[3:47] Today's program is brought to you by Whole Foods Market. For more information, visit Whole Foods Market.com. I'm Laura Stanley, host of Inside School Food. You are listening to Heritage Radio Network broadcasting live from Bushwick, Brooklyn. If you like this program, visit heritageradionetwork.org for 1000s more.

[4:17] Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues. This is Dave Arnold, your host of Cooking Your Shoes coming to you live on Heritage Radio Network, broadcasting every Tuesday from roughly 12 to roughly 1245, 1250 from

[4:27] Rover's Pizzeria in Bushwick. Brooklyn. How you doing, Jack? We got Jack in the studio today. Oh, I'm good. That was real energy right there. You like the Brooklyn? No, you really went in. You know why? It's because I took a horse ride over the weekend at

[4:44] Gettysburg along the battlefield and so I got the Wow. Horse ride inspired Brooklyn. Yeah. Yep. You know, a lot of people used to ride horses here. you know that? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I think we have Stas on the phone too. Okay, so we do not have Nastasia the Hammer Lopez live in the studio today because she is out in Chicago. Uh, she's not. I was about to lie and say she's covering the James Beard Awards for cooking issues, but that's just a straight up lie. Right? We lost somebody. I hope we didn't lose either people. Anyway, I don't know if we do we have an extra line for people to call in or we're done. Yeah, we got 3 lines. All right, so the big special guest we have on air today is Richard

[5:28] Rangon. Richard Rangham is the, uh, let me get this uh, right here. The Ruth B. Moore professor of biological anthropology at Harvard. And he wrote a kind of a book that I think was published in about 2010, I think, but I think it's remained influential, and I think it's more

[5:49] interesting actually to have him on, you know, 6 years after it's been published so that we can see kind of what the impact has been and how it's how the theory is in it, have stayed, you know, stayed the test over time. The book is called Catching Fire, how Cooking Made Him, Made Us Human. Uh, and do we, uh, Professor Arangum. You on the phone? Ah, hi, good to speak with you. Good to speak with you. Um, so, by the way, I don't know whether, like, how do you, how do you, do you want to give the elevator pitch for what the book's about for those people that don't already have

[6:20] it, or do you want me to, to mutilate it for you, or what do you want to do? Something's going on with the phone lines. Is that Professor Ragam's phone that's cutting out? Yeah. Both of the lines just cut out, so we'll have to have them call right back. All right, so listen, while we're waiting while we're waiting for him to call back, I'll just catch a few questions that we had in advance.

[6:39] Andrew is another tandor question. Andrew wrote in. Hello. I just started listening to the show and I love it. I thought I'd write in a question. I hope this is the right spot. I've decided it's time I bring a tandor into my life. Good call. The internet is a wash with videos of courageous DIWires, building set ovens in their backyards. I have little DIY experience, but I'm not a half wit and can follow directions. What do you think? Buy or build? Any tips or thoughts for a rookie learning to feast on tika and nan? Cheers, Andrew. Listen, dude, if you don't like DIY stuff out, the only reason to build a tandor is because you really, really, really, really, really want to build a tandor, right? If you'd rather just, and you also like how much value does your time,

[7:16] uh, you know, have, like I bought mine and I am an avid DIYer just because, um, I think in general, it's better the 1st time you use a piece of

[7:24] equipment. If you had been grown, if you'd grown up and used tandors your whole life, and you knew what the geometry was, and you knew how it was supposed to work, and you roughly knew what mass it was supposed to be, and you roughly knew what the, you know, the competition of the clay was, and how it was reinforced, and how it was used over time,

[7:39] and, you know, kind of you knew all of those factors. Then I'd say, you know what? Build one, a lot of fun. But in absence of that, if you haven't actually used one before, probably a good idea to just get one from the

[7:49] professionals, the one I have, and they should pay me because I sent so many people to them. you know, it's www.tandors.com. It's Gulati International, and they're in New Jersey. I was lucky enough. I live close enough. I was able to go get one. But if you don't, if you're not that lucky, they will ship it, but I think the shipping is expensive because they're clay and

[8:09] they really want you to ship them by truck carriers. So um, so there you have it. And Jack, are we back here? Yeah, we're back. We're back. We're back. All right. I will get to the 2nd question before the end of the show. It's about Bazbuzza, the semolina cake. Anyway. Okay, so Professor, we got Stas. We got you on the phone too? Hi, Richard Rangam here. Proessor Rang. Oh, good, good, good. Okay, now, do you want to give the elevator pitch, or do you want me to give the elevator pitch, and then you'll say what 80 I am, or how do you want to do it? You should give the elevator pitch. All right, so, so, basically, in, here's what I, what I got out of it. So the question, the question is this. How is it or why is it that human beings have evolved in

[8:56] in a very kind of particular way? Why do we have big, very energetically expensive brains to run? Why is our digestive system short? Why is our jaw muscles puny? Why are relatively puny to other things like great apes? Why, why is it that our teeth are structured, the way there are all these kinds of things? Why are we relatively erect? Why are we relatively hairless? Why can't we climb very well? And if you, if the question is, is it these, these kinds of things started happening a long, long time ago, what caused those things to happen? And the kind of simplest explanation from an Occam's razor standpoint isn't any one of the normal kind of things have been posited, like tool use or any of these other

