Why have we been cooking all this time?

[pc701]

Why have we been cooking our meat all this time if afterall ajonous and science tells us that cooked food and meat is less healthy for us....

Is it just purely because it tastes better?....Thats the only reason i can think of...But then again, I believe that instictively eating what you/eating what you want/following your taste buds,  leads to health problems
So we have been eating cooked meat for more than 100,000 years and have not attributed out health problems to the cooked meat and foods?...Is this a correct assumption?.I think it's plainly obvious that wild animals are much more healthier than humans as a whole, and animals dont cook their food. is this percisely because they dont cook ther foods?

[Josh]

I had an idea - we would have been used to fresh raw meat and meat that was warm from the sun. Then the ice age comes along...suddenly all the meat is frozen or really cold which is unappetising..so people start warming it up from the fire. They learn to like rare meat and the whole cooking thing starts from there. No idea if that's true or not.

[majormark]

I think it's for the same reasons we started eating any other junk food. Curiosity, addiction, etc.

[TylerDurden]

Cooked foods in general and grains and dairy all contain opioids in them which are highly addictive.

[goodsamaritan]

Why do people drink coke?
Why do people eat pizza?
Why do people eat spaghetti?

[SkinnyDevil]

Way back when I was a kid, we ate at a restaurant about once a year. Soda was for the holidays. About once a month, we'd get to go to a convenient store and get a slushy. Halloween was a big deal because that's when we'd get candy.

By the time I was in high-school and skateboarding all over the place, I started grabbing a hot dog (they were cheap) while I was out and maybe a fruit pie. I did this because where we moved didn't have apple trees (which we used to eat all day while we were out playing). Somehow, soda for most people I knew became a weekly affair.

Fast-forward a coupla decades....now soda isn't even a daily affair, it's what people drink all day. Candy is for multiple daily snacks (often replacing a proper meal), and I know kids who think hitting their favorite fast food place on the way to school and again on the way home is a god-given right. I watched a kid getting their music lesson where I teach get mad at his mom because they were going straight home instead of to McDonald's.

Re-wind to 10,000BC: Dude is munching his raw meat, staying warm by the fire. Dude is playing around and sticks hunk of meat over fire. It sizzles. He munches a bit of the burnt edge. YUM! Does this once a month or so for a treat, but knows instinctively you don;t wanna do this all the time. Looks over at his mate who is feeding the baby....

Fast-forward to when baby is now 15. Spoiled brat who sizzles his meat every day and mouths off when dad says "stop that!".

The wheel turns.....

[William]

Why have we been cooking our meat all this time if after all ajonous and science tells us that cooked food and meat is less healthy for us....

Why are we self-destructive?

Consider the mind.
We are possessed of a demon which makes us destroy ourselves.

This IMO is the message of the stones at Gobekli Tepes.


Same as saying that we are cursed. If you can mentally get a grip on that, the next step is to consider who would create such a daemon, and why.


Note that creating a daemon in not such a big trick - I've done it, and put it in this computer, so that every time the computer goes online the demon gets a time update from the ntp pool, and also updates the hardware clock. An operating systems is said to be modelled on the way our minds work.

[Paleo Donk]

We are clearly not self destructive on purpose. We evolved to continue our genes by any way possible and so in my opinion cooking probably helped us stay alive longer. Cooking lets us eat certain foods that are not available to us raw.  Cooking also drastically changes the taste of food.

I haven't eaten raw foods long enough to tell if its acculturation getting in the way, but cooked meat still tastes better than raw. There has to be a reason why cooked food can taste so good yet be potentially harmful to us. I can't imagine us evolving to have taste buds that crave something that is so bad for us. My guess is that there clearly must be some short term benefit, perhaps faster availability of some of the nutrition and energy.

Or maybe its more psychoactive like cocaine, where we will crave more and more of it until we eventually overdose and die. In the example of cocaine, the short term benefits are obvious and immediate (euphoria and energy) and the potential harmful long term effects are of much greater magnitude. So cooking can be thought of an extremely mild psychoactive drug with small magnitude short term benefits.  I look at sugar in a similar manner. As always this is just speculation and I am confused but to me it seems there must be some short term benefit to cooking or else we wouldn't do it at all.

[SkinnyDevil]

Yes, Donk, you have a good point. You are correct that cooking makes certain foods available that otherwise would not be edible.

Cooking allows access to extra nutrition & cheap calories when food is scarce. The problem, of course, is when it becomes the norm....as in the mildly facetious scenario I outlined above.

[Hannibal]

I haven't eaten raw foods long enough to tell if its acculturation getting in the way, but cooked meat still tastes better than raw. 

That's definitely acculturation.
The longer I eat raw meats the better they taste. Now they taste better than cooked ones.
Look at the young childern - thay crave raw ground meat, but mothers tell them it isn't good to eat

[TylerDurden]

What I find interesting is that I feel the psychoactive component of cooked foods(mainly cooked meats) much more keenly than in pre-cooked days(taking into account worse health, prerawpalaeodiet). Just a couple of days ago, I ate some cooked animal food for various reasons(only a relatively small amount) and felt drugged and weak for 24 hours afterwards.

[alphagruis]

That's definitely acculturation.
The longer I eat raw meats the better they taste. Now they taste better than cooked ones.
Look at the young childern - thay crave raw ground meat, but mothers tell them it isn't good to eat

I agree. Acculturation is most likely the major culprit. Our brains of ex-cooked meat eaters have to be definitely re-wired to get rid of the imprinted false equation: raw meat or fish or eggs = disgusting food. This has no rational basis, it's actually the other way around. Science has clearly shown that taste and smell senses unfortunately are not "objective" and attraction or repulsion does not just depend on the chemicals that come into contact with taste buds or olfactory receptors but on many other informations stored in the brain, in particular our metabolic state and also undoubtedly our culture.

