Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human Read Online Free PDF Page A

was practiced by every known human society. Similarly, all around the world are societies that tell of their ancestors having lived without fire. When anthropologist James Frazer examined reports of prehistoric firelessness, he found them equally full of fantasy, such as fire being brought by a cockatoo or being tamed after it was discovered in a woman’s genitals. The control of fire and the practice of cooking are human universals.

     
     
     
    Still, in theory, societies could exist where cooked food is only a small part of the diet. The quirky nutritionist Howell thought so. In the 1940s he stated as part of his theory of the benefits of raw foods that the traditional Inuit (or Eskimo) diet was dominated by raw foods. His claim about the Inuit eating most of their food raw has been an important main-stay of the raw-foodist movement ever since.

    But again it has proved exaggerated. The most detailed studies of un-Westernized Inuit diets were by Vilhjalmur Stefansson during a series of expeditions to the Copper Inuit beginning in 1906. Their diet was virtually plant-free, dominated by seal and caribou meat, supplemented by large salmonlike fish and occasional whale meat. Stefansson found that cooking was the nightly norm.

    Every wife was expected to have a substantial meal ready for her husband when he got back from the hunt. In winter a husband came home at a predictably early time and would find the smell of boiling seal meat and steaming broth as soon as he entered the igloo. The long days of summer made the time of a husband’s return home less predictable, so wives often went to bed before he came back. Anthropologist Diamond Jenness accompanied Stefansson, and described what happened if a wife failed to leave cooked meat for her husband: “Woe betide the wife who keeps him waiting after a day spent in fishing or hunting! . . . Her husband will probably beat her, or stamp her in the snow, and may even end by throwing her household goods after her and bidding her begone forever from his house.”

    Arctic cooking was difficult because of the shortage of fuel. In summer women made small twig fires, whereas in winter they cooked over burning seal oil or blubber in stone pots. After the snow had melted to water, the process of boiling meat took a further hour. Despite the difficulties, the meat was well cooked. “I have never seen Eskimo eat partly cooked meat so bloody as many steaks I have seen devoured in cities—when they cook, they usually cook well,” Stefansson wrote in 1910.

    The slow cooking and shortage of fuel meant it was hard for men to cook when they were out on the hunt, so during the day they would sometimes eat fresh fish raw, either the flesh or in the case of large fish, just the intestines. Hunters also made caches of excess fish, which they could recover later for a cold meal. However, even though these foods were uncooked they were affected by being stored: fish from the cache became “high”—in other words, smelly because they were partially rotten. Most people liked the strong taste. Jenness saw “a man take a bone from rotten caribou-meat cached more than a year before, crack it open and eat the marrow with evident relish although it swarmed with maggots.”

    Though many raw foods were eaten for convenience, some were taken by choice. Blubber was often preferred raw. It was soft and could be spread easily over meat like butter. Other meats eaten raw were also soft, such as seal livers and kidneys and caribou livers. Occasionally there was evidence of more exotic tastes. Stefansson’s hosts were horrified to hear of a distant group, the Puiplirmiut, who supposedly collected frozen deer droppings off the snow and ate them like berries. They said that was a truly repulsive habit, and anyway it was a waste of a good dropping. Those pellets were a fine food, they said, when boiled and used to thicken blood soup. The only vegetable food that was regularly eaten raw was the lichen eaten by