[9:38] things? Really, the most simple Occam's razor thing is cooking. Cooking can accomplish all of those things because if you cook foods, all of a sudden they are much easier to chew, you don't have to chew as long, it takes a lot less

[9:53] time, and you get a lot more actual caloric value energy out of the foods once they're cooked versus raw. Basically right, professor? Absolutely fantastic job, Dave. Yeah. No, that's really terrific. And so what it comes down to is this. What we know about humans is that you cannot live on raw food in the wild. You know, if you're a raw foodist, then you can survive on your

[10:19] salads and your smoothies and so on, in an urban environment in which you can take the highest quality food that you can

[10:26] find and you can blend it and so on. But it's not good enough in the wild. That's what we now realize from the last few years. So humans are unlike every other species, we are adapted to eating our food

[10:39] cooked. We absolutely need to. So that's 11 big point. And then the other big point is, well, okay, if that's true, how long has it been true? Is it 50,000 years ago? Is it 5000 years ago? Is it half a 1000000 years ago? And actually, I think that there's a pretty easy answer to this, which is that it's been true as long as we have bodies like the bodies that we have nowadays. And when do we get those bodies, everybody knows. It was just decided 2 million years ago. Now, one of the questions I have is hit it right at the beginning, and it's, it's, in the, in the book, and here's the kind, and maybe there's been a lot of research since 2010. So one of the main arguments that critics have is there is no evidence of fire,

[11:29] remote, like cooking fire, you know, non- non-happenstance fire. Um, anywhere near that long ago. Your counter argument in the book is mostly, well, it's the easiest explanation, and therefore should be accepted until an easier explanation is given. Is that still your, A, am I putting your position correctly? And B, has that changed over the past 6 years? Yeah, no that's great. So, yeah, there's, um, uh, no one can say yet that, uh,

[12:01] there is definitely control of fire by humans going all the way back to when I am predicting it, uh,

[12:08] at 2000000 years ago. But since the book was published, we have had fire, the date of control of fire being pushed nicely

[12:19] back. So we've now got a couple of places at 800,000 years ago, a place that a 1000000 years

[12:27] ago. This is, you know, quite a lot more than the 250,000 years ago that people have traditionally

[12:34] thought. And I'm feeling very excited about reports that I've been hearing about some evidence that is going to take the evidence for the controller fire back to very close to when I think

[12:48] it will eventually be shown. And so that that 800,000 year old one is a fairly accepted site? Yes, it is. That one is in Israel. And then there's another one, which has just been published in Spain, just about the same time. And then there's a 1000000 year one in South Africa. And let me, and so this is, this is also something I don't understand. curious, is um, what is the difference between a 250,000 year old site that has been easily identified for a long time as having control of fire and a site that's a 1000000

[13:26] years uh, a 1000000 years ago? What's the difference in technology or placement or how the sites are preserved such that it makes it more difficult to trace it back. Like, why is there that line? I mean, basically, over these immense periods of time that we're talking about, then the further back you go, then the more chance there is that everything has been disturbed to the point that you're

[13:50] not going to be able to find what you're looking for. I mean, here's one measure of the way in which it's disturbed. The half life of a cave, as to say, the duration that a cave is going to

[14:03] exist, is something around a quarter of a 1000000 years. So that most caves have gone after that time, because of erosion of the cave rock, that sort of thing. So, there's all sorts of difficulties, the further back you go, and they, in the end, the way that people are finding evidence for the control of fire in the very early times, like a million years ago, is um,

[14:28] uh, more from um, Microscopic grains of charcoal that uh, cannot be explained on the basis of anything else other than humans being responsible for making fire.

[14:41] Would the difference be on the microscopic level between, say, a lightning strike and human fire? Well, I mean, natural fires can produce charcoal, of course. But they tend to produce charcoal that ends up with smaller grains than human-made fire. That's been shown in actualistic studies. But the real thing that characterizes the evidence for the use of fire by humans at a 1000000 years ago in South Africa is the fact that there is a very ancient cave, it's

[15:21] fact, it's really the only cave that has been found in that date, and deep in the cave. 30 meters in. So what was that? 100 feet in. Uh, you have uh, lots of buried charcoal and uh, people say there's no way that you could have had any natural process that brought in the

[15:45] fuel. It's not in the sticks, and the grasses, and that sort of thing that were being burned. So it had to be humans. Right, so it's not like a natural, it's not like West Virginia where we have all these coal things that catch on fire once in a while. This is not a coal bearing cave or something like this. Right, exactly. But you have to be very careful. You know, there's lots of places where people have found some evidence of burning associated with

[16:07] humans way back, 1500000, 1600000 years ago, but there's always

[16:14] the possibility that it was a tree burning from a lightning strike or some other natural fire.

