June 3, 2009--Cooking With Gas

For years, while working ten-hour days, we pretty much always ate out.

I’m sure some of this had to do with laziness—we fortunately could afford to take all our meals in restaurants (living in downtown Manhattan helps with that since there are so many good, low-cost ethnic places within walking distance) and so we had a ready excuse for not wanting to roam the supermarket aisles at 7:30 PM and then heading home to start food preparation. Instead, we’d head over to the Stage Restaurant on Second Avenue, a Polish place famous for pirogue and roast chicken and an assortment of the best homemade soups in New York. A quick dinner for two there would rarely set you back more than $20. So why cook?

In fact, we cooked so little that we got a call from Con Edison one day to ask if there was something wrong with our gas service. No usage was being reported on the meter. When we confessed to the fact that we didn’t do much cooking—and that when we did we pretty much always used the microwave—they suggested that maybe we should have them turn off gas service so we could avoid the monthly fee that they charged whether or not we used any. To save that $12 a month we authorized them to do so.

But then for years we were ashamed to let any of our friends know about this. It would make us seem as spoiled as in fact we were. But then, during the booming gilded years when spending was seen to be virtuous, we fessed up and became local heroes of a sort—The Couple Who Ate Out Every Day. In our small way we became symbols of that profligate time.

Well, that time is over, we have more time now that neither of us has a traditional job (in other words, we’re sort of retired), and we are finding that cooking and eating at home is healthier and, the Stage aside, much cheaper than eating out all the time.

But to tell the truth, amateur evolutionary biologist that I am, if I had known sooner that cooking was related to the development and progress of our species—homo sapiens—I would have long ago had Con Edison over to reconnect us. I would have wanted to participate in that Darwinian struggle to be among the fittest.

I now know about the essential role that cooking played in evolution thanks to a new book by Richard Wrangham, Catching Fire (reviewed in the linked New York Times article). It’s not, he claims, because we, unarmed, would have been the expected winners in the battle for survival with other mammals—we have no claws, our jaws are weak, and we have no natural body armor—but rather we have survived and reached this stage of species domination because we figured out how to cook. In his more vivid language, we are “the cooking apes, the creatures of the flame.”

He’s no crackpot but rather a professor of biological anthropology at Harvard and makes a persuasive case that “cooking made us human” (his book’s subtitle).

Apes began to become human about two million years ago when they (I almost said “we”) learned to tame fire and began to sauté food. In his words:

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 aspect: cooking increases the amount of energy our bodies obtain from food.

In addition to enabling “us” to survive and reproduce better than before, eating cooked foods helped our bodies evolve in ways that made digestion easier and thereby made more energy available for our brains to enlarge. And our brains, more than our molars, are what ultimately allowed us to become the earth’s dominant animal.

The folks at the Stage couldn’t have said it any better.

Long term--who knows? At the risk of causing you to lose your appetite, all the cooking we are now doing is attracting a few cockroaches. Sorry, but we live in New York City. I haven’t seen any of them doing much food preparation—they are for sure seemingly enjoying mine—but I do know that many biologists contend that even if we homo sapiens wind up annihilating ourselves in a nuclear war or succumb to some pandemic, the roaches will survive us.

Must be my cooking.