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

caribou, which the Copper Inuit ate when the lichen was partially digested. In summer they would take it directly from the rumen and eat it while cutting up the carcass. As the cold closed in during the fall, they were more likely to allow the full stomach to freeze intact with the lichens inside. They would then cut it into slices for a frozen treat.

    The Inuit probably ate more raw animal products than other societies, but like every culture the main meal of the day was taken in the evening, and it was cooked. In a scene captured by anthropologist Jiro Tanaka, the !Kung of the Kalahari illustrate the typical pattern for hunter-gatherers of a light breakfast and snacks during the day, followed by an evening meal. “Finally, as the sun begins to set, each woman builds a large cooking fire near her hut and commences cooking. . . . The hunters return to camp in the semidarkness, and each family eats supper around the fire after darkness has fallen. . . . Only in the evening does the whole family gather to eat a solid meal, and indeed people consume the greater part of their daily food then. The only exception is after a big kill, when a large quantity of meat has been brought back to camp: then people eat any number of times during the day, keeping their stomachs full to bursting, until all the meat is gone.”

    The Inuit consumed raw food mostly as a snack out of camp, as is typical of human foragers. In 1987, anthropologist Jennifer Isaacs described which foods Australian aborigines ate raw or cooked. Although foragers sometimes lit fires in the bush to cook quick meals such as mud crabs (a particular favorite), the majority of animal items were brought back to camp to be cooked. A few items, such as a species of mangrove worm, were always eaten raw, and these were not brought back to camp. Isaacs reported three types of food that were eaten sometimes raw and sometimes cooked—turtle eggs, oysters, and witchetty grubs—and in each case they were eaten raw by people foraging far from camp but were cooked if eaten in camp. Most fruits are preferred raw and are eaten in the bush, whereas roots, seeds, and nuts are brought back to camp to be cooked. Everywhere we look, home cooking is the norm. For most foods, eating raw appears to be a poor alternative demanded by circumstance.

     
     
     
    What happens to people who are forced to eat raw diets in wild habitats, such as lost explorers, castaways, or isolated adventurers simply trying to survive despite losing their ability to cook? This category of people offers a third test of how well humans can utilize raw food. You might think that when humans are forced to eat raw, they would grumble at the loss of flavor but nevertheless be fine. However, I have not been able to find any reports of people living long term on raw wild food.

    The longest case that I found of survival on raw animal foods lasted only a few weeks. In 1972 a British sailor, Dougal Robertson, and his family lost their boat to killer whales in the Pacific and were confined to a dinghy for thirty-eight days. They began with a few cookies, oranges, and glucose candies. By the seventh day they were forced to eat what they could catch on a line. They spent their last thirty-one days at sea mostly eating raw turtle meat, turtle eggs, and fish. There were occasional treats, such as chewing the liver and heart of a shark, but their staple was a “soup” of dried turtle in a mix of rainwater, meat juice, and eggs.

    They caught more food than they could eat, and they survived in good cheer. Indeed, their diet suited them so well that by the end of their ordeal, Robertson reported that their physical condition was actually better than when they had begun their journey. Sores that had been present when their boat was sunk had healed, and their bodies were functioning effectively. The only problem was that nine-year-old Neil, despite being given extra portions of bone marrow, was disturbingly thin.

    And all were