william wrote:

>On Wed, 2004-05-12 at 09:22, Todd Moody wrote:
>
>
>>  Cooking makes more food available,
>>and any hunter-gatherer would recognize that as a good thing.
>>
>>
>
>True, but this doesn't address the picture of a small human population
>in an earth swarming with food. We live in an age of scarcity so that
>even in rich countries such as Canada some starve, then there are those
>who sicken from eating fantasy-foods (fodder) such as wheat - a
>different form of starvation.
>
>Rivers used to be full of clams (from a book on the history of the
>Mississippi) - difficult for us to imagine, but the idea of food as
>scarce seems to dominate modern minds.
>
>If this makes sense, there seems no point in cooking, except in times of
>population excess. I've heard nothing of a "boom and bust" population
>cycle in paleolithic times; lacking a competent predator on humans this
>should have happened.
>
>

You make a good point.  In an environment swarming with food, cooking is
a pointless waste of time and energy.  Nonetheless, cooking caught on
and became universal.  I am still inclined to think that it did so
because it paid off.  One possibility is that it allowed populations to
expand into terrain where, without cooking, the food wasn't so
swarming.  I wouldn't argue that food was always and everywhere scarce,
but it seems reasonable to suppose that it was sometimes scarce, and
under those conditions the foods made available by cooking would be a
definite advantage, and once that advantage was seized, it would propel
further population expansion, just as agriculture did.

Todd Moody
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