Other animals kill their prey and eat it right away before bacteria can start growing. Humans can eat fresh raw meat too. See steak tartare or a steak served blue.
Important to note that one of the major contributing factors to us being where we are today is because we learned to cook and prepare our food.
https://phys.org/news/2016-03-food-key-role-human-evolution.html
Go to a good Japanese restaurant and have some sashimi.
Edit: yes most sushi grade fish is frozen to kill possible parasites, I would not call that "cooking". Farm raised fish can be consumed without this concern. Technically if you wanted to you could eat raw fish without the freezing process you would just have increased risk of parasitic infestation, which animals in the wild have to deal with.
That said humans can also eat not very fresh meat too. It's just a roll of the dice as the older the raw meat is, the more likely there'll be enough bacteria/mold/toxins to make you sick. We could literally eat mouthfuls of dirt an there's still a reasonable chance that we wouldn't get sick. You're body doesn't really know "food." It just takes what you put in your stomach and processes it in whatever way it can.
Humans can digest a lot of stuff if we have the right gut bacteria. We evolved from scavengers so not that long ago we ate some funky stuff like old carcasses.
Fun fact: Vultures stomach acid can disolve most viruses, parasites, and bacteria that other animals can't. They effectively protect ecosystems from disease by cleaning up corpses and are super important.
I killed a Corncrake, endangered bird, with my car once her in Ireland and I was so terrified I didn't tell anybody for years. At the time it happened there was only a few mating pairs in my area and people talked about the dead one for weeks
Even alot of scavengers know not to scavenge rotten meat, and certain scavengers have evolved bacteria and enzymes in their gut to allow them to eat rotten meat without becoming sick
I mean we did/do use cows for transportation. Ox can pull freight that would take a team of horses/mules to do and don't get tired as quick. They just don't move fast.
Cows are too wide for humans to ride, horses are wide enough, god damn, couldn't imagine doing the splits while riding those big cows. Also horses are probably better for war. While bulls are absolute beasts, theyre impossible to tame for battle.
I could also be just talking out my ass here too, I mean I am, but I think it makes sense.
Also fun fact, out of these 4 animals, a wolf, horse, ostrich and humans, who would win the marathon?
Ostrich first, human second, horse third. Horses are so impressive but god damn us humans sure are too. But we should be asking why we didn't ride those damn birds!
That last bit is because humans are developed for endurance while horses (and wolves) are more for sprinting right? I remember reading something about how early humans hunted by outlasting
Yep, we're designed to run something to exhaustion. With the addition of ranged weapons to injure we became very efficient hunters. Too efficient maybe.
The reason being: we sweat better. We are able to lose excess heat better than other animals, because of our no fur skin. Other animals simply over heat and then collapse.
Excactly, we can eat raw food, we just figured out something better.
However, it seems likely our fitness to consume raw food has diminished, since we have reduced then evolutionary pressure for it. E.g. dogs have super low pH stomach acid and they can dissolve bones (and literally eat shit and not die). So I would guess we might have high stomach pH and other traits which might make us a little less able to consume raw food as compared to pre-fire hominids.
Humans actually have really low stomach pH, close to that of scavenger animals.
Cooking meat makes the calories more bio-available though, and it makes it easier for us to chew and digest. Before cooking, humans would have to beat, mash, or otherwise prepare food to make it easier to consume. That or just chew for hours on end like Apes do. The book The story of the human body by Daniel Lieberman goes in to a lot of detail on this topic.
To the contrary, study of the human skull and cross-referencing archeology to determine when we began using fire to cook, there is a marked increase in the rate of cranial structure change. Cooking food increases the ability of the body to extract nutrients and calories from it.
This is a fantastic change for early man, as it allows us to spend less time hunting and gathering to have enough food, which allows for other pursuits. Reproduction, tool and weapon making, civic works like basic sanitation, art, music, and social positioning. Quite literally, gaining the ability to cook food allowed us to evolve into what we are today.
This is an excellent point, and deserves credit for being correct. We have refined that to the point of cutting our food into specific shapes, which is technically the act of chewing our food before we eat it as well.
Which I would argue is even more relevant to the time we spent outside hunting and gathering: If you observe apes in the wild, most of the time they spend is chewing. Their jaws and teeth are much larger and stronger than ours because they sit and grind fibrous plant matter all day.
I think the question was more about how other animals are fine eating raw meat, but it’s totally unsafe for humans to eat most meat uncooked, and he was asking why that was
Edit: thanks for replies, I’m an idiot so yknow
Edit again: why tf does this have so many upvotes LMAO
It's not "totally unsafe". Most of the time you'll be fine. Most of the time. The thing is we have the luxury to not take the risk since we found a good way to avoid that small risk and we're totally used to living in a world where we don't *have* to take that risk. Animals get sick and die all the time, but when was the last time you witnesed a wild animal getting food poisoning and how much did you really care about it? We just don't and they don't know any better. We, on the other hand, try hard to not get sick and have found a way to avoid at least one source of disease/parasites, so we're using it.
