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With cooking, plants and animals became the raw materials for food, not food itself. Given that we commonly use the word “food” to describe what farmers grow, and given that we eat nuts, fruit, some vegetables, and even fish and steak tartare without cooking, the statement that plants and animals are not food may seem counterintuitive. The fact is that most of us get only a small fraction of our calories from raw foods. Even so, that fraction is probably higher than that of our ancestors, since we are the beneficiaries of millennia of breeding that have created larger, sweeter fruits and more tender vegetables and meat. Furthermore, even what we call raw has usually been subjected to many kitchen processes. Few of us sink our teeth into raw steak unless it has been finely chopped or sliced. Raw foodists allow slicing, grinding, chopping, soaking, sprouting, freezing, and heating to 104–120 degrees Fahrenheit. In spite of modern high-quality plant foods and careful preparation, it is almost impossible to thrive on such a diet, according to evidence gathered by Richard Wrangham. In antiquity, people happily accepted that humans ate cooked food. Indeed, they saw it as what distinguished them from animals. Perhaps it is because today we place so much emphasis on “fresh” and “natural” foods—which Susanne Freidberg has shown are made possible only by changing animal life cycles, modern transport, refrigeration, and ingenious packaging—that we underestimate how much we depend on cooking. In any case, there is no escaping that with cooking, food became an artifact, like clothes and dwellings, not natural but made by humans. A sheaf of wheat is no more food than a boll of cotton is a garment.
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Rachel Laudan (Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History (California Studies in Food and Culture Book 43))