Cooked - A Natural History of Transformat Part 3

II.

Cambridge, Ma.s.sachusetts

"h.o.m.o sapiens is the only animal that ..."

How many flattering clauses have philosophers tacked on to that cherished construction, only to watch them eventually crumble? One by one, the faculties on which we thought we could stake the flag of our specialness science has shown belong to other animals as well. Suffering? Reason? Language? Counting? Laughter? Self-consciousness? All have been proposed as human monopolies, and all have fallen before science's deepening understanding of the animal brain and behavior. James Boswell's nomination of cooking as the defining human ability seems more durable than most, though perhaps an even st.u.r.dier candidate would be this: "Humans are the only species that feels compelled to identify faculties that it alone possesses."

But here's why cooking may stand a better-than-average chance of surviving this silly game: Only the control of fire and consequent invention of cooking can explain the evolution of brains big and self-conscious enough to construct sentences like "h.o.m.o sapiens is the only species that ..."

That at least is the import of "the cooking hypothesis," a recent contribution to evolutionary theory that throws a wonderfully ironic wrench into the scaffold of our self-regard. Cooking, according to the hypothesis, is not merely a metaphor for the creation of culture, as Levi-Strauss proposed; it is its evolutionary prerequisite and biological foundation. Had our protohuman ancestors not seized control of fire and used it to cook their food, they would never have evolved into h.o.m.o sapiens. We think of cooking as a cultural innovation that lifts us up out of nature, a manifestation of human transcendence. But the reality is much more interesting: Cooking is by now baked into our biology (as it were), something that we have no choice but to do, if we are to feed our big, energy-guzzling brains. For our species, cooking is not a turn away from nature-it is our nature, by now as obligatory as nest building is for the birds.

I first encountered the cooking hypothesis in a 1999 article in the journal Current Anthropology t.i.tled "The Raw and the Stolen: Cooking and the Ecology of Human Origins" by Richard Wrangham, a Harvard anthropologist and primatologist, and four of his colleagues. Wrangham subsequently fleshed out the theory in a fascinating 2009 book, Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human. Soon after it came out, we began corresponding by e-mail, and eventually we had the opportunity to meet, over a lunch (of raw salads) at the Harvard Faculty Club.

The hypothesis is an attempt to account for the dramatic change in primate physiology that occurred in Africa between 1.9 and 1.8 million years ago, with the emergence of h.o.m.o erectus, our evolutionary predecessor. Compared to the apelike habilines from which it evolved, h.o.m.o erectus had a smaller jaw, smaller teeth, a smaller gut-and a considerably larger brain. Standing upright and living on the ground, h.o.m.o erectus is the first primate to bear a stronger resemblance to humans than apes.

Anthropologists have long theorized that the advent of meat eating could account for the growth in the size of the primate brain, since the flesh of animals contains more energy than plant matter. But as Wrangham points out, the alimentary and digestive apparatus of h.o.m.o erectus is poorly adapted to a diet of raw meat, and even more poorly adapted to the raw plant foods that would still have been an important part of its diet, since a primate cannot live on meat alone. The chewing and digestion of raw food of any kind requires a big gut and big strong jaws and teeth-all tools that our ancestors had lost right around the time they acquired their bigger brains.

The control of fire and discovery of cooking best explain both these developments, Wrangham contends. Cooking renders food much easier to chew and digest, obviating the need for a strong jaw or substantial gut. Digestion is a metabolically expensive operation, consuming in many species as much energy as locomotion. The body must work especially hard to process raw foodstuffs, in which the strong muscle fibers and sinews in meat and the tough cellulose in the cell walls of plants must be broken down before the small intestines can absorb the amino acids, lipids, and sugars locked up in these foods. Cooking in effect takes much of the work of digestion outside the body, using the energy of fire in (partial) place of the energy of our bodies to break down complex carbohydrates and render proteins more digestible.