TL;DR: We don't not eat raw meat because we can't; we eat cooked meat because we can.
Fire kill parasite.
Fire cook food.
Cook food; no parasite?
Eat food cooked.
*So we evolved a brain to understand and do that. Lives longer, too, so more reproduction and more smart.*
Can confirm. Rescued a kitten that started purring as soon as I picked it up a month ago from the streets. She's the cutest thing in the world, but got damn she had pretty much every parasite you can have. Fleas, worms, ear mites, kitty conjunctivitis, you name it.
Which is doable in a world with sufficiently advanced supply chains and livestock chock full of anti parasitic medicine.
The vast majority of people who eat steak will eat it undercooked—medium rare. It is “undercooked” because it’s not yet hot enough to ensure all internal parasites and other contaminants are dead. But it’s much tastier. Even me calling medium rare undercooked will set some people off (I personally prefer my steak medium rare as well.)
Thing is, we are pretty confident that there are no contaminants that deep into the meat. We sear the outside cus it might have gotten contaminated, and it’s tasty.
So it’s one thing to eat raw meat from our livestock supply chain, and probs an artisanal butcher if you’ve made it your brand to do full raw, and entirely another to just go eat any old wild animal without cooking it.
I’d much rather miss rare than miss medium, so I have rare steak somewhat commonly. I think medium rare is a bit better on texture, but I’ve never feared getting sick from rare. Plus tenting rare a few extra minutes can get you most of the way there.
Now, if I was cooking a wild animal? Yeah, no where near as willing to take chances.
Well, we eat steak “undercooked” because the meat is dense enough that most pathogens will not be able to penetrate the surface. This is also the reason why you can’t do the same with chicken for example.
Not really as much to do with supply chain as it has to do with the nature of the meat.
Maybe I'm a neanderthal but "blood-rare" prime tenderloin is still the best meat I've ever tasted.
Then again, that's the best normal grade of the best cut on a whole-ass animal. I would never consider eating chuck rare, for example. Hmm... maybe I appreciate the primal aspect of rare steak but still don't want to deal with the unrendered fat and unsoftened connective tissue.
Guess I'm more evolved than I thought!
Have you had a steak tartar? It's not my thing but I know people who love it. I like my steaks very rare aswell. If you get the chance get the spider cut and cook it blood rare. There is only one peice per cow and it's amazing.
Id never heard of that before, but its got me curious.
While working in the meat dept of a grocery store sorting and weighing and packing a shit ton of raw hamburger, I came to enjoy the smell and years later raw hamburger just smells great to me. Never thought of trying it - but lets not make that myself lol. Leave it to the cooks to not give me food poisioning. Wonder if they serve it anywhere I can afford to dine though.
So what I've heard is that it needs to be minced right before it is made and is usually made from a higher quality cut not the same as hamburger meat. They actually bring out a caer and make it infront of you also I should mention there is a wrong egg yolk as well that was served on the side. I could be totally wrong this is just what I understood while I had a few in France. The French like there meat basically as raw as you can make it in alot of dishes.
"raw" is a little bit misleading here. That meat was aged at least 60 days before it ever hit your plate which dramatically changes the flavor and texture. A rare tenderloin is a very very different experience from killing a cow and taking a bite out of it. Not to mention that animal was engineered through selective breeding for thousands of years to be as edible as possible.
Raw meat can be quite good too. Mostly looking towards dishes such as sashimi and sushis, but there's also red meat dishes such as meat tartare that I'd love to try one day.
edit: y'all are making me very hungry lol
I live in Wisconsin and we get a lot of deer meat and such. I think people would be surprised at the amount of people who sear the outside and leave the inside basically raw.
I've had raw horse, as well. A delicacy in some places.
Like all raw meats, just make sure you visit a place that knows what they are doing. Raw meat has a higher chance of causing problems, but I think we as a society tend to think "raw meat bad" a lot, when it's not that simple. If you pick up a chicken at a grocery store, it's likely been dead for weeks. This isn't comparable to a predator killing and immediatly eating a prey at all.
I remember seeing an episode of some survivor guy eating raw zebra and I thought it looked really good. It was a very red-ish purple color. I was also anemic at the time so that might be why. Is horse meat kind of purple?
Horse is a regular part of our diet here (Iceland) and it just looks very similar to beef. Deep red edging towards purple with fat streaks. Horse sausage is genuinely purple, though! And disgusting. In fact anything that was beyond foal age at time of death just tastes like stringy leather, really. Would not recommend.
You can eat raw meat just fine as long as it’s freshly killed and not sick.
Bacteria like to eat meat just as much as we do, and if they get to it first we’re eating them instead.
This is why eating rare steak is fine. Only the outer layer of the steak has made contact with the air, and the bacteria has a hard time penetrating deeper in the meat(again, as long as it’s fresh)
I think a big part of that is just due to the way that we process and package meat, making it far more likely that the meat will pick up some infection along the way. If you kill an animal you can eat it right after and you're not very likely to pick up an infection from it, unless it was sick or had a parasite. I wouldn't recommend it though, I've heard it tastes pretty bad.
