Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human, (Paperback)

from janglen

This is a very interesting theory. I was not totally convinced by the latter section of the book which provides an explanation for why cooking became a female role, and why this inevitably meant subservience to men. However, Wrangham is on the whole very persuasive, especially in the link he make...

from Paulagraph

As I live in an area that is perhaps the world capital of raw food veganism, the contrarian in me just had to read How Cooking Made Us Human. [disclaimer: I'm naturally a quasi-vegetarian, although I eat plenty of fish, eggs & poultry] Wrangham's thesis is a fairly simple one: it's not "man" the ...

from lquilter

Intuitively Wrangham's thesis makes a lot of sense, and he does a decent job laying out research that supports his thesis. I suspect that it's not quite that simple, but I found persuasive his account of the nutritional benefits of cooking. His relation of this to evolutionary time is a bit sketc...

from jmoncton

OK, forget the raw food movement. This book presents an interesting theory that a breakthrough moment in human evolution was when man began cooking his food. Cooking the food allowed more calories to be absorbed, changing the shape of primates from having large digestive tracts to large brains. A...

from fegolac

This book offers a compelling case for the idea that cooking is the main reason why we evolved from australopithecines to Homo erectus and then to Homo sapiens. It challenges at several points the mainstream notion that meat-eating was a keystone of (at least some parts of) this evolution, for ha...