"Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human" by Richard Wrangham

 

Publisher: Basic Books

Copyright: 2009

ISBN: 9780465020416

Even though this book shares the first part of its title with one of a relatively popular series of novels, this book has absolutely nothing to do with "The Hunger Games", although cooking does typically satisfy hunger. It is in fact an anthropological investigation into the revolutionary history of humans and how we possibly might have teamed fire, and thereby learned to cook food, allowing us to evolve into what we have today.

The book starts off by examining the theories behind eating raw food, which at the time of writing was somewhat of a fad. Following this Dr. Wrangham looks into amongst other things the energy theory of cooking, how cooking began, what foods best affect brain development, the social structure of hunter-gatherers, how we differ from the great apes in both social structure and feeding habits, how domestication possibly influenced the male role in life, and much more.

In one chapter Dr. Wrangham looks at the social inequity between males and females, and it is rather surprising to see how much that parallels the inequality seen even today in certain cultures.

This book has 46 pages of reference notes, and a 30 page bibliography. Both of which are extremely valuable in understanding this topic. For the most part when I was taking my anthropology courses ideas such as this were not part of the curriculum but then again this was many years before this book was published.

An extremely book that is well worth reading.