Applying the heat of a fire to food transforms it in several ways-some of them chemical, others physical-but all with the same result: making more energy available to the creatures that eat it. Exposure to heat "denatures" proteins-unfolding their origami structures in such a way as to expose more surface area to the action of our digestive enzymes. Given enough time, heat also turns the tough collagen in the connective tissues of muscle into a soft, readily digestible jelly. In the case of plant foods, fire "gelatinizes" starches, the first step in breaking them down into simple sugars. Many plants that are toxic eaten raw, including tubers such as ca.s.sava, are rendered harmless as well as more nutritious by heat. Other foodstuffs the cook fire purifies, by killing bacteria and parasites; it also r.e.t.a.r.ds spoilage in meat. Cooking improves texture and taste as well, making many foods more tender, and others sweeter or less bitter. Though which comes first-an inborn taste for cooked food or nearly two million years of familiarity with it-is hard to say.

True, cooking can have some negative, seemingly maladaptive, effects, too. High heat produces carcinogenic compounds in some foods, but the danger of these toxins is outweighed by the sheer increase in energy that cooking makes available to us-and life is at bottom a compet.i.tion for energy. Taken as a whole, cooking opened up vast new horizons of edibility for our ancestors, giving them an important compet.i.tive edge over other species and, not insignificantly, leaving us more time to do things besides looking for food and chewing it.

This is no small matter. Based on observations of other primates of comparable size, Wrangham estimates that before our ancestors learned to cook their food they would have had to devote fully half their waking hours simply to the act of chewing it. Chimps like to eat meat and can hunt, but they have to spend so much of their time in mastication that only about eighteen minutes are left each day for hunting, not nearly enough to make meat a staple of their diets. Wrangham estimates that cooking our food gives our species an extra four hours a day. (This happens to be roughly the same amount of time we now devote to watching television.)

"Voracious animals ... both feed continually and as incessantly eliminate," the Roman physician Galen of Pergamum pointed out, "leading a life truly inimical to philosophy and music, as Plato has said, whereas n.o.bler animals neither eat nor eliminate continually." By freeing us from the need to feed constantly, cooking enn.o.bled us, putting us on the path to philosophy and music. All those myths that trace the G.o.dlike powers of the human mind to a divine gift or theft of fire may contain a larger truth than we ever realized.

Yet having crossed this Rubicon, trading away a big gut for a big brain, we can't go back, as much as raw-food faddists would like to. Wrangham cites several studies indicating that in fact humans don't do well on raw food: They can't maintain their body weight, and half of the women on a raw-food regimen stop menstruating. Devotees of raw food rely heavily on juicers and blenders, because otherwise they would have to spend as much time chewing as the chimps do. It is difficult, if not impossible, to extract sufficient energy from unprocessed plant matter to power a body with such a big, hungry brain. (Our brains const.i.tute only 2.5 percent of our weight yet consume 20 percent of our energy when we're resting.) By now, "humans are adapted to eating cooked food in the same essential way as cows are adapted to eating gra.s.s," Wrangham says. "We are tied to our adapted diet of cooked food, and the results pervade our lives, from our bodies to our minds. We humans are the cooking apes, the creatures of the flame."

How do we know if the cooking hypothesis is true? We don't. It's just a hypothesis, and not an easy one to prove. The fossil evidence that humans were cooking when h.o.m.o erectus walked the earth is not yet there, though it has recently gotten stronger. When Wrangham first published, the oldest known fossil remains put the date for controlled fire at around 790,000 B.C., but Wrangham's hypothesis suggests cooking must have begun at least a million years earlier. In his defense, Wrangham pointed out that evidence of fires that old would be unlikely to survive. Also, cooking meat doesn't necessarily leave behind charred bones. But recently archaeologists found a hearth in a cave in South Africa that pushed the likely date for cooking back considerably further,* to one million years B.C., and the hunt for even older cook fires is on.

So far at least, Wrangham's most convincing arguments are deductive ones. Some new factor of natural selection changed the course of primate evolution about two million years ago, expanding the brain and shrinking the gut; the most plausible candidate for this new selective pressure is the availability of a new, higher-quality diet. Meat by itself could not have supplied that diet. Primates, unlike dogs, don't digest raw flesh efficiently enough to thrive on it. The only diet that could have yielded such a dramatic increase in energy is cooked food. "We are," he concludes, "cooks more than carnivores."