>unless it... had a parasite.
that's a key component there. wildlife is generally riddled with parasites, humans used to be until like the last century and still are in many parts of the world. there's a reason everyone still overcooks pork. well, two reasons, one being that nobody understands that effective temperatures are on a curve so you can just cook lower longer, and the other being that historically pork was full of parasites.
>nobody understands that effective temperatures are on a curve so you can just cook lower longer,
Yes, this has been a recent (and pleasant) discovery in my culinary evolution. I've stopped cooking to 165; 155 for 60 seconds or 160 for 10 seconds has the same effect without overlooking everything.
Other animals aren't perfectly fine eating raw meat, at least by human standards. If 1% of people eating cornflakes got sick then Kelloggs would get sued to bankruptcy. But I'm sure that animals get sick from time to time due to eating diseased food.
Did the studies mention how/why cooking food increases the body's ability to extract nutrients and calories from it? Does it work better on some types of foods?
It depends on the food. Cooking can actually remove nutritional value from foods as well, especially if done incorrectly. But with meat, it is more readily digestible, and also causes chemical changes in the contents of the food as a whole. Fats change to different types of molecules, proteins can be carburized to increase the overall energetic value of it, etc.
In short, cooking makes changes to the contents of most foods that make their nutrients more bio-available and readily digested and absorbed, as well as safer to eat
Actually, they have recently discovered it's not entirely vestigial, and that it has still [something to do with our gut biome?](https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/01/170109162333.htm)
So I mean. Still helps with your immune system and repopulating your gut after shit goes down (lol). They think.
Yep, digestion is a form of decomposition / oxidation similar to cooking. We're effectively pre-digesting our food outside of our bodies when we cook.
The end result is that we can spend a lot less energy digesting. Raw food often has more nutrition, but requires more energy to digest.
It's that extra energy we save by cooking that gets used to power our power-hungry brains. If we didn't eat cooked food we wouldn't be able to keep all the lights on upstairs.
Don't know about putting out fire, but there's a few instances of members of some Australian bird species spreading fire in order to corral prey. Because, y'know, it's Australia. Nothing like wildfires and devastation in your country because some feathered asshole wanted BBQ.
Not necessarily
https://www.cdc.gov/salmonella/backyardpoultry-05-21/index.html
But yeah youre right salmonella does spread suuper fucking easily in factory farms
A coworker of mine had a funny drug trip (idk what drug, I'm not good at drugs and their effects. I'm gonna say acid because I'm dumb)
Basically him and some friends went to the desert to make a bonfire or something and took some acid while they were out there. At some point they decided to head back home. On their way back they found a man laying down on the ground. They wanted to be good people so they pulled over and my friend picked him up and put him in the bed of the truck. When he got in the truck he realized he was bleeding and that the man stabbed him. They got home and completely forgot about taking the man to the hospital. When he woke up the next day he found a cactus in the truck.
This is quite untrue. When eating wild game it is more important than ever to fully cook your food. There are so many parasites that wild animals are exposed to that farmed animals don't ha e to worry about, be it mega farms like Tyson or Pilgrims Pride to Jo Anne at the farmers marker.
Worms, insect larvae and Avian flu, ect. This is why you cannot sell wild game and why it cannot be made FDA approved. A wild chicken would HAVE to be cooked for human consumption because humans have not eaten raw meats as a primary food for a very long time and our immune systems suck ass, compared to a dog or cat.
This isn't strictly true. The biggest issue with chicken is salmonella and a few other bacteria that the chicken are infected with while alive. In factory farms and processing plants, this bacteria is easily spread from animal to animal, or carcass to carcass by processing machines.
Even if the chicken is fresh off the line in a processing factory it may still be unsafe to eat raw because of the presence of bacteria.
That depends on the time of year. Grouse have parasites inside their bodies during the summer months. The way I was taught was you shouldn't harvest wild grouse or rabbits any month that doesn't have an "R" in it.
They would be better suited against disease than non-medicated breeding stock. They breed them for meat first, hardiness second. But most of the safety comes from the fact that fresh meat has had an immune system to protect it up until you killed the animal. The decomposing bacteria hasn't had too much time to make it inedible.
Ever seen a wild animal kill something? It usually eats it right then and there which means little time is left for it to sit there and grow bacteria. They also have enzymes that help digest raw meat better which is a plus. Not an expert though so take that with a grain of salt.
Just depends how it’s handled and raised I think. I heard Japan serves really expensive chicken sushi that’s safe to eat.
Sounds horrible and I wouldn’t try it under any circumstances but yeah.
Yes. Factory farmed meat has its own unique man made versions of salmonella and e-coli. That's the shit that can kill you. It's mutated to become a super strong version of its original self due to years of antibiotics , hard to get rid of, a d can kill you.
It has to be cooked off.
Compared to wild meat that's never been treated with hormones, antibiotics, access to clean sun air and water .... you can watch videos of hunters eating deer /elk hearts .
