..that's right .. take notice biters ( and yes i'm talking to you brendan and bethany ) NObody does charles better than charles

It should probably be noted that—best I can gather—cooking food with fire predates us, Homo sapiens, by about 400,000 years.

This is an excellent book, despite the fact that Mudede mangles the title (it's "Catching Fire", not just "Catching" ...) and the premise - it's about the idea that cooking food, not cooperative hunting for meat, spurred human evolution ... which actually puts women in more of an active role in how humans ended up the big-brained critters we are today (some of us, anyway).

It's also got an excellent argument against the raw foodist whackos.

#3 - The raw food thing: I was just suffering through, tight lipped, some raw foodist expel the "science" behind how they're new raw food diet has given them all this fantastic energy they've never had before. Ugh.

Far more interesting books are
Catching Fire How: Cooking Made Us Human
& it's sequel,
Human Made Cooking: How Catching Us Fire.

Interesting take. So it's like "Gah, me cook mammoth leg ALL DAY and now that no-good Bako come steal it! Me need own man, protect food!!"

I suppose that's one way to look at it. Or it could be that holding the secrets of cooking actually gave females an advantage (another one, that is, like the mysterious moon-time-bleeding when not sick, the creation of new small people, etc...). Another reason to not smack little Bitsy around, she cook good mammoth for you! And make new small people, that look like you! Gah, keep Bitsy around a while... maybe.....

(@ 6 - Raw meat only makes you sick when you're used to eating cooked. I doubt early humanoids had such delicate tummies.)

while it is an odd phenomenon that cooking has been so routinely viewed as a woman's role, i think this conclusion is absurd. it seems that the 'oppression' of women would have predated cooking by several thousand years and been spurred on by the inherent imbalance in the human reproductive situation, ie, being pregnant is a much more vulnerable state than cooking. also, oppression in this context is a term that better describes modern institutionalization of traditional gender roles as to make them mandatory and enforceable. it's silly to call the social roles of people essentially living in the wild and in a state which we can only speculate about as oppressive. it's a very judgemental and condescending approach to anthropology/archeology.

Charles, yesterday you posted on the Slog that women were more "human" because they were more open to empathy, and men were more territorial-minded. So which is it? The cooking or our brain-stem structure?

I find this review a wonderful example of intellectual ignorance. Because he hasn't found a culture that fits outside his narrow viewpoint, doesn't mean they haven't existed. It's a very weak foundation for any rational conclusions. We have little way of knowing about cultures that are older than a few thousand years, and yet this yahoo figures that the hundreds of thousands of years (if not millions) of human experience since we began utilizing fire is 100% knowable based on recent human activity. Intellectual ignorance thrives on the inability to say "I don't know."

Of the many holes in that theory, I'll just point out one, that city-building did not exist until 5,000 years ago, which has had a huge impact on human consciousness. That leaves many thousands of years where we simply don't know how humans thought. The philosopher projecting his current cultural bigotries onto All Humans is as old as the hills.

Plus, even after the advent of city-building, there were many matriarchal societies. It has been argued that male-domination is only a very recent aberration in human history. Or has it always existed among humans? I don't know.

@6 you sound pretty fucking bitter. bordering on misogyny. if you're having so much trouble getting laid that you resort to trashing the entire female population of the human species over the last 100,000 years or so then maybe you should get a hooker or something. take the edge off.

explain grilling then.
1. it's probably the oldest "cooking" method.
2. it's not "slow", in general.
3. men enjoy doing it.

I'm starting to believe that Mudede is just the best troll ever.

How do gay men survive without subservient women around to cook for us?

Adam Smith never included anything that women did in his grand works on capitalist economy.

Especially cooking.

Very very sad.

This is the sort of absurdly specious "just so" story that laid the foundation for Social Darwinism and Phrenology.

Cooking has been elevated to an art form, only perfunctory cooking subjugates women.

Now I have an even better reason for why I only date (or marry) men who cook! I thought it was just that I was a) lazy, and b) didn't care that much about what I ate. Now I know it's because I'm being oppressed. Help! Help! I'm being oppressed!

Except I'm not. Because I don't cook.

wow charles, let's see more posts like this. very interesting.

Your good-looking mom threw chopped carrots in a pot? Are you sure this dream is about cooking?

In the culture of classic French cooking (extended to colonies outside of France, including New Orleans), women were (and ares sometimes still) not allowed to cook in restaurants. They were stuck out front serving, while only men were considered capable of creating sophisticated haute cuisine.

Also, I am a woman and I love to cook. Also, I think Puty may be onto something...

Oh, and count the number of female sushi chefs you've ever met...

Wouldn't that just be technology freeing up people? I mean this is a classic scarcity scenario that cooking or not males are going to be aggressive, maybe the suggestion is that since the food is cooked the smell travels longer and it will attract more males?

Furthermore, why not look at the bright side, does this mean that men didn't understand how to cook, and only women got it? So like, they developed brains and science and shit while men were too busy beating each other around? I don't know what the writer is trying to get at, maybe he's looking way to far into cultural norms, but I would suspect that some male somewhere got the bright idea to cook food around the same time a woman got the idea. I guess I see how it could be considered oppressive, but in this scenario the male hunts/gathers the food and the female cooks it. So in some ways could this be the women oppressing men? If the only thing we're talking about is cooking that is.....

@23: Right? I always found that disparity interesting. It's the same thing across many occupations. Look at teaching. Plenty of men at the professorial level (although that's finally shifting) and as you go further down the educational chain, the fewer men there are and the more women there are.

I remember how in grade school -- especially among the female students -- we found male teachers a great novelty.