To demonstrate how the advent of cooking could have supplied a caloric boon sufficient to change the course of our evolution, Wrangham cites several animal-feeding studies comparing raw and cooked or otherwise processed food. When researchers switch a python's diet from raw beef to cooked hamburger, the snake's "metabolic cost of digestion" is reduced by nearly 25 percent, leaving the animal that much more energy to put to other purposes. Mice grow faster and fatter on a diet of cooked meat than on a diet of the same meat raw.* This might explain why our pets tend toward obesity, since most modern pet food is cooked.

It would seem that all calories are not created equal, or, as a proverb quoted by Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin in The Physiology of Taste puts it, "A man does not live on what he eats, an old proverb says, but on what he digests." Cooking allows us to digest more of what we eat, and to use less energy doing it. What is curious is that animals seem instinctively to know this: Given the choice, many animals will opt for cooked food over raw. This shouldn't surprise us: "Cooked food is better than raw," Wrangham says, "because life is mostly concerned with energy"-and cooked food yields more energy.

It may well be that animals are "pre-adapted" to prefer the smells, tastes, and textures of cooked food, having evolved various sensory apparatus to steer them toward the richest sources of energy. Attractive qualities such as sweetness, softness, tenderness, and oiliness all signify abundant, easy-to-digest calories. A hardwired preference for high-energy foods would explain why our evolutionary ancestors would immediately have appreciated cooked foods. In speculating as to exactly how early humans would have discovered all the good things fire does to food, Wrangham points out that many animals scavenge burned landscapes, enjoying particularly the roasted rodents and seeds. He cites the example of chimpanzees in Senegal, who will eat the seeds of the Afzelia tree only after a fire has pa.s.sed through and toasted them. It seems likely that our ancestors would also have scavenged among the remains of forest fires, looking for tasty morsels and, perhaps occasionally, getting lucky enough to have the sort of transformative experience that Bo-bo, the swineherd's son in Charles Lamb's story, did when he first touched that bit of crackling to his tongue.

Like any such theory-indeed, like evolution itself-the cooking hypothesis is not subject to absolute scientific proof. For that reason, some will no doubt dismiss it as another "just so" story, Prometheus in modern scientific garb. But, really, how much more can we expect when trying to account for something like the advent of ourselves? What the cooking hypothesis gives us is a compelling modern myth-one cast in the language of evolutionary biology rather than religion-locating the origins of our species in the discovery of cooking with fire. To call it a myth is not to belittle it. Like any other such story, it serves to explain how what is came to be using the most powerful vocabulary available, which in our case today happens to be that of evolutionary biology. What is striking in this instance is that cla.s.sical mythology and modern evolutionary theory both gazed into the flames of the cook fire and found there the same thing: the origins of our humanity. Perhaps that coincidence is all the confirmation we can hope for.

III.

Intermission: A Pig's Perspective

I can attest from personal experience to the fact that animals are just as attracted as humans and G.o.ds are to the aroma of food cooked over a fire, barbecue included and perhaps especially. This story is hard to believe, but it is true in every particular. The first particular is that, as a teenager, I briefly owned a pig, a young white sow by the name of Kosher. My father gave me the pig; he also gave the pig its perverse name. I'm still not entirely sure why my father gave me a pig. We lived in Manhattan, in an apartment on the eleventh floor, and I certainly hadn't asked for one. But ever since reading Charlotte's Web, I had liked the idea of pigs, and collected pig books and pig figurines and such. Yet as is sometimes the way with even mild predilections like mine, other people take them far more seriously than you do. Before long, I found myself with a bedroom-full of pig paraphernalia to which, at least by the time I was sixteen, I was more or less indifferent.

