Hello, everybody, and welcome to a brand new series on heritage radio network called the culinary call sheet where we give a peek into the back kitchen of culinary media. I'm your host, April Jones,

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Absolutely what was once niche or a little silly, as I'm sure you remember, Darren, when we started out, this man has now become such a massive playing field for so many creatives using food as the medium.

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I'm Laura Stanley host of inside school foods you are listening to heritage Radio Network broadcasting live from Bushwick, Brooklyn. If you'd like this program visit heritage radio network.org for 1000s More Hello and welcome.

This is Dave Arnold, your host of cooking issues coming to you live on narratives Radio Network broadcasting every Tuesday from roughly 12 to roughly 1245 to a 50. From reverse pizzeria in Bushwick. Brooklyn, how're you doing? Jackie? Got Jack in the studio today.

Oh, I'm good. That was real energy right there to Brooklyn, like really went in.

You know why? It's because I took a horse ride over the weekend at Gettysburg along the battlefield. And so I got the

Wow. horse ride inspired Brooklyn. Yeah, yep.

Younger people used to ride horses here. Do you know that? Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. So So I think we have stars on the phone, too. Okay. So

we do not have Anastasia the hammer. Lopez live in the studio today because she is out in Chicago. If you're not, I was about to lie and say she's covering the James Beard Awards for cooking issues. But that's just a straight up lie. Right?

We lost somebody.

Hope we didn't lose either people anyway. I don't know if we have an extra line for people to call in or we're done.

We got we got three lines. So

alright, so the big special guests we have on air today is Richard Rankin. Richard Wrangham is the gonna get this right here, the Ruth B. Moore, Professor of biological anthropology at Harvard. And he wrote a kind of a book that I think was published in about 2010, I think, but I think it's remained influential and I think it's more interesting actually to have him on Rio six years after it's been published, so that we can see kind of what the impact has been and how it's how the theories and it has stayed, you know, stayed the test over time. The book is called catching fire. How cooking made him a made us human. And Professor Wrangham Are you on the phone. Ah, hi. Good. Good to speak with you. Good to speak with you. So, it by the way, I don't know whether like how do you how do you want to give the elevator pitch for what the books about for those people that don't already have? Or do you want me to mutilate it for you? Or what do you want to do? Well,

hello, something's going on with the phone lines.

Is that Professor Reagan's phone? It's cutting out? Yeah, both of

the lines is cut out. So what to have them call

right back. So listen, while we're waiting. While we're waiting for him to call back. I'll just catch a few questions that we had in advance. Andrew is another Chandor question Andrew wrote in Hello. I just started listening to the show and I love it. I thought I'd write in a question. I hope this is the right spot. I've decided it's time I bring a tandoor into my life. Good call. The internet is awash with videos of courageous DIY errs building set ovens in their backyards. I have a little DIY experience, but I'm not halfway and can follow directions. What do you think buy or build any tips or thoughts for a rookie learning to feast on teacup and non cheers, Andrew, listen, dude, if you don't like DIY stuff out, the only reason to build a tandoor is because you really, really, really, really, really want to build a tandoor. Right? If you'd rather just, and you also like how much value does your time you know, have like, I bought mine and I am an avid DIY er, just because I think in general, it's better the first time you use a piece of equipment, if you have been grown, if you grown up and use tandoors your whole life. And you knew what the geometry was, and you knew how it was supposed to work, and you roughly knew what maths it was supposed to be. And you roughly knew what the you know, the composition of the clay was and how it was reinforced and how it was used over time and you know, kind of knew all of those factors. Then I'd say you know what, build one lot of fun, but in absence of that if you haven't actually used one before that probably a good idea to just get one from the professionals, the one I have, and they should pay me because I've sent so many people to them. You know, it's www.tandoors.com. It's Gulati International and they're in New Jersey. I was lucky enough. I live close enough, I was able to go get one. But if you don't if you're not that lucky, they will ship it, but I think they're shipping is expensive, because they're clay and they really want you to ship them by truck carrier. So there you have it. And Jack, are we back here? If not, yeah, we're back. We're back. We're back. All right. I will get to the second question before the end of the show. It's about boss Bouza the semolina cake anyway. Okay. So Professor, we got started. We got you on the phone

to know. Hi, Richard Wrangham. Professor rang.