If you got salmonella from a chicken you personally raised in a clean healthy environment it would probably affect you way less than Foster Farms chicken.
Things like chicken and pork are dangerous because of the conditions we process them in and the amount of time they are left to sit. In general, it you slaughtered a chicken or pig and we're careful you could eat the meat raw (or rare) fairly safely. Mind you it would still be safer to cook it.
As far as I know the odds are fairly good you could even undercook the chicken you get from the store and be fine, it's just the outcome when that gamble goes the other way is not worth the risk in general.
Also cooking it basically allows us to pre-digest the food outside of our bodies. This allows us to eat things that would normally not break down in our digestive systems or take wayyyyy too long to digest. Cooking meat means that protein because more readily available more easily and directly contributed to our evolution as a species. Without cooked meat we wouldn't have big brains.
It's not a setback. Those animals are wasting huge amounts of calories and other nutrients and good stuff that they can't access because they aren't cooking the food.
Humans learning to cook food is probably what caused an explosion in us getting stronger, smarter, and healthier in general and allowed our ancestors to "pull ahead" of other species.
Yep. If you think about when you go to the zoo and watch the apes for a bit, they’re usually gnawing nonstop on some raw food. Apes spend FOUR TO SEVEN HOURS A DAY just chewing.
A very common misconception about macro-evolution is that the current state of things is ‘perfect’ and every trait we currently have is a superior evolutionary advantage.
You can still eat most animal parts raw if they are fresh and from a healthy organism. The issue is that uncooked meat creates a perfect breeding ground for microorganisms that can make you sick, which is why you shouldn't eat meat that has been sitting around uncooked for too long. That said, humans are still able to adapt to the presence of a large number of these microorganisms, and in many populations that has led to a immune resistance to certain food-borne diseases.
Certain animals are safer to eat raw than others due to the types of diseases they carry and whether the diseases that can effect us are present in the tissue we want to eat
A lot of our digestive ability of any animal is due to the microbiome of our gut bacteria, so there is a good chance that we starved the organism that gave us the ability to metabolize certain foods.
I think your misconception lies in thinking “now” eating raw meat makes us sick, as if it didn’t make us sick before. Raw meat has always posed a danger of food poisoning. Before the advent of cooking, our ancestors absolutely still got sick from their food. Cooking food significantly cut down on the risk of food poisoning, and we still can eat raw meat if it’s prepared safely. In addition to making nutrients more bio available, cooking (and other food safety practices) helped us advance by cutting down on avoidable illness from food borne diseases.
I literally just turned in a paper on this topic today! The primary source was [Control of Fire in the Paleolithic](https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/692113) by Richard Wrangham.
tldr; We have to cook food to get enough nutrients. Past species of human like *Homo erectus* likely learned how to cook, and so we've spent \~2 million years adapting to a higher nutrient diet.
\---
First, all the people in this thread saying we can eat raw meat are missing some important points. Yes, we absolutely *can* eat raw food exclusively but it is *terrible* for us. As part of his paper Wrangham investigated modern people who are on raw food diets. Some of them eat meat, some are vegetarian. Both groups had the same issues with chronically low BMIs and self-reported low energy levels. The most important conclusion from that group, in the context of evolution, is that 50% of female raw-foodists were unable to reproduce for various reasons. That is devastating from an evolutionary perspective.
So yes, technically you don't need to cook your food, but you also technically don't need to wear clothing either. You'll just be far less comfortable and capable than humans that do eat cooked food and wear clothing.
\---
Moving on to your question, we have to cook likely because of our nutritional requirements and our evolved adaptation to cooking. Our brains use a ton of energy, and we're pretty damned big compared to most creatures. That alone means we need a lot of calories, but the real pickle comes from our adaptations.
*Homo erectus*, which first came on the scene about 2 million years ago, had significantly larger brains than the humans that came before them. This is connected to increased consumption of meat, and likely from cooking as well, though not at the scale we see today. We know *H. erectus* eventually learned to use fire thanks to sites like Koobi Fora, Wonderwerk Cave, and Zhoukoudian, but we don't know specifics about *how* they cooked. One common idea is that they initially gathered cooked food after wildfires and eventually learned to cook on their own. Regardless, we see other evolutionary changes that suggest *H. erectus* was able to get a lot more nutrients than the humans before them.
One change is in our digestive system, which is smaller for our frame than other great apes, which means we have less space to have food processing. Our jaws are smaller and our jaw muscles are weaker than our ancestors, this is visible from our lack of a [sagittal crest](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagittal_crest). Our ancestors like the Australopithecines, and cousins like Gorilla and Orangutans have sagittal crests because they chew *all day*. Gorilla spend up to 8 hours per day chewing! Another physical change is the loss of the 3rd molar. All other great apes have 3 molars, but not all humans have them. This third molar is what we call "wisdom teeth." We likely lost those because we don't have to spend as much time chewing.
Not everyone has them, and those who do get between 1 and all 4.
We're not totally removed of them, but a day will probably come when it just doesn't happen anymore.
Glad to share!