But my father got it into his head that a real live pig was just what I wanted, so he had his secretary track down a piglet on a farm in New Jersey and one evening brought it home in a shoe box. This was not a pot-bellied pig, not a miniature pig of any kind. No, Kosher was a standard Yorks.h.i.+re sow, destined to grow to a quarter of a ton or more if nothing was done to stop her. At the time, we lived in a doorman building, a co-op on the Upper East Side; the co-op allowed pets, but I was fairly sure a full-grown pig didn't qualify.

Luckily, for most of the time I had Kosher, it was summer and we were living in a cottage on the beach. The cottage stood on stilts in the sand, and Kosher lived beneath the deck; pigs are susceptible to sunburn (one of the reasons they like mud so much), so I fenced in the shaded area beneath the house as her pen. Kosher was the size of a football when I got her; she could, and did, fit in a shoe box. However, that didn't last very long. To paraphrase Galen the Physician, she was a voracious animal, feeding constantly and eliminating incessantly. Often in the middle of the night, Kosher would empty her bowl of pig chow, flip it over with an expressive clatter, and then unleash a chorus of deep guttural grunts to alert me to her hunger. When that didn't produce a biped at her gate with a bucket of lunch, Kosher would take to b.u.t.ting the wooden posts with her powerful snout until the seismic shaking of the cottage woke me. Some nights, having run out of pig chow, I was forced to empty the entire contents of the refrigerator into her bowl, not just the produce and leftovers, but everything, down to the eggs, milk, soda, pickles, ketchup, mayonnaise, and cold cuts, including once (I'm ashamed to admit) a few slices of Virginia ham. Kosher ate it all, with a gusto that never failed to impress me. She ate like a pig.

But that isn't the story. The story is of the evening Kosher's Falstaffian appet.i.te got us both into trouble with the neighbors. Every now and then, when Kosher was feeling peckish or had caught a whiff of something good to eat, she would make a break for it, forcing her snout under the fencing and squeezing her muscular body through the gap. Usually she would head for the nearest garbage can, topple it, and feast on its contents. The neighbors were getting used to this sort of thing, and I was getting used to apologizing, cleaning up after her, and then corralling her back into her pen with the promise of a tasty morsel. But on this particular summer evening, just before sunset, Kosher must have raised her snout into the breeze and detected a few molecules of something even better than garbage: the scent of the smoke of meat on the grill. She made her escape and began working her way up the line of cottages along the beach, until she had located the source of the aroma.

What happened next I learned from the neighbor in question within a few minutes of his visit from Kosher. When it happened, this fellow was sitting on his deck, sipping a gin and tonic, and taking in the last pastel light of the summer day as his dinner sizzled on the grill. Like just about everyone on our strip of beach, this man was a well-to-do New Yorker or a Bostonian, maybe a lawyer or businessman, but likely not a person with much experience of hogs, except perhaps in the form of hams, chops, and strips of bacon. Hearing the clatter of hoof on wood, he looked up from his summer reverie to find a pinkish-white creature the size of an extremely short-legged Labrador bounding up the steps to his deck, grunting furiously. This was no dog. Kosher had evidently locked on to the scent of grilling meat, and when she arrived at last at its source, she worked with the efficiency and speed of a commando, knocking over the barbecue and making off with the man's steak.

Only a few minutes earlier, I had stepped outside to feed Kosher and discovered she had gone missing. I tracked her movements up the beach-most of the neighbors were on their decks, and had spotted her heading north-and arrived at the scene of the crime only a few minutes after Kosher had scurried off with a partially grilled steak clamped between her jaws. To my great good fortune, either Kosher's victim had an excellent sense of humor or his gin-and-tonic had put him in particularly high spirits, because he was doubled over with laughter as he recounted what Kosher had done. I apologized profusely, offered to drive to town to replace his dinner, but he waved me off, declaring the story was worth far more than the price of any steak. The man was still cracking up when I left him to go track down my fugitive hog.

It was long overdue: the Pig's Revenge on Barbecue. I have to think that if hogs had their own mythology, in which they pa.s.sed down tales of heroism from one generation to the next, the daring achievement of my pig would figure prominently in it: Kosher, the porcine Prometheus.

IV.