Well, good, good. Good. Okay. Now, do you want to give the the elevator pitch? Or do you want me to give the elevator pitch? And then you'll say what an idiot I am? Or how do you want to do it?

You should give the elevator pitch. All right. So

basically, in here, here's what I got out of it. So the question, the question is this, how is it? Or why is it that human beings have evolved in in a very kind of particular way? Why do we have big, very energetically expensive brains to run? Why is our digestive system short wired, our jaw muscles, puny wire are relatively puny to other things like great apes? Why? Why is it that our teeth are structured the way they're all these kinds of things? Why are we relatively erect? Why are we relatively hairless? Why can't we climb very well? And if you if the question is, is it these these kinds of things started happening a long, long time ago? What caused those things to happen? And the kind of simplest explanation from an octopus raiser standpoint isn't any one of the normal kind of things have been posited? Like tool use, or any of these other things, really, the most simple outcomes razor thing is cooking, cooking can accomplish all of those things. Because if you cook foods, all of a sudden, they're easy, much easier to chew. You don't have to chew as long, it takes a lot less time. And you get a lot more actual caloric value energy out of the foods once they're cooked versus raw, basically, right, Professor?

Absolutely. Fantastic job, Dave. Yeah, no, that's really terrific. And so what it comes down to is this, what we know about humans is that you cannot live on raw food in the wild, you know, if you're a raw foodist, then you can survive on on your salads, and your smoothies, and so on, in an urban environment in which you can take the highest quality food you can find, and you can blend it and so on. But but it's not good enough in the wild. That's what we know realized for the last few years. So humans are unlike every other species, we are adapted to eating our food cooked, we absolutely need to. That's one one big point. And then the other big point is well, okay, if that's true, how long has it been true? Isn't it 50,000 years ago? Was it 5000 years ago? Is it a half a million years ago? And and actually, I think that there's a pretty easy answer to this, which is that it's been true as long as we have bodies, like the bodies that we have nowadays. And when did we get those voters who everybody knows it was just decided 2 million years ago?

Now, that one of the questions I haven't hit it right at the beginning, and it's it's in the in the book, and here's the baby, there's been a lot of research since 2010. So one of the main arguments that critics have is there is no evidence of fire remote, like cooking fire, you know, non non happenstance fire. anywhere near that long ago, your counter argument in the book is mostly Well, it's the easiest explanation and therefore should be accepted until an easier explanation is given. Is that still your a is am I am I putting your position correctly? And B has that changed over the past six years? Y'all

know? That's great. So yeah, there's no one can say yet. But there is definitely control of fire by humans going all the way back to when I am predicting it. 2 million years ago, but since since the book was published, we have had fire, the date of control of fire being pushed nicely back. So we've now got a couple of places that 800,000 years ago and a place that a million years ago. This is you know, quite a lot more than the 250,000 years ago that people have traditionally thought and and I'm feeling very excited about reports I've been hearing about some evidence that they're going to take the evidence for the control of fire back to very close to one I think it will eventually be shown. And so

that that million that 800,000 year old one is a fairly accepted site. Yes, it

is that one is in in Israel. And then there's another one, which has just been published in Spain, just about the same time, then there's a millenia one in South Africa.

