Tasty by John McQuaid Read Free Book Online Page A

and filled with strong tastes from start to finish: the savory, umami flavors of raw meat, the iron bitterness of blood, the richness of fat, the odd complexities of brains and kidneys.
    Then came fire. It might have started like this: A lightning strike ignited the savanna scrub, the breeze sending a wall of flame dancing through the grass. Animals panicked and fled in all directions, eyes mad with fear. But a few dozen pairs of more practiced, nearly human eyes assayed the scene from a distance. They had seen this many times. They gauged the wind and the direction the flames were advancing, and moved together to make way, reaching a slight rise in the land for a better view. They would have felt the heat on their faces and chests as the blaze passed by, and a rush of excitement. After waiting for things to cool off, they inspected the charred wake of the fire, scanning the ground and the bushes for food. Heat-scarred fig tree branches and nuts littered the ground, their shells cracked by the heat. Perhaps one of the group swept up a few nuts and tasted one. The flesh had turned tender, and the flavor, the richness of seared fats under the charcoal, was delicious. Nearby, others also ate cooked figs, hot juice running down their cheeks.
    The above description is based on primatologist Jill Pruetz’s observations of savanna chimps, who maneuver around wildfires, then move in afterward seeking treats. Australopithecines and their descendants likely employed similar strategies, developing a feel for how to manipulate flame. Chimps, in fact, appear just a conceptual step or two away from controlling fire and cooking. Kanzi, a bonobo (a species of chimp) at the Iowa Primate Learning Sanctuary in Des Moines, became fascinated with fire at a young age. He repeatedly watched the movie Quest for Fire , about early humansstruggling to rekindle their hearth, mimicking the actors and building small piles of sticks. When his keepers taught him how to light a match, he began setting fires. He’d manage them, tossing on extra wood when the flame started to die. Soon he was cooking: he’d take a marshmallow and put it on the end of a stick, and later began using a frying pan to cook hamburgers.
    Like our ancestors, bonobos know that cooked food tastes better. Roasting makes meat tender, the toughest tubers mushy, and eggs palatable. Intense heat triggers a series of distinctive chemical reactions that allow flavor to bloom. At around 300 degrees Fahrenheit, the tightly coiled proteins in the muscle fibers of meats begin to break up and unwind. Their uniform shape is replaced by thousands of different configurations, which then clump together in a process called denaturing. The meat turns tender. Then amino acids combine with sugars, the start of a chain reaction that spins out thousands of distinct, flavorful chemicals in trace amounts. This process is known as the Maillard reaction, after the French physician and chemist Louis Camille Maillard, who discovered it a century ago. The Maillard reaction also generates pigments, turning baked bread, cooked meat, and roasted coffee beans brown. Today, manipulating the Maillard reaction is a cornerstone of food science.
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    The Gesher Benot Ya’aqov cave site’s million-year-old hearths are the earliest widely accepted evidence of cooking, and archaeologists have discovered many more suspected ancient hearths dating back to four hundred thousand years ago, the time of the immediate forerunners of modern Homo sapiens . But there is evidence that cooking transformed human biology, and with it, the human flavor sense, sometime between one and two million years ago, providing the crucial calorie boost larger brains demanded.
    Richard Wrangham, a Harvard primatologist, looked at the mechanics of eating and digesting raw food and wondered if it could really provide enough fuel for Homo erectus to survive. After the calories burned in chewing and digesting are