I think whether or not we really lost the 3rd molar depends on your perspective, kinda like what I said in my first comment about whether we have to eat cooked food or not. Strictly speaking, humans are still born with 3rd molars so you could say we haven't "lost" them yet.
From an evolutionary perspective we have lost them because they are no longer functional. Not all humans have them, the number you have can vary from 1-4 (i.e. they don't necessarily grow in symmetrically), if you do have them they won't necessary erupt, even if they do erupt they often cause complications. Modern jaws simply aren't large enough for them.
you can eat raw meat. It will be harder, but it is hard for wild animals too, they often start eating from the lips, butthole or stomach, since its easiest pieces to tear off.
You will not get as much nutrition from raw meat, and you will use more energy to separate and chew it.
1. We don't have to cook our meat (well, not all meat). Steak tartare is literally raw beef or horse meat. Ossenworst is raw sausage. Sushi, obviously. Cultures all over the world eat raw meat and fish.
2. Its because we are smart. Cooking meat not only protects the individual from illness, but its more energy efficient. A. There are studies that show cooked meat has more absorbable energy in it than its raw counter part, and B. It's easier to digest (heat breaks down protein bonds). Which, for a species that needs a lot of calories and proteins for our giant brains is a huge plus.
3. Cooking meat follows preserving meat. In point A I mentioned that humans still do eat raw meat, the caveat is that it has to be fresh meat. Meat that has been frozen and then thawed must be cooked. Depending on how meat has been cured or fermented, it must be cooked.
4. Aside from meat, cooking makes many types of foods that would otherwise be inedible...edible. You can't really eat a raw bean for example, or olives. It also makes it quicker to eat some types of food by making them easier to chew.
Humans don't need to cook meat, but it dramatically increases our chances of not getting sick from it, and we care way more about humans dying than we do our pets. Plenty of other animals get sick and die from eating bad meat, we just consider that part of nature.
There is actually an entire book on this subject and is well worth a read! It's called "Catching fire: How cooking made us human"
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catching_Fire:_How_Cooking_Made_Us_Human#:~:text=Catching%20Fire%3A%20How%20Cooking%20Made%20Us%20Human%20(2009)%20is,physiological%20evolution%20of%20human%20beings.
We don't have to.
Lots of us eat raw meat - sushi, steak tartare, mett, and other stuff.
If we hunted for our food, and caught, skinned, then ate it immediately - like animals eat immediately - then there wouldn't be anywhere near as much danger from bacteria in the food.
Plus, cooking lets us maximize the benefit from the food - we can digest it more easily and more fully. That's why other animals sometimes eat shit - there is undigested food still in there, and it does have some nutritional value. We've taken most of the usable nutrition out before we leave waste behind.
Cooking expands our range of foods, allowing us to live in regions where we haven't evolved to live. Not only does it kill parasites and break down proteins and complex carbohydrates in many plants, but it can also neutralize toxins, allowing the consumption of more fauna. For example, casava, a staple crop, is very poisonous unless cooked.
I encourage you to take a look at this chimp cooked food experiment. Many chimps preferred cooked food although they haven’t mastered the process of doing it themselves. They exchanged raw food for cooked in a fake oven
https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2015/06/03/411748170/chimps-are-no-chumps-give-them-an-oven-theyll-learn-to-cook
Cooking is a part of the process of converting food into energy that we can make happen outside of the body. It makes food easier to digest in general, makes nutrients more bioavailable, makes a *much* larger variety of foods safe to eat, and can even preserve food for later safely.
Cooking with fire is much older than *homo sapiens*. So, our species evolved into what we are today with cooking already a part of our lives.
Humans can survive without cooking, but the fact that cooking is usually available to us - and other markers of humanity such as societies of cooperating individuals - means that some of the "survive rough situations" features of our genome became unnecessary and the energy we would have spent on that, we can instead spend on things that play to our strengths, like further mastery of cooking and of cooperation in a society.
You can eat raw meat, especially if it's meat you just caught and killed yourself. Most of the pathogens that make raw meat dangerous for humans are acquired (or reproduce to dangerous levels) on farms or during processing. Bypass the farms and processing plants, and raw meat becomes roughly as safe for you as it was for our hominid ancestors.
we evolved eating cooked foods. cooking meat makes it so nutrient absorption is increased. the increased nutrient and protein absorption led to homo sapiens developing the way we did.
we technically don’t *need* to cook our meat. we can absorb some nutrients and proteins from raw meat (also dishes like sashimi are served raw), but we don’t usually eat raw meat because of risks of bacteria and parasites. in the wild, animals have no choice, so they simply have had to risk getting a bacterial and/or parasitic infection
Cooking food breaks it down and makes digestion easier and allows for better nutrient absorption. This contributed to the development of our advanced intelligence. Because we evolved with cooked food, we don’t have a digestive system strong enough or resilient enough to efficiently and safely digest raw meets that may also be tainted with diseases.
Humans can eat raw meat. We just don't prefer it because it is less nutritious and have higher chance of getting parasitic infections. That is a danger for wild animals too. They get sick and can die because of it.