And I mean, it's so this this is also something I don't understand, I'm just curious is, what is the difference between a 250,000 year old site that has been easily identified for a long time as having control of fire? And a site that's a million years, a million years ago? What's the difference in technology or placement or how, how the, how the sites are preserved such that it makes it more difficult to trace it back? Like why is there that line,

I mean, basically, over these immense periods of time that we're talking about, then the further back you go, then the more chance there is that everything has been disturbed to the point that you're never going to be able to find what you're looking for. I mean, here's one measure of the way in which is disturbed the half life of a cave, as I say, the duration that a cave is going to exist, is something around a quarter of a million years, so that most caves have gone after that time, because of erosion of the of the cave rock, that sort of thing. So there's all sorts of difficulties, the further back you go, and they in the end, the way that people are finding evidence for the control of fire, in the very early times, like a million years ago, is more from microscopic grains of charcoal that cannot be explained on the basis of anything else other than humans being responsible for making fire.

What would the difference be on the microscopic level between, say, a lightning strike and human fire?

Well, I mean, natural fires, dude can produce charcoal, of course. But they tend to produce charcoal that ends up with smaller grains than than human made fire. That's been shown in actual allistic studies. But the real thing that characterizes the evidence for the use of fire by humans at a million years ago in South Africa is the fact that there is a very ancient cave, it's factor. It's really the only cave that has been found at that date. And deep in the cave 30 meters in so what was that 100 feet in, you have lots of buried charcoal. And people say there's no way that you could have had any natural process that brought in the fuel mistakes and the grasses and that sort of thing that we're being burned. So how to be humans,

right? So it's not, it's not like a natural. It's not like West Virginia, where we have all these cool things that catch on fire once in a while. This is not like a coal bearing cave or something like this.

Right? Exactly. So but you have to be very careful. You know, there's lots of places where people have found some evidence of burning associated with humans way back 1.5 million 1.6 million years ago, but there's always the possibility that it was a tree burning from a lightning strike or some other natural fire so that's why you have to be so cautious. Alright,

so that's the first thing I think that a lot of people bring up in the second one, I'm curious whether there's been more research and this is the core really, and I was laughing actually, I listened to it when I'm when I was driving the car. I got it on, on Audible. And I was laughing out loud with the parts about the raw diet because it's been it's been exactly my experience. I did the raw diet I lost a bet and had to do the raw diet for a week. And I'll tell you, I you know, I didn't need any scientific study to show that I wasn't absorbing my calories just ask ask my toilet you know, it was like it's obviously this stuff runs straight through you. Yeah, you know, it's I mean, to me it's fairly obvious and you're eating a preposterous amount of of and this is like as you say, you know, shopping in modern supermarkets and you know, modern having a I have a very expensive high speed blender and taking a lot of times to soak things, etc, etc.

Right, I mean, using agricultural foods. And so of course, the quality of foods that are produced in on farms is far higher simply from the point of view of producing energy than what you get in the wild. So So you know, the fruits in the area that I work on study chimpanzees in Uganda, the average fruit has about as much sugar as a carrot and far less than an apple or an orange, and so on. So, so the raw food is have all these advantages that you mentioned, including eating domesticated foods. And, yes, there's quite a lot of extra work has now been done on this. And so, since the book was published, we've got very nice data showing that if you feed mice on cooked tubers, or on cooked meat, or on cooked peanuts, then they will get more energy than eating raw. And as you say, I mean, anybody who's tried a raw food diet knows this. But it's nice to be able to work out the mechanisms,

right. And I think another thing that I don't know whether a lot of people bring it up when they talk to you about the book. But the another thing I thought was very interesting, and I didn't, you know, you expect to hear in nutrition discussions, and you never do never in your book is a basically a huge indictment of the way we and I don't think you even explicitly bring it out this way, but a huge indictment of the way nutritional labels are printed. Because a calorie is clearly not a calorie is clearly not a calorie, it depends on the structure of it, how much it's cooked, how it's delivered to you, how much you chew, etc, etc. What are your Do you have any more current thoughts on that? Do you? Are you even interested in that it's not? Or is it just not part of your field of study?