[16:20] So that's why you have to be so cautious. Right. So that's the, the, the, the 1st uh, you know, thing I think that a lot of people bring up. And the, the 2nd one, I'm curious whether there's been more research. And this is the core really, and I was laughing. Uh, actually, uh, I listened to it when I'm, when I was driving the car. I got it on Audible. And I was laughing out loud with the parts about the raw diet because it's been, it's been exactly my experience. I did the raw diet. I lost a bet and had to do the raw diet for a week. And I'll tell you, uh, I, you know, I didn't need any uh, scientific study to show that I wasn't absorbing my uh, calories. Just ask my toilet. You know, it was like, it's obviously the stuff run straight through you. Um, you know, it's, uh, I mean, to me, it's fairly

[17:06] obvious, and you're eating a preposterous amount of, of, uh, of, and this is like, as you say, you know, shopping in modern supermarkets and, you know, modern, having, you know, I have a very

[17:16] expensive, high-speed blender, um, and taking a lot of times to soak things, et cetera, et

[17:22] cetera. Right. I mean, using agricultural foods. And so, of course, you know, the quality of foods that

[17:29] were produced in on farms is far higher, simply from the point of view of producing

[17:35] energy, than what you get in the wild. So, you know, the fruits in the area that I work on, study chimpanzees in Uganda, the average fruit has about as much sugar as a carrot. and far less than an apple or an orange and so on. So, the raw food is have all these advantages that you mentioned, including eating domesticated

[17:58] foods. Um, and uh, yes, there's quite a lot of extra work that's now been done on this,

[18:05] and um, so uh, since the book was published, we've got uh, very nice data showing that uh, if you uh, feed mice on uh, cooked uh, tubers

[18:18] or, or on cooked meat, or on cooked peanuts, then uh, they will get more energy

[18:24] than eating raw. And as you say, I mean, anybody who's tried a raw food diet knows this, but it's nice to be able to work out the mechanisms. Right. And I think another thing that, I don't know whether a lot of people bring it up when they talk to you about the book, but that, another thing I thought was very interesting, and I didn't, you know, you expect to hear

[18:44] it in nutrition discussions, and you never do. Never. In your book is basically a huge indictment of the way we, and I don't think you even explicitly bring it out this way, but a huge indictment of the way nutritional labels are printed.

[18:58] Um, because a calorie is clearly not a calorie is clearly not a

[19:02] calorie, it depends on the structure of it, how much it's cooked, how it's delivered to you, how much you chew, et cetera, et cetera.

[19:09] What are your, do you have any more current thoughts in that? Are you even interested in that? Or is it just not part of your field of study? Um, no, I mean, I remain interested. It was an epilogue in the book, calling for a more rational approach to food labeling, and Rachel comedy, and I, we ran a session at the American Association for Advancement of Science, 3 or 4 years ago, or we brought together a number of people to reflect on the

[19:38] fact that, as you say, it's very clear to all sorts of people, even though it's not very often talked about, that the food labeling system does not capture what you wanted to know, which

[19:48] is how much weight will I put on from eating this particular kind of

[19:52] food? It's all very ironic, because the scientists do know, do they do

[20:01] understand, on the whole, that processing matters enormously, and that

[20:06] the, the more highly processed your food is, whether it's by cooking or

[20:10] by, um, whatever has been done by way of grinding it in, in the food company before you even get it. This will increase the number of calories you get and everyone knows that. So we should have a modified labeling system, but there have been a whole series of attempts to think about what the new system could be, and no one can agree on what it should be. So it's not going to happen at the moment. Right. Well, the thing is, is that even if you could, uh, do that, you still need some sort of, uh, I mean, the body is so

[20:43] complicated that you simply can't really say what's going to happen. Even there's no way to adjust it at all because my favorite, you know, example I put to everyone is that if I drank a gallon of vegetable oil right now, if I could do it without throwing up, I simply wouldn't absorb the vast majority of those calories, even though they're liquid and I should be able to absorb them fairly well, I'd just be overwhelming my

[21:08] system and it would all, you know, leave relatively unprocessed. I mean, it's just impossible to, it's impossible

[21:16] to, uh, to account for the differences in the way humans

[21:21] consume. I mean, you could get probably some sort of close average based on what the average person eats and how fast the average person eats, but it's just an incredibly complicated system,

[21:30] right? Yes, exactly. And that's a great example. And it really does draw attention to the fact that part of the problem with the current system is that it is too simple.

[21:41] But then by the same token, any change to the system, in terms of the way that

[21:49] we put some kind of numbers on the food labels, is going to be complicated, and complexity is a hard

[21:58] sell. Yeah. I mean, I've thought of things, I mean, you probably have two, like some kind of traffic light system where you have

[22:07] red amber and green. And you associate those with the particular numbers that you put on the, on the food label and say, uh, I, if it's, uh, if the

[22:22] red, then, uh, probably actually you, you, you know, under the various circumstances, you're going to get more calories than you expect from this. And if it's green, you get less or whatever. Oh, so base it on expectations rather than on health. Don't have it be a, because I think most of the health claims are garbage anyway. So it's like, based it on expectations, like, that's an interesting idea. Yes, something that emphasizes that nothing very precise is going to come out, but you hear some ways to think about what it's going to do to you. Yeah, I mean, I think the real damage and, you know, you touch touch on this, but the real, real damage is this, is that, um, once you apply numbers to something. And this is my problem with much of nutritional science in general, once you apply numbers to something, then the average person believes that those numbers have meaning.

