What is cooking?
Cooking has proven to be so successful a survival strategy
that we are now in need of a way to curtail our social
growth in order to avoid drowning in our own success. There
are many theories about the beginning of cooking, but the
simple answer is that early humans realized in the aftermath
of forest wildfires that burnt meat and fruits and
everything else released all sorts of different new smells.
They didn't know that this was because chemicals were being
formed by the action of fire and volatilized and released
into the air, (like microscopic fireworks releasing a
constellation of molecules into smell space,) but they
instinctively understood that these new aromas corresponded
to basic components in the food, and therefore the more of
these components were identified and remembered the better
the chances to find edible stuff in places not easy to
locate with the eye.
And this was of paramount importance, because it allowed
them to use aromas as a way to relate seemingly disparate
finds, and thus, enlarge the pool of edible things. For
instance, even if they knew visually that a fish is good to
eat, it was not easy to infer from its appearance that a
crab would be good too, whereas if you cook them both,
you'll find that the aromas emanating from them have many
similarities and it's easy to intuit that if one is edible
so would be the other. After they learned to control fire,
early humans began to exploit this new method as a
practical tool to learn about the composition of collected
foodstuffs. In practice, cooking is similar to a
spectroscopic analysis, where the sense of smell is like
our built-in spectrometer. And instead of relying on the
limited information vision can offer on the suitability of
an object as food, the brain had then a way to analyze the
prospective foodstuff's molecular structure, and as a
result, a multitude of new items were added to the pool of
edibles, which needless to say generated an enormous
increase in the probability of survival.
Read the complete article www.hypernose.com