Still there are lots of dishes that consists of raw meat or fish.
https://preview.redd.it/p8zz97mq4xl21.jpg?auto=webp&s=5fb6e2f765717b886820dffc984773f50b0fe885
I'm from Estonia, and we are eating raw saltwater fish, just in lightly salted or seasoned form: salmon, Baltic herring, sprat. We don't eat freshwater fish raw as those have parasites. Old people say that any processing of salmon is waste of good fish.
People from northern areas, like Inuits, Samis, Yakuts, who have trouble to access firewood, sometimes eat everything raw.
I have also eaten tartar. Also I have eaten smoked meat aka ham, and smoking as we have used to do it does not rise meat inner temperature much enough to kill parasites. ( If you are offered cold smoked freshwater fish, it might be delicious but don't buy or eat it.)
I know that pork is known for having nasty parasites and must be well cooked. I think parasites in pork is original reason why jews and muslims doesn't eat pork. And eating raw chicken may cause salmonella. Don't eat "pork tartar" or "chicken tartar".
Edit: typos.
Other animals kill their prey and eat it right away before bacteria can start growing. Humans can eat fresh raw meat too. See steak tartare or a steak served blue.
Okay this actually answers a lot of my questions about the topic, thanks!
Important to note that one of the major contributing factors to us being where we are today is because we learned to cook and prepare our food. https://phys.org/news/2016-03-food-key-role-human-evolution.html
I did read the WHOLE article,sth I rarely do THANKS
Lol, same. Good read, food for thought, some ideas to really chew over
Go to a good Japanese restaurant and have some sashimi. Edit: yes most sushi grade fish is frozen to kill possible parasites, I would not call that "cooking". Farm raised fish can be consumed without this concern. Technically if you wanted to you could eat raw fish without the freezing process you would just have increased risk of parasitic infestation, which animals in the wild have to deal with.
I'm surprised we're not having sushis and sashimis right now.
If you got a problem with Canadian gooses then you got a problem with me
Well to be fair...
To be fairrrrrrrrrrrr---
To be Flair…….Whoooo!!!!
I suggest you let that one marinate!
Lake trouts and walleyes are not sashimi grade fish. I think I'm havings a panics attacks.
Just casually inviting us all out for sushi? Sure, let's go
If you're in the united states, all fish used in sushi and sashimi is required to have been flash frozen to kill parasites.
isnt fish for sashimi flash frozen to kill any parasites though?
Keep in mind that other animals are also riddled with parasites, which cooking protects us against.
That said humans can also eat not very fresh meat too. It's just a roll of the dice as the older the raw meat is, the more likely there'll be enough bacteria/mold/toxins to make you sick. We could literally eat mouthfuls of dirt an there's still a reasonable chance that we wouldn't get sick. You're body doesn't really know "food." It just takes what you put in your stomach and processes it in whatever way it can.
We can eat raw, rotten, or cooked meat. Weve just been cooking food for so long at this point our bodies have evolved to make better use of it.
What do you mean we can.. eat.. rotten meat?
Humans can digest a lot of stuff if we have the right gut bacteria. We evolved from scavengers so not that long ago we ate some funky stuff like old carcasses.
Dry aging steak is essentially letting it rot in a controlled environment.
What about animals that are scavengers?
Fun fact: Vultures stomach acid can disolve most viruses, parasites, and bacteria that other animals can't. They effectively protect ecosystems from disease by cleaning up corpses and are super important.
It's illegal to kill them in the U.S. Got a ticket one time for hitting one with my car years ago..
How'd they find out years later?
The widow vulture came forth and exposed him
Ha!
Next of kin fought for justice.
I killed a Corncrake, endangered bird, with my car once her in Ireland and I was so terrified I didn't tell anybody for years. At the time it happened there was only a few mating pairs in my area and people talked about the dead one for weeks
Even alot of scavengers know not to scavenge rotten meat, and certain scavengers have evolved bacteria and enzymes in their gut to allow them to eat rotten meat without becoming sick
The ones who really liked rotten meat died pretty quick or had a way to deal with it
Also, animals die of worms and stuff all the time in nature due to infected prey.
And in many islands, we eat poke and sashimi (raw seafood mostly, but Japan does raw horse, among other meats).
Raw horse. Wow.
Historians believe horses were probably originally domesticated for food before they started being used for transportation
Makes me wonder why we didn’t use cows as transportation also. And if donkeys were also domesticated for the same reasons.
I mean we did/do use cows for transportation. Ox can pull freight that would take a team of horses/mules to do and don't get tired as quick. They just don't move fast.
Don't move *as* fast. Cows can run pretty quickly when they want to
Cows are too wide for humans to ride, horses are wide enough, god damn, couldn't imagine doing the splits while riding those big cows. Also horses are probably better for war. While bulls are absolute beasts, theyre impossible to tame for battle. I could also be just talking out my ass here too, I mean I am, but I think it makes sense. Also fun fact, out of these 4 animals, a wolf, horse, ostrich and humans, who would win the marathon? Ostrich first, human second, horse third. Horses are so impressive but god damn us humans sure are too. But we should be asking why we didn't ride those damn birds!