Initially a practise that usually helps is to dry the stuff more or less in an air stream below 40°C. This produces only a very tiny quite negligible amount of AGEs or oxidation at the surface and results in a "food that much more resembles usual cooked or smoked meat or ham". 

 

 

   

[TylerDurden]

One also has to bear in mind that babies tend to like the foods the mother eats during pregnancy, due to habituation to the chemicals involved.

[instant]

i agree with SD that for example soda 50 years ago was a treat now its a daily beverage.

i think cooking was initially used to help preserve food in tough times? Then it eventually became the norm.?

[Paleo Donk]

I agree that the longer I've tried raw meat the better it has begun to taste and now crave it though still prefer a nice rare steak. What has not really changed as much though is the palatability of raw fat. It is far far easier to eat and far tastier when cooked. I've chewed on pieces of raw fat (usually from the rim of the steak) for easily 30 minutes without being able to take it down. I actually was looking for a substitute for gum and it has worked out nicely. This has me puzzled again on how paleos would get adequate fat if they were truly carnivorous without cooking or grounding it up.

[yon yonson]

I agree that the longer I've tried raw meat the better it has begun to taste and now crave it though still prefer a nice rare steak. What has not really changed as much though is the palatability of raw fat. It is far far easier to eat and far tastier when cooked. I've chewed on pieces of raw fat (usually from the rim of the steak) for easily 30 minutes without being able to take it down. I actually was looking for a substitute for gum and it has worked out nicely. This has me puzzled again on how paleos would get adequate fat if they were truly carnivorous without cooking or grounding it up.

paleodonk: if you had to chew it that long, i don't think it was fat. might have been connective tissure or something. i've found that good quality fat is waaay better raw than cooked. id recommend trying some marrow or hide fat

[goodsamaritan]

The taste of just caught very fresh raw fish is so phenomenally more satisfying at the beach than when it is transported to the cities.

The taste of grass fed just slaughtered beef and never refrigerated is also so phenomenally satisfying than those frozen and transported to cities.

If everyone had those above conditions available to them, they would eat more raw meat.

This is what the art of Japanese sashimi tries to enhance.  Thus Japanese people eat a good amount of raw meat.

Raw meat done right just tastes fabulous.

I just tasted New Zealand raw beef for the first time this lunch time and it tasted really good for something previously frozen.

Maybe the rise of civilization and townships led people to cook and flavor their meats to make up for the rotten non-fresh taste.

[DeadRamones]

The taste of just caught very fresh raw fish is so phenomenally more satisfying at the beach than when it is transported to the cities.

The taste of grass fed just slaughtered beef and never refrigerated is also so phenomenally satisfying than those frozen and transported to cities.

Man, you are spoiled!

I agree with one of the previous post. Cooking was more likely used to preserve food. Although I'll admit, eating some warm food gives me a comfortable feeling when it's cold out.

[William]

i think cooking was initially used to help preserve food in tough times? Then it eventually became the norm.?

Hmmm. How about cooking made crummy meat resemble the taste of good dried meat/jerky? This might explain why people accepted the change.

[Hannibal]

Cooking was more likely used to preserve food. 

Drying meat was much better preservation.

[alphagruis]

 Cooking was more likely used to preserve food.

It seems strange to me that cooked might be better than raw to preserve food. Paleomen could not use airtight tins to prevent cooked meat from bacterial rotting and if left in ambient atmosphere and at room temperature cooked meat decays rather faster than raw meat, as far as i could judge.
I agree with Hannibal. Raw meat could be easily dried specially in windy (even hot tropical) countries when cut in thin slices and easily preserved in this very simple and natural way. No need and most likely even quite bad to cook anything before drying. For instance, european sailors in the Caribbean Islands, did it. Arctic peoples too.  

[yon yonson]

yeah, i don't know how the hell cooking could preserve meats if you didn't have pressure canning or other modern inventions. it would have been much easier and more efficient to just dry the meat.

[instant]

The only thing that's kind of interesting there are no modern hunter gather tribes that are raw foodists; and some of these tribes have been completely cut off from civivlation.
http://www.beyondveg.com/tu-j-l/raw-cooked/raw-cooked-1a.shtml

even the Okinawans cook most of there food and seem to have remarkable health.

[goodsamaritan]

I think cooking became popular as a survival mechanism as cooking grains and potatoes gave people a stable source of starchy nutrition.

Cooking also allowed people to consume massive quantities of vegetables.

So cooking is mainly for the consumption of cooked starches and cooked vegetables.

Cooking also allows people to make bone broths and get some more nutrition from animal bones and animal parts that cannot be consumed raw.

In times of plenty, humans do not need cooking.  Cooking seems to be an adaptation to the times of starvation.

So we raw paleo dieters are living our lives in the times of plenty. And in times of plenty we are healthy.

[DeadRamones]

http://www.beyondveg.com/tu-j-l/raw-cooked/raw-cooked-3a.shtml

# Typical responses to wildfires by predators and other animals as guide to early primitive human relationship to fire. Based on present-day observations of how animals react and respond to wildfires, which can be used as a behavioral baseline, one can infer that early humans would have exhibited at least as sophisticated responses to it. Typically, predators move in soon after a fire to forage for food among the charred or partially burnt remains. Ruminants later visit to lick at the ashes (for salt), and in general, mammals visiting the site appear to enjoy its warmth at night. Goudsblom refers to these types of behavior as "passive" use of fire. It may also have been at this stage that humans would first have begun to appreciate not just the different and perhaps appealing taste of fired food, but more importantly its effects in preserving meat for later consumption when it would otherwise spoil if not soon eaten--a survival advantage.