[23:10] And so now there is this idea that there is a simple number that has a meaning, and in fact,

[23:16] it doesn't. And so you can't go back and tell someone, well, your whole, you know, your whole mentality about the way food works is based on this thing that you think is simple and is

[23:28] accurate. But in fact, I can't give you any good numbers. Sorry. People won't buy that. You know what I mean? Yes. Well, I mean, I mean, to me, the, you know, the ultimate example of this, of course, is the fact that, um,

[23:39] that, uh, what my group and I have been emphasizing is this enormous difference between raw and

[23:45] cooked. And if you just look at the numbers in the USDA website, which is the source for where a lot of the

[23:54] materials or a lot of the food labels come from, What you will see is that you are supposed to get the same number of calories from raw

[24:04] food, as you do from cooked. So if you take, you know, a carrot and you cook it raw, sorry, you eat it raw and then you cook it. According to the USD website, you're going to get the same number of calories. Well, this is completely absurd. Yeah, course. And you know, this is actually, ultimately, it could be dangerous because people who believe in numbers, and as you say, you know, people tend

[24:25] to believe in numbers once they're given them, will stick to their guns and use them to support their

[24:31] philosophy. And what could be dangerous is that you could, as a result, get too little food from eating it raw. And that's a choice if you're an adult, and if you're a child. It's um something that you're, your parents give to you, and that's where you really could be dangerous. You know, we have cases that have been reported of infants dying from eating raw food.

[24:56] Right, because, well, right. I mean, so... I have a question when you're ready. I don't think it's related, but whenever you're ready. Oh, if it's not related to... We'll get it in a minute if it's not real. No problem. All right, so let's let me, because if people haven't read the book yet, I encourage them to go out and get the book, it's a fun read. It's well written. And right now we're really talking about the except for the nutrition labels. We're talking about the 1st half. So the 1st half, I would guess, professor is more, um, contentious in the scientific community, and the 2nd half is more contentious in the kind of

[25:33] sociological, uh, committee, uh, community. And the 2nd half is more contentious kind of sociologically. Would you say that's true or no? Yes, probably, that's right. Yeah, I mean, it's not that contentious, but nevertheless, that's where it's provocative. Just put it that way. Yeah, okay. way to put it. So let's stay with the 1st half. And the 1st half is really about this thesis of cooking. And I was completely fascinating because Professor, you spent a lot of time actually hanging out with great apes, you know, chimps and whatnot in Africa, observing them, eating the way they

[26:08] eat, doing these sorts of things. How long, how long per, how much time per day does the average great ape take eating? Um, so a chimpanzee, which weighs, um, I don't know, uh, something like £100, uh, will spend uh, roughly 5 or 6 hours just

[26:29] chewing. Just chewing. Not gathering, just chewing. Just chewing, yep. So, so, uh, you know, they'll climb up into three, that sort of thing. But literally with food in their mouth, just moving their jaws up and down. It is about half the day. And so this is one of the incredibly striking things about the difference between us and our cousin primates, because

[26:51] it's all related to body size, you know, the bigger you are, then the more time you've got to spend

[26:56] chewing, because you've got to get more food into your body. And um, so if we were eating our food raw in the same way that

[27:03] the chimpanzees and gorillas and orangutans do, then we would be spending something around 7 or 8 hours chewing per day.

[27:12] Now, now, the reason, uh, for those of you who haven't read the book yet, that you would, that we would have to chew more than, uh, the

[27:19] chimp is, uh, I mean, I would guess not just because our muscles are less strong, but because we require more energy to run our brains, yes? And we have a less efficient intestinal system. Well, okay, no, here's the funny thing about our brains. They're incredibly expensive to run, and you can never turn them off, unlike a computer. And so, you know, they're expensive to run when you're asleep, they're expensive to run when you're awake. But, even though they are costing something like between a quarter and a 5th of all the energy that you eat, um, when when you're resting, uh, something like, um, uh, 25% of the energy in, in your body is you being used to run your brain. Nevertheless, the total amount of energy that humans are using, when they're asleep, is the same in proportion to body

[28:12] weight, in any other primate. We're not taking in more energy on average.

