Cooking

• 1. Introduction

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  Cooking is the only activity of its kind that belongs to humans alone. No other animal prepares its food with heat or fire. Archaeological evidence of cooking fires reaches back at least 300,000 years, yet some researchers push the origins of human cooking to as early as 2 million years ago. Defined as the art, science, and craft of using heat to make food more palatable, digestible, nutritious, or safe, cooking appears in every human society. Anthropologists treat it as a cultural universal. From grilling over an open fire to baking in ovens to boiling in water, its techniques reflect local conditions and traditions. But how did a species learn to harness fire for its meals, and what does that change inside the food itself? What turns raw matter into something safer, tastier, and easier to absorb? And why does the same heat that protects us also carry its own quiet dangers?

• 2. Fire And The First Cooks

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  Phylogenetic analysis suggests early hominids may have adopted cooking 1 to 2 million years ago. Burnt bone fragments and plant ashes from the Wonderwerk Cave in South Africa point to control of fire by early humans 1 million years ago. In his work Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human, Richard Wrangham argued that bipedalism and a large cranial capacity meant early Homo habilis regularly cooked food. Unequivocal evidence in the archaeological record for the controlled use of fire begins at 400,000 BCE, well after species like Homo erectus are thought to have lived. The oldest evidence of controlled fire used to cook, drawn from heated fish teeth in a deep cave, was dated to about 780,000 years ago. Across Europe and the Middle East, remains from 300,000 years ago survive as ancient hearths, earth ovens, burnt animal bones, and flint. Anthropologists think widespread cooking fires began about 250,000 years ago, when hearths first appeared. The earliest hearths reported so far are at least 790,000 years old.

• 3. Foods Across The Atlantic

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  Communication between the Old World and the New World in the Columbian Exchange reshaped what cooks everywhere could put in a pot. From the New World came potatoes, tomatoes, maize, beans, bell pepper, chili pepper, vanilla, pumpkin, cassava, avocado, peanut, pecan, cashew, pineapple, blueberry, sunflower, chocolate, gourds, green beans, and squash. Their arrival had a profound effect on Old World cooking. Moving the other way across the Atlantic were cattle, sheep, pigs, wheat, oats, barley, rice, apples, pears, peas, chickpeas, mustard, and carrots, which changed New World cooking just as deeply. The expansion of agriculture, commerce, trade, and transportation between regions kept handing cooks new ingredients. New inventions added new methods too, including the invention of pottery for holding and boiling water. Each exchange widened the range of techniques a kitchen could draw on.

• 4. Food As National Identity

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  In the 17th and 18th centuries, food served as a classic marker of identity in Europe. By the 19th-century "Age of Nationalism", cuisine had become a defining symbol of national identity. Ilaria Porciani notes that industrial food manufacturing, including McDonald's and other fast-food places, created a desire for authentic cuisine. She argues that food becomes entangled with nostalgia and is imagined in terms of authenticity and tradition, representing continuity with past generations. In this way, food undergoes what she calls heritagization. National intellectuals and folklorists shaped the process by researching national traditions and fostering a sense of unity. Governments, public institutions, cooks, and gourmets joined what amounts to an informal contract to build a culinary identity for the nation. The Industrial Revolution brought mass production, mass marketing, and standardization of food. Factories processed, preserved, canned, and packaged a wide variety of foods, and processed cereals quickly became a defining feature of the American breakfast. In the 1920s, freezing methods, cafeterias, and fast food restaurants emerged.

• 5. The Chemistry Of Ingredients

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  Most ingredients in cooking come from living organisms, carrying proteins, carbohydrates, and fats, along with water and minerals. Carbohydrates include sucrose, the table sugar that is a disaccharide, plus simple sugars like glucose and fructose, and starches from cereal flour, rice, arrowroot, and potato. When sugars are heated until all water of crystallisation is driven off, caramelization begins, producing carbon and the breakdown products that make caramel. Heating sugars and proteins together causes the Maillard reaction, a basic flavor-enhancing technique. Fats behave differently under heat than the sugars beside them in the pantry. They can reach temperatures above the boiling point of water, which makes them useful for transferring high heat in frying, deep-frying, or sautéing. In European cooking, a mixture of butter and flour called a roux thickens stews and sauces, while Asian cooking gets a similar effect from rice or corn starch and water. Proteins tell their own story under heat. When heated, they denature and change texture, so meat becomes more friable and less flexible. Egg whites do the opposite, coagulating into a rigid yet flexible matrix that underpins meringue and many desserts.

• 6. Methods Old And New

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  Most methods of cooking have been known since antiquity, including baking, roasting, frying, grilling, barbecuing, smoking, boiling, steaming, and braising. A more recent innovation is microwaving, which sits apart from the older family of techniques. Steaming works by continuously boiling water, which vaporizes into steam that then transfers heat to the food. Many consider it a healthy form of cooking, as it helps retain nutrients in vegetables or meat. In the en papillote method, food is placed in a pouch and baked, allowing its own moisture to steam it. Smoking flavors, cooks, or preserves food by exposing it to smoke from burning or smoldering material, most often wood. Sous vide takes a slower path entirely. The food is placed into a plastic pouch or glass jar, sealed often in a vacuum, then cooked in a water bath at precise temperatures for longer than normal times, sometimes up to days.

• 7. The Hazards Of Heat

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  As of 2021, over 2.6 billion people cook with open fires or inefficient stoves burning kerosene, biomass, and coal. These practices produce high levels of household air pollution, causing 3.8 million premature deaths annually. Of those deaths, 27 percent come from pneumonia, 27 percent from ischaemic heart disease, 20 percent from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, 18 percent from stroke, and 8 percent from lung cancer. Women and young children are disproportionately affected, since they spend the most time near the hearth. Inside the kitchen, the dangers are more immediate. About a third of the United States' estimated 400,000 annual knife injuries are kitchen-related, alongside the risks of burns, fires, and unseen slippery surfaces. Heat also protects, killing or inactivating bacteria, viruses, and parasites such as tapeworms and Toxoplasma gondii. Some spoilage bacteria, like Clostridium botulinum or Bacillus cereus, form spores that survive boiling, then germinate after the food cools, which makes it unsafe to reheat cooked food more than once. Kidney beans are toxic when raw or improperly cooked due to phytohaemagglutinin, inactivated only by cooking for at least ten minutes at 100 C.

• 8. What Cooking Costs Nutrition

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  Vitamin C is especially prone to oxidation during cooking and may be destroyed by protracted heat, leaching into the cooking water in vegetables and fruits. Peeling vegetables compounds the loss, especially in potatoes, where most of the vitamin C sits in the skin. The picture is not all loss. Research shows a greater proportion of carotenoids is absorbed from cooked vegetables than from raw ones, and cooking increases the bioavailability of thiamin, vitamin B6, niacin, and folate by freeing them from food microstructure. Heat can also create hazards inside the food itself. Several studies since 1990 indicate that cooking meat at high temperature creates heterocyclic amines, thought to increase cancer risk. Researchers at the National Cancer Institute found that people who ate beef rare or medium-rare had less than one-third the risk of stomach cancer of those who ate it medium-well or well-done. The Institute notes that cooking meat below 212 F creates "negligible amounts" of these compounds. Baking, grilling, or broiling starchy foods until a toasted crust forms generates significant acrylamide, a discovery in 2002 that led to international health concerns. Later research found it unlikely that acrylamides in burnt food cause cancer in humans, and Cancer Research UK calls the idea that burnt food causes cancer a "myth". The scientific study of all this carries its own name: molecular gastronomy, with contributions from figures such as the chemist Hervé This and the physicist Nicholas Kurti.