william wrote:

>>What makes you think it's up to you to define the word "food"?
>>
>>
>
>No one else is doing it.
>You refer to fodder as if it were food. Wrong.
>
>

Well, as far as I am concerned, the English definition of food as stuff
one can eat for energy and building of tissue is quite adequate, but
I'll bear in mind that you mean something else.  Returning to your
original statement that it's a mystery why people started cooking food
in the first place, I still believe the best answer is that doing so
rendered the inedible edible, and thus conferred a significant advantage
upon those who cooked in comparison to those who didn't.  I suppose I
should add that by "edible" I mean "consumable as food," in the English
language sense of the word "food."  Cooking makes more food available,
and any hunter-gatherer would recognize that as a good thing.

That fact that cooking was advantageous does not imply that it carried
no disadvantages.  It is jejune to suppose that every dietary choice is
all good or all bad; and a similar point can be made concerning many
foods that are edible raw.  Many of them contain secondary compounds
that can be deleterious if enough of them is consumed, and some
individuals may be more vulnerable to these compounds than others.  With
the possible exception of the Inuit, I would be willing to bet that
*all* existing hunter-gatherers cook and make edible at least some foods
that would otherwise be inedible.  My view is that this, if true, is not
a coincidence.  The Inuit, I suppose, could eat all of their food raw,
but don't.

Todd Moody
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