No, I mean, I remain interested. It was an epilogue in the book, calling for a more rational approach to food labeling, and Rachael comedy. And I, we ran a session at the American Association for the Advancement of Science. So three or four years ago, we brought together a number of people to reflect on the fact that as you say, it's it's very clear to all sorts of people, even though they're not very often talked about, that the food labeling system does not capture what you wanted to know, which is, how much weight will I put on from eating this particular kind of food? It's all very ironic, because the scientists do know, do they do understand on the whole, that processing matters enormously, and that the more highly processed your food is, whether it's by cooking or by whatever has been done, by way of grinding it in, in the food company, before you even get it? This will increase the number of calories you get, and everyone knows that. So we should have a modified labeling system. But there have been a whole series of attempts to think about what the new system could should be, and no one can agree on what it should be. So it's not going to happen, right at the moment,

right? Well, the thing is, even if you could do that, you you still need some sort of mean, the body is so complicated, that you simply can't really say what's going to happen even there's no way to adjust it at all, because my favorite, you know, example, I put every one is that I drink a gallon of vegetable oil right now, if I could do it without throwing up, I simply wouldn't absorb the vast majority of those calories, even though they're liquid, and I should be able to absorb them fairly well, I just be overwhelming my system, and it would all, you know, leave relatively unprocessed. I mean, it's just impossible to it's impossible to to account for the differences in the way humans consume. I mean, you could get probably some sort of close average based on what the average average person eats, and how fast the average person eats. But it's just an incredibly complicated system. Right?

Yeah, exactly. And that's a great example. And it really does draw attention to the fact that part of the problem with the current system is that it is too simple. But then, by the same token, any change to the system, in terms of the way that we we put some kind of numbers on the food labels is going to be complicated. And complexity is a hard sell. Yeah, I mean, we I've thought of things. I mean, you probably have to like some kind of traffic light system where you have red, amber and green. And you associate those with the particular numbers that you put on the on the food label and say if it's if the red then probably actually you you on the very second as you're gonna get more counters and you expect from this and if it's green, you read less or whatever.

So base, base it on expectations rather than on health and don't have it be because most of the health claims are garbage anyway. So it's like, based on expectations, like Yeah, that's an interesting idea. Yes.

Something that emphasizes that nothing very precise. He's gonna come out. But here are some ways to think about what it's going to do to you.

Yeah, I mean, I think the real damage, and you know, you touch touch on this. But the real real damage is this is that once you apply numbers to something, and this is my problem with much of nutritional science in general, once you apply numbers do something, then the average person believes that those numbers have meaning. And so now there is this idea that there is a simple number that has a meaning. And in fact, it doesn't. And and so you can't go back and tell someone, well, your whole, you know, your whole mentality about the way food works is based on this thing that you think is simple and is accurate. But in fact, I can't give you any good numbers. Sorry, people will fall by that, you know what I mean?

Yes? Well, I mean, to me, the, you know, the ultimate example of this, of course, is the fact that, that what my group and I have been emphasizing is this enormous difference between raw and cooked. And if you just look at the numbers in the USDA website, which is the source for where a lot of the materials, or a lot of the food labels come from, what you will see is that you are supposed to get the same number of calories from raw food as you do from cooked. So if you take, you know, a carrot, and you cook it wrong, or you Sorry, you eat it raw, and then you cook it, according to the USDA website, you're gonna get the same number of calories was pretty absurd. Yeah, of course. And, actually, ultimately, it could be dangerous, because people who believe in numbers, and as you say, you know, people tend to believe in numbers, once they're given them will stick to their guns and use them to support their philosophy. And what can be dangerous is that you could, as a result, get too little food from eating it raw. That's a choice if you're an adult. And if you're a child, it's something that your, your parents give to you. And that's where he really could be dangerous, you know, and we have cases that have been reported of, of infants dying from eating raw food,

right, because well, right. I mean, so

the question when you're ready? Oh, yeah, I don't think it's related. But whenever you read, oh,

it's not related to that. Oh, what are they will get in a minute if it's no problem. All right. So let's let me because if people haven't read the book yet, I encourage them to go out and and get the book. It's, it's a fun read. It's well written. And right now we're really talking about the, the except for the nutrition labels. We're talking about the first half. So the first half, I would guess, Professor is more contentious in the scientific community in the second half is more contentious in the kind of sociological, committed community and the second half is more contentious kind of sociologically. Would you say? That's true, or now?

