1.8 Million Years of Cooking

Today’s New York Times includes a short, but fascinating interview, “A Conversation with Richard Wrangham: From Studying Chimps, a Theory on Cooking.”

What caught my attention was his theory, which he apparently expands on in his upcoming book, “Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human,” that cooking, rather than tool making and meat eating, was the main factor in man’s early evolution.

How Cooking Made Us Human (Richard Wrangham)

…our large brain and the shape of our bodies are the product of a rich diet that was only available to us after we began cooking our foods. It was cooking that provided our bodies with more energy than we’d previously obtained as foraging animals eating raw food.

Studying modern chimpanzees, he noticed that much of the chimps diet consisted of “extremely fibrous foods,” which required a lot of time sitting around chewing.  According to Mr. Wrangham, once early humans learned to cook, their evolution accelerated since their diet was now “richer, healthier and required less eating time.”

Sounds like fast food has been around a lot longer than I thought.  Perhaps Eric Schlosser needs to write a prequel to Fast Food Nation.

There are clearly differences between earlier fast (“less eating time”) food and today’s highly efficient and arguably unsustainable cousin is community.

…once you had communal fires and cooking and a higher-calorie diet, the social world of our ancestors changed, too. Once individuals were drawn to a specific attractive location that had a fire, they spent a lot of time around it together. This was clearly a very different system from wandering around chimpanzee-style, sleeping wherever you wanted, always able to leave a group if there was any kind of social conflict.

Now compare these community oriented, almost slow food type eating experiences with today’s fast food diet:

[Author asked if today’s man has adapted to McDonald’s, pizza]  I think we’re adapted to our diet. It’s that our lifestyle is not. We’re adapted in the sense that our bodies are designed to maximize the amount of energy we get from our foods. So we are very good at selecting the foods that produce a lot of energy. However, we take in far more than we need. That’s not adaptive.

What really amazes me is that today’ man, with our vast technologies and industries, can’t figure out how to get families to spend a lot of time together eating richer, healthier food.  Is it possible that our industrial food system doesn’t care about such things?  Regardless, what is the significance of American’s either eating out or eating prepared meals nearly half the time?  Is this putting the species at risk of devolving?

OK, so I’m having a little fun with this. There are serious problems in our food system and I believe that reversing our migration away from our kitchens and being able to cook sustainable foods has the potential to be the “main factor” in improving our health and the health of our planet, building stronger regional economies, and strengthening our families.

A tall order, but far better than the typical response of throwing technology at the problem.

Related Information and Links:

• Dear Julia Child, We Need You!
• Follow me on Twitter: Jambutter

30 Years of Messing Up Food

Over the weekend, I finally had the opportunity to watch King Corn, a documentary following an acre of corn.  If you haven’t seen it, I highly recommend you do.  Like Michael Pollan’s books, especially The Omnivore’s Dilemma, it helps connect the dots regarding U.S. food policy, industrialized food, fast food, and more.

King Corn also inspired me to dust off my copy of Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation, the book that in many ways sparked my interest in sustainable food systems.  As a history of the fast food industy, I am hoping a reread will help me better understand fast food’s role in creating today’s unsustainable food system, especially before the early 1970s when U.S. agriculture policy took a 180 degree turn.

At this point, here are what I believe are the major contributors that have created the food “mess” we find ourselves today (What’s missing?):

1. Urban Sprawl – The U.S. interstate system, cheap oil, and the rapid growth of the auto industry contributed to a significant migration of people out of America’s cities to the suburbs.  I am sure there were other contributors.  Regardless, this exodus provided the perfect accelerator for a young fast food industry to move beyond its humble roots to the mainstream.  Soon, fast food joints were popping up at every interstate exit.  With such significant growth opportunities in sight, fast food industry leaders recognized the need for even cheaper food to fund its expansion.
2. U.S. Agriculture Policy – In the early 1970s, under Ag Secretary Earl L. Butz, and as pointed out in King Corn, the U.S. shifted from a policy of paying farms not to produce, to subidizing over production.  According to the New York Times, “Mr. Butz maintained that a free-market policy, encouraging farmers to produce more and to sell their surplus overseas, could bring them higher prices.”
3. 1938 Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act –  This Act of Congress required that any food product that wasn’t the real thing must include the word “imitation” on its label.  Around the same time that Secretary Butz was moving agriculture through its 180 degree swing, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) quitely repealed the Act, thus giving food manufacturers something they had been lobbying for for decades.  Without such labeling, something like Sara Lee’s Soft & Smooth Whole Grain White Bread, along with its very long list of ingredients could be classified as “real” bread the same way as freshly baked bread with 4-5 whole food ingredients. [Thanks to Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food for pointing out this critical policy change (quote).]
4. High Fructose Corn Syrup Industry – In my recent post titled Is Industrial Food Stealing Farmers Lunch Money?, I highlighted a 12-cent shift in the allocation of consumer expenditures on food since the early 1980.  That 12 cents of every dollar now goes to the “food marketing system” instead of farmers who saw their share go from 31 cents of every dollar to 19 cents (a 40% decline).  What I learned from King Corn is that this shift began around the same time that significant corn surpluses motivated large investments in developing cheaper high fructose corn syrup, which was helped by declines in corn prices.

The result of all of this is an abundance of cheap food in America, much of which would be better defined as fast or fake cheap food.  Of course Earl Butz, during an on-screen interview in King Corn, was proud of the fact that we can now feed ourselves with 16-17 percent of our take-home pay, leaving us more money to spend on other things.  On the surface, this makes a lot of sense.

Unfortunately, increasing amounts of  our money now goes toward rapidly increasing health care costs, which in large part are due to our deterioting health caused by what we eat.  If it hasn’t happened already, I’m betting before too long that consumer spending on food plus health care will leave us pretty much where we started – tight family budgets and a lower quality of life.

Seems like the perfect time to shift from our “Quantity Economy” to one of quality.  Granted it likely means eating less and paying more, but the alternative is not sustainable.

Related Information and Links:

• Industrial Food Continuing to Stack Deck?
• Is Industrial Food Stealing Farmers Lunch Money?
• Experiencing Food v. Thinking Nutrients
• FoodRenegade blog: Food – Not Nutrients – Is the Fundamental Unit in Nutrition
• Follow me on Twitter: Jambutter