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

hungry. They “enjoyed the flavour of the raw food as only starving people can.” Their fantasies focused on cooked food. By the twenty-fourth day, Robertson recorded, “our daydreams had switched from ice cream and fruit to hot stews, porridge, steak and kidney puddings, hotpots and casseroles. The dishes steamed fragrantly in our imaginations and as we described their smallest details to each other we almost tasted the succulent gravies as we chewed our meager rations.” The Robertsons’ raw diet supported survival but it also brought a sense of starvation.

    Their resourcefulness enabled them to emerge from a terrifying situation in fine condition. They may have been hungry and thinner, but they were apparently not starving to the point of danger. Their experience shows that with abundant food, people can survive well on a raw animal-based diet for at least a month. But people sometimes survive with no food at all for a month, provided they have water. The lack of any evidence for longer-term survival on raw wild food suggests that even in extremis , people need their food cooked.

    The case that comes closest to long-term survival on raw wild food is that of Helena Valero. This exceptional woman was a Brazilian of European descent who reportedly survived in a remote forest for some seven months in the 1930s. She knew the jungle well because at about age twelve she had been kidnapped by Yanomamö Indians. She became a member of their tribe but her experience was very hard. One day, after her life was threatened, she escaped her captors. She took a firebrand wrapped in leaves so she could cook, but after a few days a heavy rain drenched it. Unwilling to return to Yanomamö life, she wandered alone, fireless and increasingly hungry, until she found an abandoned banana plantation. Valero was lucky because villagers had planted the trees in a dense grove. There, she said, she survived by eating raw bananas. She counted the seven months by the passage of the moon. Valero did not record her condition at the end of her exile, but she was eventually found by Yanomamö. She returned to the comforts of village life, married twice, had four children, and eventually feared for her children’s lives and escaped again at about age thirty-five. She never found happiness in Brazilian society.

    Valero’s tale could not be verified, but if anyone were to survive on raw food in the wild, it makes sense that they would have the fortune to have an abundant supply of a high-calorie domesticated fruit. Bananas are often touted as nature’s most perfect food.

    In more ordinary circumstances starvation is a rapid threat when eating raw in the wild. Anthropologist Allan Holmberg was at a remote mission station in Bolivia in the 1940s when a group of seven Siriono hunter-gatherers arrived from the forest. They were so hungry and emaciated that, as one of them told Holmberg, if they had not arrived when they did they might have died. This group had been part of a band that had thrived in the rain forest until they were taken to a government school. They had been so resentful of their forced removal that they had escaped with the aim of returning to their ancestral homeland. To avoid capture they had moved fast, walking even in heavy rain. Without proper cover the smoldering logs they were carrying were extinguished. After that the little group was reduced to a raw diet of wild plants until they were rescued after three weeks. They walked less than five miles per day and even though they knew the forest intimately and found raw plants to eat, they still could not obtain sufficient energy from their diets. Two of the men had bows and there was lots of game, so they might have done better but for a taboo on raw meat, which they claimed not to eat under any conditions. But even hunter-gatherers often live well with little meat for weeks on end, as long as they cook. The Siriono experience suggests that raw diets are dangerous because they do not