[28:19] Is that because we're spending less energy on digestion? Exactly. So, so the solution that many people like, and it seems to really have a lot of sense to why it is that we are able to afford to run a big brain, which is obviously so important, is that we cut back on running our

[28:38] guts. And this makes every sense, because we have the smallest digestive system in relationship to body size for any primate, and we have the largest brain in relationship to body size for any

[28:49] primate. And the gut is one of the most expensive parts of the body. And it's been a while, but isn't it also true that our brain is more calorically expensive to run per gram than most other brains? We just run it at a faster rate. We overclock ourselves, yes? No, no, that's not right. Well, it's the same. A gram of our brain. It costs the same as a gram of my brain. Oh, okay. Good. Nice. All right. So like a whale just a whale takes a lot more energy to run their brain, but they have a much bigger body, so it's a smaller percentage. For which one? For like a whale, anything something with a huge brain, an elephant, something with a giant. Yes, yes, exactly. Yes, right. All right, cool. So we are not over clockers. So, interesting. Okay, now, so on this, I made some recent papers that have come out and see what your response is, your

[29:43] colleague, colleagues, I guess, Lieberman, Professor Lieberman, who I guess is in your same building or in the building next to you at Harvard. Absolutely, yes, he's about 20 yards away. Ah, yes, you 2 can duke it out in the real life. You don't need to write papers. You can just go have it out with each other. Absolutely, yes, right. And Professor Zink wrote a paper basically saying that they think that chewing a

[30:08] pounding, rather, and beating things with tools prior to prior to consuming them is enough to allow us to get the extra energy out rather than

[30:19] cooking. What are your thoughts on that? Well, my thought is that it's a very odd idea. I mean, I, you know, they're both good friends and Katie Zinc was my student at one point. So, you know, I like what they do. But I think this particular conclusion is odd because it doesn't seem to pay attention to what we know about

[30:42] raw food. You know, we know that even with incredibly high class food, you put into electric blender,

[30:51] you, as a human, will still lose weight. And what they're saying is that way back in the Paleolithic, when you're using incredibly crude stone tools, that people could have done

[31:01] enough by way of pounding and cutting their food to increase the ease of digestion and get enough food out of it. Yeah, I mean, I think the study, by the way, if people want to read it, is called impact of meat and lower Paleolithic food processing techniques on chewing in humans in nature. I, you know, I think to me, one of the main things about the paper that I didn't get was they're really

[31:30] just, they were focusing on time to create a bolus to swallow, right? Which is not necessarily the the only thing that's important. It's part of it, right? Decreases the amount of time you have to chew, but not the amount you have to consume to get it

[31:42] to get the calories required, right? Is that is that? That is absolutely right. So it's very awkward with humans because it's very difficult to get permission to be able to study what happens when people eat raw meat, say, because the authorities are so worried that people are

[31:59] going to get some kind of a worm for something from eating raw meat. So they were stuck with seeing what happens in terms of the time spent

[32:08] chewing. And, you know, they did very nice experiments showing that if you pound your meat or even just slice it. Then you will spend less time chewing. But it doesn't come to the heart of the matter, as you said. And here's another problem. Um, we actually have very good evidence, as a profession, that stone tools of the

[32:29] types that they're talking about were used long before, humans emerged into their present body form. So, so the genus homo, um, you know, we're homo sapiens and an earlier form that has the same basic body shape as

[32:46] homo erectus, and that happened around one.90000 years ago. But then, prior to that, all the way back to 3000000 years ago, you've got stone tools being used by

[32:58] somebody, and those somebodies, um, were prehuman ape like forms. And so, you know, that's another difficulty, that uh, that if they were using those tools to modify their food,

[33:13] it didn't do anything for them for a very long time. Yeah, you know what, you know what you should do, Professor? You should let people know here, like on this or any other show. We will volunteer to chew raw meat. We don't have to spit it out because we're not part of a sanctioned study. Like, isn't there some way to just create a voluntary study or is that completely unethical? Now, unfortunately, we're not allowed to do that, because when we try to publish it, um, the, the

[33:38] journals will ask for the statement showing that we did it autletically. See, you can only write about it in a book, then you can never publish it in a journal. Yeah, exactly. And you'd be run out of the community on a rail, I presume. Yeah, it's not a bad idea. Yeah, because the thing is, right, if you're writing books, right, I mean, clearly you are, because, I mean, you could get a bunch of volunteers, I could probably find, you know,

[34:02] 100 volunteers like today who would be willing to chew and swallow the meat and not worry about

[34:07] it. But, you know, then the question is, how would you trace our, uh, how would you trace our,

[34:12] um, You'd have to do it inside of a chamber to measure how much we were absorbing, I guess, which is

[34:18] that. Yeah, you know, it becomes complicated, but I appreciate the thought and hey, maybe I'll get back to you with some studies. I mean, you know, we'd love to be able to to follow what happens, um, to uh, the microbiome of people eating raw food and people eating

[34:35] cook food. So you know what we're talking about there? Yeah, yeah. The bacteria in the colon, and there's increasing evidence that this is quite important, a contributor to the amount of energy we get out of our food, and very little is known about anything that differs between the raw and the cooked foods. So shifting people from raw to cooked diets, and vice versa, and recording their

[35:02] microbiome would be, you know, it's certainly something that people are going to be wanting to investigate soon. Yeah, well, maybe we can find some quasi-ethical way to do it. Well, yes, exactly. Right. Yeah. Um, so, uh, see if you have any more, uh, like, uh, pressing questions on the on the 1st section. Well, let's let's move to the 2nd section now, and then we can move back and forth. So the 1st section describes, you know, a bunch of reasons why, the best explanation, the cooking hypothesis, I guess you call it, the best explanation for how we got to be the way we

[35:40] are is that we started cooking. Now, the 2nd section of the book deals with what the cultural impacts of that are. And so, you know, that's the part where, you know, it seems like it's interesting, but it gets in hot water for, you know,

[35:58] could potentially get in hot water because it deals a lot with gender difference.

