Anita Dittmar wrote:

> Just a quick side note...
> Agriculture and the consumption of highly refined carbs also has
> "caught on"
> but it doesn't make it healthy or right.


That's right.  I'm not even interested in arguing about whether it is
"better" to eat cooked or raw foods.  I eat what I like, and that's the
end of it.  I am, however, interested in the question of how cooking
become so established.  In the case of agriculture, it's not too
difficult to see what happened.  Agriculture brought about surplus
calories in large amounts, which in turn increased the population of
agriculturalists, which then increased their demand for more arable
land, creating a spiral which continues today.  Cooking is much older,
and does not appear to have been accompanied by a population boom, so
there must have been a different dynamic.  It's easy enough to see that
cooking made more plant foods available, making it possible to make a
living in previously inhospitable areas, but it wouldn't explain about
cooking meats.  It's possible, I suppose, that the cooking of meat was
just a pointless side-effect of the cooking of plant foods.

Todd Moody
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