wonderful sociability of standing around a barbecue as the food pretty much cooks itself, and, of course, the aromas — we sniff the air, our saliva glands kick in, our stomachs rumble, we just want to get in there and start gnawing on bones and licking our fingers. It must always have been this way, the appetising aromas of food cooking over the fire bringing people together — and then the conversation, the ideas, the camaraderie, the shared pleasure of eating together.
As a cook, there’s something inherently feel-good about the idea that our humanity could be pinned through time on the cooks of the world. We are the only species on earth that cooks — and barbecue is the world’s oldest cooking method. With Labour Weekend kicking off the barbecue season, it’s time to fire up the grill and get back to your roots.