[36:03] And so I'm not going to take a stab at cliff noting that

[36:08] one. So you want to give a basic rundown of what cooking allowed to have happen and... Yes. Well, sure. So, here's the 1st observation that even though nowadays in enlightened places in Western Europe and

[36:24] United States and so on. You have men who are really interested in cooking. The fact is that in every culture around the world,

[36:33] in every society, it is almost entirely a woman's role to do

[36:38] the ordinary domestic cooking. The ordinary household cooking. And this is the most striking of all of the economic differences between men and

[36:49] women, that women do the cooking. The times when men do the cooking are special occasions, when you have feasts, when you have some kind of great public

[36:59] affair, and men come out and jointly roast the elephant, as they were. In the book, right, you point to the fact that the ability to not spend a lot of time chewing and

[37:16] having like your basic, like some basic staples and calories already cooked, allowed more time for one group, the males to go out and hunt, and therefore the other section devolved on the females to do that, the kind

[37:30] of, we know it's going to be their cooking. Is that accurate or no? No, that is right. That if you look at small scale society. It's kind of ironic in a way because I mentioned earlier that if we were eating our food raw, then we'd be spending something like 7 or 8 hours chewing.

[37:49] And so now we eat our food cooked and we can save lots and lots of time. I mean, instead of 7 or 8 hours, it's one hour a day, if you look, or less than one hour a day, all around the world. doesn't matter where you are. It's just the human condition. less than one hour a day chewing your food. So what do you do with all the spare time? Well, here's the irony. The irony is that the women are mostly spending that

[38:11] time gathering food and cooking it and preparing it. But meanwhile, the men, in some ways, get off lightly. And the reason the men get off lightly is not that they don't do anything, they do. They do a lot of complimentary ways to get food. I mean, if you're living in a very simple way, in a small scale society, um, as a hunter and gatherer, then the men are doing a lot of hunting, but they have options. Women don't have options. They are absolutely required, culturally, to be there every day producing the basic food. But the men, if they want to, they don't have to hunt, you know, they can go off

[38:50] and and lie under a tree and gamble, or visit girlfriends in the neighboring area, or go to war, or whatever else it is. For those of you that are listening to this and haven't read the book, I encourage you before you draw any sort of opinions to go read the relevant sections of the

[39:06] book because professor, you go through a series of societies that appear to contradict what you're saying, but then you have arguments as to how they actually kind of fit into the general pattern, correct?

[39:17] Yes, I mean, they're astonishing consistencies. I would say that. That's right. And so what we do in the book is to, I try and think about, Where does this pattern come from? Why is it that universally in human societies, it is the women who are doing the cooking and the men who have relative freedom and are able to absolutely rely on women providing food for them, which is so unlike any other

[39:48] animal. And I come to the conclusion that this has got something to do with a very basic feature of cooking, that once you rely on cooking, then there's something funny about the way the food is

[40:02] produced, and that is this, that it is very easily stolen. It's very easily

[40:08] used by people other than the ones who collected the food. So, compare this with, um, If you're a chimpanzee, say, you climb into a tree, you pick up fruit and pop into your

[40:22] mouth and nobody can take it from you. But if you're cooking food, you absolutely have to put the food onto a fire and just sit there for however long it takes for the food to cook. And during that time, someone else can come along and take the food. So, that means that, uh, the people who are doing the cooking and people have collected as food are vulnerable to the social competition. And so this is now, you know, a very strange kind of concept compared to thinking about us actually in the kitchen. But nevertheless, it is a reality of cooking on the campfire. And I think that reality leads to the following dynamic. Women end up needing to be socially protected from the kids from the woman next

[41:07] door, or from some lousy bachelor who doesn't have a wife, or from some other visiting man. And the person who protects her is the husband. So, in the end, it does fall back on the old, the men do that kind of labor because of just physical strength.

[41:25] Well, physical strength is part of it, but it probably even more important is just a compact among men. It's the, uh, it's the consensus among men that, uh, they will

[41:39] uh, act as a sort of unified body, uh, to declare that, uh, if somebody has been

[41:47] accused and found guilty of, um, uh, pinching food from behind a woman's back, uh, then they will punish

[41:55] them. And so the thing is that they can act in consensus, you know, because when a wife says to a husband, look, you know,

[42:02] somebody's always taking food from my fire, then he doesn't necessarily go and confront

[42:08] them himself. He'll go to the elders and say, we got a problem in the camp. And then the elders will do something jointly. And that's where the real social power comes from. And in your book, you say that most, uh, most historical and um, you know, uh, small societies, current small size that are studied,

[42:26] the, um, the cooking, keeping the cooking in the family unit, the food is more important even than sex. Yes, I mean, you know, well, we think of marriage, of course, as something that is really purely about sex and having babies, and

