cooked food history

[svrn]

what is its history? why did we start cooking? was it to create cities which need grain to exist?

[TylerDurden]

*sigh* In future, keep ALL non-rawpalaeo topics well away from the General Discussions forum. You're the worst offender re this, so far.Moved away now to Hot Topics forum.

The Neolithic era started the cities and happened well after cooking got started. Though, admittedly, the Neolithic era likely ensured that a far higher proportion of the human diet thenceforth consisted of cooked foods. Cooking only seems to have gotten started c. 250,000 to 300,000 years ago.

[CitrusHigh]

Tyler, you're out of control bruva. Troll wasn't promoting cooked foods, just asking about how it started, a totally legitimate topic for the general discussion. Have you considered therapy or meditation as an alternative way of venting frustration, because you went out of your  way to find a problem with this thread and it's placement on the boards.

How long we've been eating cooked foods is relevant because it has evolutionary implications via epigenetic and mutagenic events. Can you deny this? You cannot less you wish to foray into fantasy. I propose you move this thread back where it belongs, though I care not if you actually do, you'd also do well to apologize to Troll and find other outlets for your angst... for your own benefit.

I respect keeping the promotion of cooked foods out of any area but 'hot topics', but the neutral discussion thereof is for the sake of understanding and knowledge, you are in essence saying you are frightened of reality/history.

[TylerDurden]

 The reason why I was annoyed is that this is the umpteenth TOD(400+?) posts I've lost count long ago) that I've had to switch to a different forum. I realise that some people want to post all their topics in the general discussions forum as it's the biggest one(and, likely, the most viewed) but many such topics actually belong elsewhere. In the case of cooked foods discussions, they  all clearly belongs in the hot topics forum. General Discussions forum is for general discussions about raw foods. Off-topic discussions are concerned with non-RPD diet-related topics that don't otherwise belong in the hot topics etc. forums. And so on... I realise that we all make mistakes sometimes(I've, after all, done some re allocating threads to the wrong forum) but we should aim to make these rare occurrences, as otherwise the board eventually gets  skewed into having 99% of all posts going to just 2 or 3 forums.

[TylerDurden]

Incidentally, I'm not at all against the discussion of cooked foods, even with people suggesting that cooking brings some benefits(though I would still try to debunk those points with scientific data if I could). This is a question of forum-placement.

Anyway, back to cooked foods:-

One notion is that cooking allowed more foods to be eaten which could not be eaten raw, though this advantage was clearly more used in the Neolithic era, long after cooking was invented. My own stance is that cooking creates addictive opioids which influence the brain like drugs do. The Waisays website has lots of scientific data on this subject.

[Löwenherz]

One notion is that cooking allowed more foods to be eaten which could not be eaten raw, though this advantage was clearly more used in the Neolithic era, long after cooking was invented.

And the current result is a population of 7 billion ill people who are dependant on cooked junk plus pharmaceutical drugs.

What a drama!

Löwenherz

[svrn]

i think it belongs in general but I don't really care. move it wherever you want.
What I'm really interesting is what made the first human to put his food in the fire do so and when did it happen.

Was it only to create the stored grain revolution which created the ability for an elite to control the masses?

I have a feeling grains are totally evil not only in terms of health but also in the literal enslavement of people into systems they want nothing to do with.

[Iguana]

Still you didn't read it yet, Tyler?

_If things are as rosy as you say, I don’t understand what inspired early man to cook his food in the first place. If he found his raw vegetables as tasty as cooked dishes, or even more so, according to what you say... He wasn’t a masochist, after all.

o Let me suggest a possible incident that will account for what might have happened after our ancestors discovered fire. Imagine a tribal people that had always eaten raw food before and who, one day, started cooking_even just one food_either out of curiosity, accident, or possibly because a forest fire had cooked their sweet potatoes to a turn.

_Sweet potatoes? But, one can’t even eat them raw.

o Why not? They taste delicious when the body needs them; they’re crunchy, juicy, a bit like pears, sweet-tasting and fragrant. Like all raw food eaters, those tribal people most certainly ate their sweet potatoes raw with relish as long as they needed them and, once the aversion threshold had been reached, felt their texture turned tough and that they tasted like aftershave. Those signs warn a raw food eater that he can’t go on eating sweet potato, as yourself will perhaps experience one day.

_I’ve already experienced it. I’ve never found that sweet potatoes had any other texture or taste than something quite repulsive!

o Very true. I should have said that perhaps you’ll discover one day how good they can taste.
Let’s go back to those tribal people who ate their sweet potatoes cooked for the first time. Try to conjure up the scene in your mind’s eye.

_If I understand you aright, they presumably didn’t, at any point, feel that they couldn’t go on eating.

o Without the slightest doubt. They probably ate an amount that far exceeded their need for glucose, starch, or any other nutrient present in those tubers. What do you think happened, the following day, when, as usual, they tried to eat their fine sweet potatoes raw?

_They found they tasted bad.

o Precisely. Their instincts prevented them from increasing the overload resulting from the revelries of the previous day. They found their raw sweet potatoes tough and inedible.

_They must have been utterly baffled.

o There were two possible reactions. Either they thought that their raw sweet potatoes had suddenly become distasteful because of some divine curse and that, to exorcise the sweet potatoes, they had to go on cooking them; that was the advent of fire as a cathartic agent.
Or, alternatively, the tribal dietitian concluded that “the raw sweet potatoes tasted bad today because, when we ate them cooked yesterday, we disregarded our instincts and overloaded our metabolism and thus today our taste buds, which work properly with raw food, prevented us from increasing the overload not yet cleared.”

_I don’t believe that a tribal people could have reasoned in such a way.

o Neither do I, especially since 20th century dietitians are as yet unable to.

http://www.reocities.com/HotSprings/7627/ggraw_eat1.html

My own stance is that cooking creates addictive opioids which influence the brain like drugs do. The Waisays website has lots of scientific data on this subject.

Sure, that's probably another reason.