Raleigh, North Carolina

Now, of course, to a Southerner, Kosher's theft wasn't a theft of barbecue, not really: Only a deluded Northerner would ever refer to a steak grilled over an open fire as "barbecue." Southerners will argue without end about the precise definition of the word-and in fact any comprehensive definition of barbecue would have to include the fact that it is a food the definition of which is endlessly being contested-but to qualify for the term this cooking must include at a minimum meat, wood smoke, fire, and time. Beyond that, the definition of barbecue changes state by state, and even county by county. I have a map over my desk called "The Balkans of Barbecue." It purports to depict the different barbecue regions of the Carolinas, and superimposed over a map of the two states are the outlines of five distinct barbecue cantons: whole-hog here, shoulders there, strictly vinegar east of this line, tomato-based sauce to the west, mustard-based sauce to the south and east.

And that's only the Carolinas. The map stops before you get anywhere near the ribs of Tennessee or the smoky briskets of Texas, which, because they're beef, no Carolinian would deign to call barbecue. Every one of these barbecue nations regards the practices of every other as an abomination. As you might expect, the trash talking among pit masters is endlessly inventive. d.a.m.ning with faint praise is one common rhetorical strategy. Once, when I asked someone in Texas to a.s.sess the quality of a fellow Texan's barbecued brisket, he allowed, in a drawl, that though his brisket was "goooood, it wasn't knock-your-d.i.c.k-in-the-dirt good."

Perhaps the most generous definition of barbecue I've come across attempts to bridge all these regional differences. Put forward by a black pit master from Alabama named Sy Erskine, this definition diplomatically elides the whole vexed issue of sauce; it also hints at the sacramental quality of barbecue. Barbecue, he told a writer, is "the mystic communion among fire, smoke, and meat in the total absence of water."* I suspect most Southerners could rally under that broad banner. But the other thing they could agree on? That my own Northerner's conception of barbecue-which wasn't even clear as to whether the word referred to the cooking process or the apparatus used in that process or the resulting food or the accompanying sauce-was just wrong. I had been in North Carolina long enough now to know at least this: "Barbecue" is a noun (not a verb) that refers either to a social event or to the kind of food prepared and served at that event.

Thus far my own experience of Southern barbecue had been limited to observer and eater. Though I had now tasted the food, I had not yet been to a real barbecue. So I left Ayden with an aspiration: to see if I could learn at least a few of the secrets of barbecue, by apprenticing myself to one of its masters, and not in a kitchen but at a barbecue. I didn't want to watch anymore. I wanted to do.

Before I came to North Carolina, I thought I had done and knew something about how to barbecue; I do it all the time at home. As for most American men, the cooking of meat outdoors over fire const.i.tutes one of my most exalted domestic duties. And like most American men, I do a fine job of mystifying what is at bottom a very simple process, such a fine job, in fact, that my wife, Judith, is by now convinced that grilling a steak over a fire is as daunting a procedure as changing the timing belt on the car.

Indeed, North or South, it is remarkable how much sheer bulls.h.i.+t seems to accrete around the subject of barbecue. No other kind of cooking comes even close. Exactly why, I'm not sure, but it may be that cooking over fire is actually so straightforward that the people who do it feel a need to baste the process in thick layers of intricacy and myth. It could also be that barbecue is performed disproportionately by self-dramatizing men. For my own part, I made much of my special talent for determining the doneness of a chunk of grilled meat, which involved touching the meat on the grill and then, with the same finger, touching various sectors of my face. If the meat responds to pressure like my cheek does, that means it is rare; if it feels more like my chin, it's medium; if like my forehead, then it's well done. I'd seen some chef demonstrate the technique on television and it seemed to work, not just as a handy metric but, much more important, as a further aid to mystification. Judith has come to doubt her own face could possibly work as well.

It's a pretty good racket. Or at least I thought it was until someone let me in on the secret that many women play dumb around the whole subject of fire, in order to make sure that men do at least some of the cooking.