Yes. Progress, right. Yeah, I mean, it's not that contentious. But But nevertheless, that's where it's provocative. Let's put it

that way. Okay, that's a better way to put it. So let's stay with the first half. And the first half is really about this, this thesis of cooking. And I was completely fascinated, because Professor you you spent a lot of time actually hanging out with, with great apes, you know, chimps and whatnot in in Africa, observing them eating the way they eat, doing these sorts of things. How long, how long per day, how, how much time per day does the average Great Ape take eating?

So a chimpanzee which weighs, I don't know, something like 100 pounds, we'll spend roughly five or six hours just

chewing, just chewing, not gathering, just chewing,

chewing. Yep. So the time up into three months sort of thing. But, but literally, with food in their mouth, just moving that jaws up and down. It is about half the day. And so this is one of the incredibly striking things about the difference between us and our cousin primates. Because it's all related to body size, you know, the bigger you are, then the more time you got to spend chewing because you got to get more food into your body. And so if we were eating off food raw in the same way that chimpanzees and gorillas and orangutans do, then we would be spending something around seven or eight hours chewing per day.

Now the reason for those of you who haven't read the book yet that you that we would have to chew more than the chimp is mean, I would guess not just because our muscles are less strong, but because we require more energy to run our brains. Yes. And we have a less efficient intestinal system.

Well, okay, now, here's the funny thing about our brains. They're incredibly expensive to run and you can never turn them off unlike a computer. And so you know, they're expensive to run when you're asleep. They're expensive to run when when you're awake. But even though they are costing, something like between a quarter and a fifth of all the energy that you eat, when when you're resting, something like 25% of the energy in your body is being used to run your brain. Nevertheless, the total amount of energy that humans are using when they're asleep, is the same in proportion to body weight as it is in any other primate. We're not taking in more energy, on average,

is that because we're spending less energy on digestion?

Exactly. So the solution that many people like, and it seems to really have a lot of sense to why it is that we are able to afford to run a big brain, which is obviously so important is that we cut back on running our guts. And this makes every sense because we have the smallest digestive system in relationship to body size for any primate and we have the largest brain in relationship to body size for any primate. And the gut is one of the most expensive parts of the body.

And it's been a while but isn't it also true that our brain is more calorically expensive to run per gram than most other brains? We just run it at a faster rate. We overclock ourselves. Yes,

no, no, that's not right. It's the same ground with our brain. It costs the same as a gram of most brain.

Okay, good. Oh, nice. All right. So like a whale, just a whale takes a lot more energy to run their brain, but but they have a much bigger body. So it's a smaller percentage. For which one for like a whale anything something with a huge brain and elephants something with? Exactly, yes. Right. All right. Cool. So we are not overclockers. Interesting. Okay, now, so on. This means some recent papers that have come out and see what your response is. Your colleague colleagues, I guess, Lieberman, Professor Lieberman, who I guess is in your same building, or in the building next to you at Harvard? Absolutely.

Yes. He's about 20 yards away. Ah, yes, you

can duke it out in the real life. You don't need to write papers, you can just go have it out with each other. Absolutely. Right. And, and Professor Zink wrote a paper basically saying that they think that chewing, a pounding, rather, and beating things with tools prior to prior to consuming them is enough to allow us to get the extra energy out rather than cooking. Now, what are your thoughts on that?

