Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human, by Richard Wrangham, is rightly taking the food world by storm. Well researched and documented (the bibliography alone is 30 pages long), it is also an engaging read. Astonishingly, few other writers have previously related the importance of cooking to the nutritional quality of food, thereby enabling human beings to evolve.
Not only does Wrangham detail the evolution of humankind in terms of how we understood and utilized fire, he also sets his aim on the modern food system. He takes on the trendy raw food community, as well as the fast food, chemically-processed types. He argues that eating calories that are too easy to digest is now a bigger problem for many than getting enough food. His book puts out a clarion call to
This article appears in Oct 22-28, 2009.