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Domestication Of Food

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Food has played a subtle, integral role in the evolution of humans. The domestication of grains and the use of fire to cook raw food, such as vegetables and meat, has created a new culinary paradigm that still exists and thrives in the modern world today.
As Tom Standage writes in The Edible History of Humanity, “Maize appears to be a gift from nature; it even comes wrapped up. But appearances can be deceptive.” Despite a crop coming from nature, it is ultimately modified by humans themselves through propagation. Maize is “. . . the result of human propagation of a series of random genetic mutations that transformed it from a simple grass into a bizarre, gigantic mutant that can no longer survive in the wild.” Before humans began propagating …show more content…

As plants became larger and unable to survive in the wild as a result of humans, the plants became solely reliant on human assistance to survive, as did humans on the plants. The consistent practice of farming domesticated grains was able to provide a supply of food that, in turn, “. . . provided the basis for new lifestyles and far more complex societies.” Furthermore, because domesticated cereal grains were able to supply exorbitant amounts of food, cultures and civilizations were built around and “. . . relied on a range of foods, but the most important were the cereals . . . .” In the grand scheme of the world, civilizations, such as the Mayan and Aztec, were built upon the basis of farming domesticated grains like maize because of the criticality of cereal grains. This deliberate process of domesticating grains led to the domestication of animals starting around 8000 B.C., and both are practices that continue today. The domestication processes have taken a strong hold on the human diet of the modern world and are considered staples to many of its inhabitants because of its effect on mankind. Although domesticated grains provided a new mean of food production, cooking is also played a role in human …show more content…

Such evidence includes, but is not limited to, prehistoric artifacts, modern-day observations of primitive cultures, and data from experiments. Dr. Richard Wrangham argues homo habilis was processing and pounding the raw meat that they butchered off of animals, and he uses prehistoric artifacts and data from experiments to support his theory. In his interview with Paul Raeburn, Wrangham says, “. . . we have lots of fist-sized hammer stones that they were clearly using for something at that time, and that would seem very reasonable. Because if you pound meat, then just like making steak tartare, just like making ground beef, it makes it much easier to chew and - actually, as we have seen with tests with pythons - it reduces the metabolic costs that the eater must pay for digesting the food.” On the other hand, Dr. Travis Pickering uses his observations of primitive cultures of a Namibian tribe known as the “real people” to support his theory that humans could have hunted with simple weapons. Pickering says, “When you’re trying to reconstruct early human foraging, the only way to do it is to come out in the real world and watch people do it.” As the narrator of Did Cooking Make Us Human explains, “For Travis, the day’s chase has shown that our ancestors could well have been successful using very basic weapons to hunt down their meat. {They killed this porcupine with a spear . . . . Spear is

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