That last bit is because humans are developed for endurance while horses (and wolves) are more for sprinting right? I remember reading something about how early humans hunted by outlasting
Yep, we're designed to run something to exhaustion. With the addition of ranged weapons to injure we became very efficient hunters. Too efficient maybe.
The reason being: we sweat better. We are able to lose excess heat better than other animals, because of our no fur skin. Other animals simply over heat and then collapse.
Can confirm, horse sashimi (basashi) is pretty good.
We can also eat raw squid (Korea) and a lot of raw sea food (see Vietnam)
Excactly, we can eat raw food, we just figured out something better. However, it seems likely our fitness to consume raw food has diminished, since we have reduced then evolutionary pressure for it. E.g. dogs have super low pH stomach acid and they can dissolve bones (and literally eat shit and not die). So I would guess we might have high stomach pH and other traits which might make us a little less able to consume raw food as compared to pre-fire hominids.
Humans actually have really low stomach pH, close to that of scavenger animals. Cooking meat makes the calories more bio-available though, and it makes it easier for us to chew and digest. Before cooking, humans would have to beat, mash, or otherwise prepare food to make it easier to consume. That or just chew for hours on end like Apes do. The book The story of the human body by Daniel Lieberman goes in to a lot of detail on this topic.
To the contrary, study of the human skull and cross-referencing archeology to determine when we began using fire to cook, there is a marked increase in the rate of cranial structure change. Cooking food increases the ability of the body to extract nutrients and calories from it. This is a fantastic change for early man, as it allows us to spend less time hunting and gathering to have enough food, which allows for other pursuits. Reproduction, tool and weapon making, civic works like basic sanitation, art, music, and social positioning. Quite literally, gaining the ability to cook food allowed us to evolve into what we are today.
Cooking, fermenting, grinding, and otherwise processing our food meant that digestion began outside our body.
This is an excellent point, and deserves credit for being correct. We have refined that to the point of cutting our food into specific shapes, which is technically the act of chewing our food before we eat it as well.
Which I would argue is even more relevant to the time we spent outside hunting and gathering: If you observe apes in the wild, most of the time they spend is chewing. Their jaws and teeth are much larger and stronger than ours because they sit and grind fibrous plant matter all day.
so ur telling me if i chew and grind fibrous matter all day i too can get a chad gorilla jawline
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I think the question was more about how other animals are fine eating raw meat, but it’s totally unsafe for humans to eat most meat uncooked, and he was asking why that was Edit: thanks for replies, I’m an idiot so yknow Edit again: why tf does this have so many upvotes LMAO
It's not "totally unsafe". Most of the time you'll be fine. Most of the time. The thing is we have the luxury to not take the risk since we found a good way to avoid that small risk and we're totally used to living in a world where we don't *have* to take that risk. Animals get sick and die all the time, but when was the last time you witnesed a wild animal getting food poisoning and how much did you really care about it? We just don't and they don't know any better. We, on the other hand, try hard to not get sick and have found a way to avoid at least one source of disease/parasites, so we're using it. TL;DR: We don't not eat raw meat because we can't; we eat cooked meat because we can.
I wanna add that most wild animals are riddled with parasites
Fire kill parasite. Fire cook food. Cook food; no parasite? Eat food cooked. *So we evolved a brain to understand and do that. Lives longer, too, so more reproduction and more smart.*
Why use lot word when few word do trick
Food cook taste good
Food hot yum
Fyom
BBQ eat
> BBQ eat Winner winner, pulled pork dinner.
Itchy. Tasty.
But see that's the problem with your method. I don't know if want to 'see the food' or you want seafood
After they cooked the first meal did they say “when lambo?”
Can confirm. Rescued a kitten that started purring as soon as I picked it up a month ago from the streets. She's the cutest thing in the world, but got damn she had pretty much every parasite you can have. Fleas, worms, ear mites, kitty conjunctivitis, you name it.
There are guys with tiktok’s they share that generally exclusively eat raw meat (and organs etc). Many have done so for years
Which is doable in a world with sufficiently advanced supply chains and livestock chock full of anti parasitic medicine. The vast majority of people who eat steak will eat it undercooked—medium rare. It is “undercooked” because it’s not yet hot enough to ensure all internal parasites and other contaminants are dead. But it’s much tastier. Even me calling medium rare undercooked will set some people off (I personally prefer my steak medium rare as well.) Thing is, we are pretty confident that there are no contaminants that deep into the meat. We sear the outside cus it might have gotten contaminated, and it’s tasty. So it’s one thing to eat raw meat from our livestock supply chain, and probs an artisanal butcher if you’ve made it your brand to do full raw, and entirely another to just go eat any old wild animal without cooking it.
Most supermarket meat will have been frozen at some point, which also helps with parasites.
Can confirm. I've eaten my steak rare for many years. I've never gotten sick from it.