[42:41] obviously that's a hugely important part of it. But it's very striking. Finding places where, um, from a man's point of view, what is absolutely more important than raising a family, when he

[42:52] first, you know, enters his 20s and so on, is becoming a man, um, is that there is somebody to cook for him. And if he doesn't have a mother who is still alive, providing his food, or occasionally his sister, then he needs someone else to do it. And he will somehow arrange that. And in some decided, you find that his 1st wife will be someone who is

[43:15] postmenopausal. She might be in her 60s, no way that she's going to provide him any children, but he provides, she provides him with food, and that means that he can go away and do manly activities during the

[43:29] day, and be as masculine as he wants to be. Otherwise, he's forced to do the cooking himself. And in a world of stereotypes, then that means that he can't really adopt a male role. And also you say in these traditional societies, going back to, you say, when men cook, they're the ones, or when they bring back food, hunted food, meat, it's typically shared in the community, whereas they've gathered food, staples, cooked

[43:56] foods that the women would are not ever share typically. Yes, I mean, there are a number of ways in which the relationships among men in these small scale societies are full of

[44:10] cooperation in a way that is strikingly not so true of the women.

[44:15] So, it tends to be the case that each woman has her own fire, to put her own

[44:21] food, that she has gathered with her own personal hands, onto that fire, and she shares that food with her own children, and maybe, well, definitely her husband, and maybe one or two other close relatives.

[44:34] But it's pretty limited, the sharing, whereas the men are much more

[44:39] likely, when they catch something, if it's big enough to share, then they will share it very

[44:44] widely with the other men in the community, and they share it with their own families. All right, now, let's get to the crux. Here's the big question. So if that was the case for how we evolved not just physically, but as culturally, as a society, to be where we are now, right? let's just assume it's all that it's all completely accurate. What does that tell us about the way we need to, or does it tell us anything about the way that we need to

[45:15] interact today in a society where most people, they cook if they want to. They go to a restaurant if they want to, they order out if they want to. I'm talking in richer societies, like, you know, here in the US. Um, where we're completely unhinged from any of these uh, needs, right? We all have actual jobs that take up, you know, 8 hours of the day and cooking and eating is a relatively small proportion of time spent. Is there? I mean, clearly there are echoes of what happened more than echoes, right? But is there is there any, is there anything for the future? Like need we be bound by it anymore? No, I don't think there's any reason to think we have to be bound by the social

[45:59] patterns. I mean, we would, we would have to acknowledge them if, in fact, there was any evidence of an evolutionary impact on our psychology. I haven't seen any such evidence so far. So, it seems to me that, um, that we should look at what happens in the human species in the past, and in many societies today, and it's sort of conscious of the fact that we want to get away from

[46:25] it, in a world of egalitarianism, between the sectors. Right. I mean, I don't remember whether you state that explicitly in

[46:34] a book, but I mean, the interesting thing to me is that we, that there really doesn't seem to be, once it's, once it's no longer a physical

[46:42] necessity, We no longer need to act that way anymore, right? Yeah, no, that's exactly right. On the other hand, you might say that there are benefits to it. I think one of the loveliest papers,

[46:55] studies that came out in the time since the book was published, was one that drew attention to the way that eating around the

[47:04] fire, is a system that is conducive to the most lovely kinds of stories and conversations that occur in the hunters and gatherers of South

[47:20] Africa. So, the Bushmen there, studied by Poly Weistner, she recorded what people talk about all day. And basically, during the day, people talk about very little. There are a few words just involved in organizing each other as to where we're going and what we're

[47:40] doing and how to cut up a piece of meat and so on. But all interesting conversations, she said, happened around the fire in the evening. And that's when the stories are told about the original myths of the society, or

[47:55] of some tremendous hunt that happened, or some hilarious incident happened with someone in another group. Uh, whatever. So, yeah, that reminds me of the fact that people do say that the conversations around a meal with your children are enormously important, and that there's something that is, you know, very sadly lost when everyone just watches

[48:20] television, um, while they're eating. Oh, yeah. No, that's for sure true. I mean, the thing is, is that there's, there's the good and the bad of what used to be, right? So it's, I mean, I would hope that we could degender the idea of sitting around a campfire and talking or

[48:40] sitting around a meal. I mean, it's an interesting thing. You don't want to throw out the baby with the bathwater, right? Yeah, exactly. No, I mean, we certainly should not be bound to the notion that women are the cooks. That has been true in our past, and that's, you know, that's bad from the point of view of

[48:59] stereotypes and assigning people to a particular role. Hopefully we can get way past that as we move into a postgendered world. What are your thoughts on the kind of observation I've heard many times that most of the time in modern couples in the US, um, when there is going to be a shared, um, a

[49:23] shared, uh, shared housework between uh, the man and the woman and a couple, uh, that the man almost always takes the cooking and the women almost always take the uh, cleaning

