Читать книгу Bits & Bites. The Invention of Food. - Том Хилленбранд - Страница 5

So, without barbecues we were just a bunch of big apes? It’s not quite that simple.

Before the discovery of fire we spent a lot of time being pretty cold. So it was probably the warmth that initially attracted us to fire. We hesitantly held out our hairy hands in front of the flames and noticed they didn’t turn to ash. Once fire no longer filled us with terror we started domesticating it. It seems to have taken until around 125,000 BC for the on-demand fire idea to catch on, a fire that could be sparked at any time with a spindle or bow. Prior to this, we had to go out and scare up, say, a blazing branch from a forest fire—and then watch over and nurture our flame so it wouldn’t go out. The communal campfire was born.

Before we tamed fire we had no way of preparing a decent meal for ourselves—we consumed everything in its natural state. Even lovers of rare, blood-dripping steaks have to admit that uncooked meat is not only hard on the stomach but also requires a great deal more chewing power than a goulash that has been simmering for hours. So chateaubriand of mammoth won’t have been the tastiest dish for our ancestors. Things weren’t much different with grains or roots. It may be that early humans ground their meat between stones to make a paste, or let it age a while—this would have made it a little easier to chew, but hardly any more palatable. Quite the opposite.

It was fire that made food edible. Apart from the fact that it was now possible to eat much better, fire had a number of other effects on our forebears. To start with, the whole barbecuing thing changed

their group behavior. No one knows exactly how and where the hunter-gatherers of the early Stone Age took their meals; anthropologists assume, however, that they frequently ate alone since there was no real reason for them to dine together. More likely, when they found fruits or berries they crammed them in their mouths on the spot before some other bigger, stronger troglodyte could steal them away.

Thanks to fire, however, food now acquired a social component. Our forefathers started assembling each evening to cook over their carefully tended campfires. The paleoanthropologist Richard Leakey believes that these Stone Age barbecues may have been the key event that separated man from ape: “Certainly, the hominids included more meat in their diet than their non-hominid relatives, but that difference was merely one of degree. The significant departure was the strategy of collecting food to be eaten later, and the consumption of food within a social network. An immediate consequence of such an arrangement would have been that social interaction, already well developed in higher primates, was enhanced still further.”

Say what one will about seating arrangements and social interaction—dinner conversation during these early barbecues is likely to have been pretty limited as these early humans couldn’t talk yet. Their jaws were too crude, having been made not for articulating sequences of sounds but for crushing rock-hard nuts or mashing scraps of tough meat. With the boiling and simmering of food, jaws built for grinding became superfluous and gave way to more refined mouth structures that made speech possible.

So without fire and without cooking our iPhones wouldn’t be much use to us. The barbecue anecdote demonstrates that culinary innovations may have been more vital for the human race than many of us believe. Now, one could object that it’s nonsense to speak of innovations in this connection. One could argue that food can’t be invented. After all, a carrot has always been a carrot just like an ear of corn has always looked like an ear of corn. Through constant cultivation over the centuries we may have made these vegetables somewhat bigger or more robust, but we hardly invented them.

This view is certainly understandable. But it’s wrong.