Well, my thought is that it's a very odd idea. I mean, I you know, they're both good friends. And Katie think was my, my students at one point. And so, you know, I like what they do. But I think this particular conclusion is odd, because it doesn't seem to pay attention to what we know about raw food. You know, we know that, that even with incredibly high class food you put into electric blender, you was a human will still lose weight. And what they're saying is that way back in the Paleolithic, when you're using incredibly crude stone tools, that people could have done enough, by way of pounding and cutting their food, to increase the ease of digestion, and I'm getting enough food out of it. Yeah,

I mean, I think the study by the way, if people want to read it, it's called Impact of meat and lower Paleolithic food processing techniques on chewing and humans in nature. I think, you know, I think to me, one of the main things about the paper that I didn't get was they're really just they were focusing on time to create a bolus to swallow right, which is not necessarily the, the, the only thing that's important, it's part of it, right decreases the amount of time you have to chew, but not the amount you have to consume to get it to, to get the calories required. Right, is that

that is absolutely right. So it's, it's very awkward in humans, because it's very difficult to get permission to be able to study what happens when people eat raw meat, say, because the authorities are so worried that people are going to get some kind of a worm, but something from eating raw meat. So they were stuck with seeing what happens in terms of the time spent chewing. And you know, they did very nice experiments showing that, that if you pound your meat or even just my said, then you will spend less time chewing but it doesn't come to the heart of the matter, as you said. And here's another problem. We actually have very good evidence as a profession, that stone tools of the type that they're talking about, were used long before humans emerged into the present body form. So so the genus Homo, were Homo sapiens and earlier form has the same basic body shape is how my rectus and that happened. around 1.9 million years ago, but then, prior to that, all the way back to 3 million years ago, you've got stone tools being used by somebody. And those somebodies were pre human apelike forms. And so, you know, that's another difficulty that, that if they were using those tools to modify the food, it didn't do anything for them for a very long time.

You know, you know, you should do professor you should get you should let people know here like on this or any other show, we will volunteer to chew raw meat, we don't have to spit it out, because we're not part of a sanction study. Like, isn't there some way to just create a voluntary study? Or is that completely unethical?

No, unfortunately, we're not allowed to do that. Because, because when we tried to publish it, the the journals will ask for the statements showing that we did it all.

You could only write about it in a book, then you could never publish it in a journal. Yeah, exactly. That's right. And you'd be run out of the community on a rail, I presume? That's not a bad idea. Yeah. Because the thing is, right, if you're if you're writing books, right, I mean, clearly, you are these I mean, you could get a bunch of volunteers, I could probably find, you know, 100 volunteers like today, who would be willing to chew and swallow the meat and not worry about it. But you know, then the question is, how would you trace our, how would you trace our you'd have to do it inside of us chamber to measure how much we were absorbing, I guess, which

becomes complicated, but, but I appreciate the thought, and hey, maybe I'll get get back to you with some, some studies. I mean, you know, we'd love to be able to follow what happens to the microbiome of people eating raw food and people eating cooked food. So you know, we're talking about that, yeah, the bacteria in the colon. And there's increasing evidence that this is quite important contributor to the amount of energy we get out of our food. And very little is known about anything that differs between the raw and the cooked foods. So shifting people from raw to cooked diets, and vice versa, and recording their microbiome would be it's certainly something that people are going to be wanting to investigate soon.

Yeah, well, maybe we can find some quasi ethical way to do it.

Yes, exactly. Right.

So see if I have any more like pressing questions on the on the first section. Let's, let's move to the second section now. And then we can move back and forth. So the first section describes, you know, a bunch of reasons why. The best explanation, the cooking hypothesis, I guess you call it, the best explanation for how we got to be the way we are, is that we started cooking. Now, the second section of the book deals with what the cultural impacts of that are. And so you know, that's the part where, you know, it seems like, it's, it's interesting, good, but it gets in, in hot water for, you know, could potentially get in hot water, because it deals a lot with gender difference. And so, I'm not going to take a stab at at Cliff noting that one, so you want to give a basic rundown of what what cooking allowed to have happen. And,

yes, for sure. So here's the first observation that even though nobody's in enlightened places in, in Western Europe, and the United States and so on, you have men who are really interested in cooking. The fact is that in every culture around the world and every society, it is almost entirely a woman's role to do that ordinary domestic cooking the ordinary household cooking. And this is the most striking of all of the economic differences between men and women, that women do the cooking. The times when men do the cooking, special occasions when you have feasts, when you have some kind of great public affair and men come out and jointly roast the elephant of the world.