But that barbecue sandwich at the Skylight Inn had persuaded me that my definition of barbecue was faulty and that there was a lot more involved in cooking over a fire than I knew-which was, basically, how to throw meat on a blazingly hot grill and then, after a while, poke at it knowingly. What I needed was a pit master willing to let me work as his sous chef, or whatever the barbecue cognate of that role was. James Howell was clearly too taciturn and inaccessible to be that mentor, and the Joneses didn't seem inclined to let me get my hands dirty (or burned) in their cookhouse.

As it happened, the pit master I was looking for would appear in my life the very next day. That's when I had an interview scheduled with a celebrated North Carolina barbecue man who had a restaurant in Raleigh called The Pit. Ed Mitch.e.l.l is his name, and I had heard a great deal about him before flying out to North Carolina-in fact had seen his picture on the front page of the New York Times, after he had wowed the crowd with his whole-hog barbecue at the first Big Apple Barbecue Block Party in New York City in 2003. By now Ed Mitch.e.l.l was nationally famous, had been all over television, had had his oral history taken by the Southern Foodways Alliance, among others, and been profiled over the years in several national magazines, including Gourmet.

None of this boded well for eliciting more than a few well-sanded sound bites from the guy, who in the pictures looked like quite the showman, a big black Santa Claus in denim overalls and a baseball cap. Of concern, too, was the fact that his barbecue joint served wine and had valet parking, and that a wag on one of the restaurant blogs had dismissed the place as "a barbecue zoo." But I had learned that over the following weekend Mitch.e.l.l would be cooking a pig at a benefit barbecue in Wilson, his hometown, some distance from the putative zoo in Raleigh. So I decided that I would call Mitch.e.l.l, and if he seemed even remotely amenable, I would ask him if I might tag along and a.s.sist.

Ed Mitch.e.l.l just might be the first pit master in history to have handlers. Before I could talk to him I had to go through his people at Empire Eats, the Raleigh restaurant group that owned The Pit, or 51 percent of it anyway. The backstory, I quickly learned, was complicated. Ed Mitch.e.l.l had lost his original restaurant, Mitch.e.l.l's Ribs, Chicken & Barbecue, in Wilson, after a legal tussle with the bank and the State of North Carolina, which in 2005 had charged him with embezzlement for his failure to remit various state taxes. (Later, I would hear Mitch.e.l.l refer to his legal and financial difficulties as a case of "orchestrated turbulence.") The charges against him were eventually reduced to tax evasion, but Mitch.e.l.l spent some time in jail and the bank foreclosed on his restaurant. After his release, Mitch.e.l.l was approached by Greg Hatem, a young local real-estate developer who'd made a reputation revitalizing Raleigh's faded downtown district. The key to luring people back downtown, Hatem had figured out, was to open some good restaurants there. Now, in Ed Mitch.e.l.l, he recognized a rare opportunity: one of the most famous barbecue men in the country down on his luck and without a stage. Hatem proposed a 5149-percent partners.h.i.+p; Ed would run the pits and the front of the house, while Greg's people would manage the business side-evidently Ed's Achilles' heel. The Pit would be a whole new kind of barbecue restaurant, an upscale place with good lighting, a wine list, and valet parking.

To many in the barbecue world, this seemed a dubious concept at best, the most withering appraisal being the one I'd read online suggesting the South's greatest black pitman had been caged in a barbecue zoo. Someone else said Ed Mitch.e.l.l had become the Colonel Sanders of barbecue. The Pit seemed to put the whole question of authenticity, never far from discussions of barbecue and always vexed, in deeper doubt than ever. Yet there was no denying the dubious concept was working. The Pit was packed for both lunch and dinner, and the barrier of the $10 barbecue sandwich had been successfully breached.*

When I finally got Ed on the phone, I had the feeling I often did when talking to an experienced pitman-that I'd opened the spigot on a hydrant of barbecue blarney. This one positively gushed. Mitch.e.l.l was evangelical on the subject of whole-hog barbecue, and strict in his construction of it. He dropped the word "authentic" into every third or fourth sentence, something that I was getting used to here in North Carolina but which raised an uncomfortable question. To wit, can authenticity be aware of itself as such and still be authentic?