[49:36] role on that. This is not my observation. I've heard this from many people. You think that's because cooking now is seen as a high prestige thing? It's just yet another... I mean, yeah, that's a really fun speculation. I mean, you know, one of the questions I think it's fascinating, which I haven't seen any really satisfactory answers to is why do men tend to do the barbecuing? Well, you touch on that in your book, right? That meat cooking has, since time memorial meat cooking, if men were going to cook anything, is going to be the meat. Yeah, I mean, it's one possibility. Another possibility is that because meat tends to be the center of attention for the meal, the thing that makes that particular meal special, then the men want to be in charge of

[50:18] it because, you know, they get all the excitement of producing is. Right. So even as we go towards less gendering of things, we actually still maintain this sort of problematic

[50:31] gender differences. Yeah, I mean, you know, of course, uh, you know, there are many other dynamics involved about, uh, who's looking after the children who's taking children to school, you know, who's getting the jobs and so on. But, um, but the point I would certainly want to emphasize is that, um,

[50:48] there doesn't seem to be any reason why our evolutionary past of women doing the

[50:55] cooking has to be the, it does not have to be the evolutionary future. We got to wrap up, but I do have a caller with a question for the guests here. All right, cool. All right, call her. on the air. Hey, uh, Dave, Professor Rangum. This is a scooter in Montana, and actually a professor, I'm a Harvard Anthropology grad, though I don't think we crossed paths there. Okay. But this is actually a question that was, some folks in the chat room we're kicking around is, just sort of generally, how does fermentation play into, um, kind of

[51:25] caloric, uh, benefits. Oh, yeah, it's a terrific question because we don't know that much about fermentation. It's very clear that, um, uh, that when you, uh, ferment your grains uh, in water to producing a

[51:42] beer, or you, you ferment your meat, um, that it increases the net energy gain for the eaters.

[51:49] So, it looks like there's all sorts of ways in which fermentation is a sort of functional equivalent of cooking. The

[51:58] question in my mind that is unresolved is how far this goes back in time. You know, as you probably know, pottery only goes back to something like 20, 25,000 years ago. Could people have been fermenting in skin bags for some tens of thousands, maybe even 100s of thousands of years before

[52:22] then, could they have found ways to ferment, even without containers like that? There's all sorts of research, possibilities, that we still don't have any very good ideas about, I think. Yeah, makes a lot of sense. Great question. Um, yeah, but was is there evidence of food stockpiling, in which case there would be auto fermentation or

[52:44] Redding and things like natural wells or hollows or anything? Right, no, I don't think, you know, only very, very recently for that sort of thing. That'll be wonderful to find evidence of the kind of thing that you see in the South Seas nowadays, or relatively recently, where cooked starches could be kept for, I

[53:06] think, people sometimes think 100 years in underground, cool places. That's a great question. So we're going to get kicked off the air. One question on the way out, Professor, and I thank you so much for being on. Do people pester you about the paleo diet all the time? Oh, uh, they occasionally ask and um, yeah, I mean, I like a Mediterranean diet myself. Alright. I just, I had to be, I'd be remiss if I didn't because uh, it seems to me to be completely not uh, in, you know, part of what you talk about there, but I'm sure people pester you about

[53:41] it because they see the word paleo. Well, yeah, that's true, right? No, I'm not wild about the paleo diet myself. And I mean, I think, you know, there's a lot of fantasy about the paleo diet that, like so much of nutritional

[53:55] science. You know, people get hold of a of a very particular idea and really push it, and it's still an incredibly primitive area. I mean, it amazed me that when I started getting interested in cooking. There was no systematic literature looking at the impact of cooking on the energy

[54:13] production, on the food, and we've had to do that work ourselves. I mean, just really brings home the fact that this is a very exciting area. The whole area of nutrition, that still has a tremendous way to go before we really understand it well. All right, well, we've been speaking with Professor Richard Rangam from Harvard University, author of Catching Fire,

[54:37] how Cooking Made As Human. Professor, thank you so much for being on the air with us today. I had a great time. Really appreciate it, Dave. Thanks a lot. All right, thanks. And on the way out, I want to mention 2 things. Shy wrote in about Bazbuzza, which is a semolina cake soaked with syrup. He wanted to make it less sweet. Use a low DE. That's dextrous equivalent glucose syrup. You can get it on Amazon. It's about 40% as sweet. It's about 81 bricks. You can water it down a little bit. It'll be a little more than a little less than half the sweetness of the sugar that you want to add. And one shout out, the museum of food and drinks, 2 shout outs. Museum of food and drinks. Spring benefit is next week. There are still tickets available. And my son, the quad has, who's on the autistic spectrum, goes to a twice exceptional school called the Quad Preparatory School.

[55:22] They having their 3rd annual Founders Gala. I'm going to be making cocktails. Franklin Becker's going to be cooking. Mark Ladner and Christina Tozi are putting stuff out there, and you can go to eventbright.com and type in quad preparatory. Thank you so much, cooking issues. Thanks for listening to this program on heritageradionetwork.org. You can find all of our archived programs on our website or as podcasts in the iTunes store by searching Heritage Radio Network. You can like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter at Heritage underscore radio. You can email us questions at any time at info at heritageradionetwork.org. Heritage Radio Network as a nonprofit organization. To donate and become a member, visit our website today. Thanks for listening.