What and in the book, right, you point to the fact that the ability to not spend a lot of time chewing and having like your basic, like some basic stables and calories already cooked, allowed more time for one, it's one group, the males to go out and hunt and therefore the other section devolved on the females to do that. They kind of we know what's going to be their cooking, is that accurate or no? No,

that is right, that if you look at small scale society, it's kind of ironic in a way because I mentioned earlier that, that if we were eating our food raw, then we'd be spending something like seven or eight I was chewing and so now we eat our food cooked. And we can save lots and lots of time. I mean, instead of seven or eight hours, it's one hour a day. If you look or less than one hour a day all around the world doesn't matter where you are. It's just the human condition, what less than one hour a day chewing your food. So what do you do with all the spare time? Well, here's the irony, the irony is that the women are mostly spending that time gathering food and cooking it and preparing it. But meanwhile, the men, in some ways get off lightly. And the reason that men get off nightly, is not that they don't do anything they do, they do a lot of complimentary ways to get food. I mean, if you're living in a very simple way, in a small scale society, the hunter gatherer, then the men are doing a lot of hunting, but they have options. Women don't have options, they are absolutely required culturally, to be there everyday producing the basic food. But the men if they want to, they don't have to hunt, you know, they can go off and, and lie under a tree and gamble or visit girlfriends in the neighboring area or, or go to war, or whatever else it is.

For those of you that are listening to this and haven't read the book, I encourage you before you draw any sort of opinions to go read the relevant sections of the book, because, Professor, you go through a series of societies that appear to contradict what you're saying, but then you have arguments as to how they actually kind of fit into the general pattern, correct?

Yes, I mean, there are astonishing consistencies. I would say that that's right. And so what we do in the book is to try and think about, where's this pattern come from? Why is it that universally in in human societies, it is the women who are doing the cooking, and the men who have relative freedom and are able to absolutely rely on women providing food for them, which is so unlike any other animal, and I come to the conclusion that this has got something to do with a very basic feature of cooking, that once you rely on cooking, then there's something funny about the way the food is produced. And that is this that it is very easily stolen, it's very easily used by people other than the ones who collected the food. So compare this with. If you're a chimpanzee, say you, you climb into a tree, you pick a fruit and pop into your mouth, and nobody can take it from you. But if you're cooking food, you absolutely have to put the food onto a fire and just sit there for however long it takes for the food to cook. And during that time, someone else can come along and take the food. So that means that the people who are doing the cooking, and people who have collected this food are vulnerable to social competition. So this is now you know, a very strange kind of concept compared to thinking about us actually in the kitchen. But nevertheless, it is a reality of cooking on the campfire. And I think that reality leads to the following dynamic. women end up needing to be socially protected from the kids from the woman next door, or from some lousy bachelor who doesn't have a wife, or from someone visiting man. And the person who protects her is the husband.

So in the end, it does fall back on the old, the men do that kind of labor because of just physical strength. Well,

physical strength is part of it. But it probably even more important is just the compact among men. It's the it's the consensus among men that they will act as a sort of unified body to declare that if somebody has been accused and found guilty of pinching food from behind a woman's back, then they will punish them. And so the thing is that they can act in consensus, you know, because when a wife says to her husband, look, you know, somebody is always taking food for my fire, then he doesn't necessarily go and confront with himself, he'll go to the elders, and say, we got a problem in the camp. And then the elders will do something jointly. And that's where the real social power comes from.

And in your book, you say that most most historical and you know, small societies current small sizes are studied, the the cooking, keeping the cooking in the family unit unit, the food is more important even than sex.

Yes, I mean, you know, what we think of marriage, of course, is something that is, is really purely about sex and having babies and obviously that's a hugely important part of it. But it's very striking, finding places where, from a man's point of view Do what is absolutely more important than raising a family when he first enters his 20s, and so on is becoming a man is that there is somebody to cook for him. And if he doesn't have a mother who is still alive, providing us food, or occasionally a sister, then he needs someone else to do it. And he, he will somehow arrange that. And in some societies, you'll find that his first wife will be someone who is postmenopausal. She might be in her 60s, no way that she's going to provide him any children. But he provides she provides him with food. And that means that he can go away and do manly activities during the day and be as masculine as he wants to be. Otherwise, he's forced to do the cooking himself and in a world of stereotypes, then that means that he can't really adopt a male role.

And also, you say, in these traditional societies going back to say, when men cook, they're the ones or when they bring back food, hunted food, meat is typically shared in the community, whereas they gathered food staples, cooked foods, that the women would or not, not ever share, typically,

yes, I mean, there are a number of ways in which the relationships among men in these small scale societies are full of cooperation in a way that is strikingly not so true of the women. So it tends to be the case that each woman has her own fire, she put her own food that she has gathered with her own personal hands onto that fire, and she shares that food with her own children. And maybe, well, definitely her husband, and maybe one or two other close relatives. But it's pretty limited the sharing, whereas the men are much more likely when they have something. If it's big enough to share, then they will share it very widely with the men in the community, and then they share it with their own families.

All right, now let's get to the crux. here's the here's, here's the big question. So if that was the case for how we evolved, not just physically, but as culturally as a society to be where we are now, right? Let's just assume it's all that it's all completely accurate. What does that tell us about the way we need to? Or does it tell us anything about the way that we need to interact? Today, in a society where most people they cook if they want to, they go to a restaurant if they want to? They would rather if they want to? I'm talking Richard societies, like, you know, here in the US, where we're completely unhinged from any of these needs, right? We all have actual jobs that take up, you know, eight hours of the day and cooking and eating is a relatively small proportion of time spent. Is there? I mean, clearly, there are echoes of what happened more than echoes. Right. But is there? Is there any, is there anything for the future? Like need we be bound by it anymore?

No, I don't think there's any reason to think we have to be bound by the social patterns. I mean, we would, we would have to acknowledge them if in fact, there was any evidence of a of an evolutionary impact on our psychology. I don't, I haven't seen any such evidence so far. So it seems to me that, that we should look at what happens in the human species in the past and in many societies today. And it's sort of conscious of the fact that we want to get away from it in a world of of egalitarianism between the sector's

right. I mean, it I don't remember whether you state that explicitly in the book. But I mean, the interesting thing to me is that we, that there really doesn't seem to be once it's once it's no longer a physical necessity. We no longer need to act that way anymore, right? Yeah,

no, that's exactly right. On the other hand, you know, you might say that there are benefits to it. I think one of the loveliest papers, those studies that came out in the time since the book was published, was one that drew attention to the way that eating around the fire is a is a system that is conducive to the most lovely kinds of stories and conversations that occur in the hunters and gatherers of South Africa. So the Bushman there studied by Polly Wisner, she recorded what people talk about all day. And basically, during the day, people talk about very little. There are a few words just involved in organizing each other as to where we're going and what we're doing and how to cut up a piece of meat and so on. But the all interesting conversations she said happened around the fire in the Evening. And that's when the stories are told about the original myth of the society, or some tremendous hunt that happened or some hilarious incident happens with someone in another group, whatever. So, yeah, that reminds me of the fact that people do say that the conversations around a meal with your children are enormously important, and that there's something that is very sadly lost when everyone just watches television. While they're reading. Oh, yeah,