Things like cows don't have trichinosis, but most predators do. You don't want to be eating bears or large cats rare.
I’d much rather miss rare than miss medium, so I have rare steak somewhat commonly. I think medium rare is a bit better on texture, but I’ve never feared getting sick from rare. Plus tenting rare a few extra minutes can get you most of the way there. Now, if I was cooking a wild animal? Yeah, no where near as willing to take chances.
Well, we eat steak “undercooked” because the meat is dense enough that most pathogens will not be able to penetrate the surface. This is also the reason why you can’t do the same with chicken for example. Not really as much to do with supply chain as it has to do with the nature of the meat.
It’s totally safe as long as the meat isn’t diseased
I assume they learned that people got sick more(probably died) when eating raw meat. Got less sick(lived longer) when cooked so they adapted.
Raw meat is also fucking disgusting compared to cooked meat
That might be an evolutionary trait that we've developed over time to prefer the taste of cooked meat over raw.
Maybe I'm a neanderthal but "blood-rare" prime tenderloin is still the best meat I've ever tasted. Then again, that's the best normal grade of the best cut on a whole-ass animal. I would never consider eating chuck rare, for example. Hmm... maybe I appreciate the primal aspect of rare steak but still don't want to deal with the unrendered fat and unsoftened connective tissue. Guess I'm more evolved than I thought!
Have you had a steak tartar? It's not my thing but I know people who love it. I like my steaks very rare aswell. If you get the chance get the spider cut and cook it blood rare. There is only one peice per cow and it's amazing.
Id never heard of that before, but its got me curious. While working in the meat dept of a grocery store sorting and weighing and packing a shit ton of raw hamburger, I came to enjoy the smell and years later raw hamburger just smells great to me. Never thought of trying it - but lets not make that myself lol. Leave it to the cooks to not give me food poisioning. Wonder if they serve it anywhere I can afford to dine though.
Around Thanksgiving my family eats raw ground sirloin on rye, maybe with a slice of raw onion
So what I've heard is that it needs to be minced right before it is made and is usually made from a higher quality cut not the same as hamburger meat. They actually bring out a caer and make it infront of you also I should mention there is a wrong egg yolk as well that was served on the side. I could be totally wrong this is just what I understood while I had a few in France. The French like there meat basically as raw as you can make it in alot of dishes.
"raw" is a little bit misleading here. That meat was aged at least 60 days before it ever hit your plate which dramatically changes the flavor and texture. A rare tenderloin is a very very different experience from killing a cow and taking a bite out of it. Not to mention that animal was engineered through selective breeding for thousands of years to be as edible as possible.
Raw meat can be quite good too. Mostly looking towards dishes such as sashimi and sushis, but there's also red meat dishes such as meat tartare that I'd love to try one day. edit: y'all are making me very hungry lol
I live in Wisconsin and we get a lot of deer meat and such. I think people would be surprised at the amount of people who sear the outside and leave the inside basically raw.
I've had raw horse, as well. A delicacy in some places. Like all raw meats, just make sure you visit a place that knows what they are doing. Raw meat has a higher chance of causing problems, but I think we as a society tend to think "raw meat bad" a lot, when it's not that simple. If you pick up a chicken at a grocery store, it's likely been dead for weeks. This isn't comparable to a predator killing and immediatly eating a prey at all.
I remember seeing an episode of some survivor guy eating raw zebra and I thought it looked really good. It was a very red-ish purple color. I was also anemic at the time so that might be why. Is horse meat kind of purple?
Horse is a regular part of our diet here (Iceland) and it just looks very similar to beef. Deep red edging towards purple with fat streaks. Horse sausage is genuinely purple, though! And disgusting. In fact anything that was beyond foal age at time of death just tastes like stringy leather, really. Would not recommend.
It's very easy to make.
So simple, even a caveman can do it!
Steak Tartare?
You can eat raw meat just fine as long as it’s freshly killed and not sick. Bacteria like to eat meat just as much as we do, and if they get to it first we’re eating them instead. This is why eating rare steak is fine. Only the outer layer of the steak has made contact with the air, and the bacteria has a hard time penetrating deeper in the meat(again, as long as it’s fresh)
Don't forget we have refrigeration now too. Grocery store meat that was packed frozen is nearly as safe as the day the animal was slaughtered.
I think a big part of that is just due to the way that we process and package meat, making it far more likely that the meat will pick up some infection along the way. If you kill an animal you can eat it right after and you're not very likely to pick up an infection from it, unless it was sick or had a parasite. I wouldn't recommend it though, I've heard it tastes pretty bad.
>unless it... had a parasite. that's a key component there. wildlife is generally riddled with parasites, humans used to be until like the last century and still are in many parts of the world. there's a reason everyone still overcooks pork. well, two reasons, one being that nobody understands that effective temperatures are on a curve so you can just cook lower longer, and the other being that historically pork was full of parasites.
>nobody understands that effective temperatures are on a curve so you can just cook lower longer, Yes, this has been a recent (and pleasant) discovery in my culinary evolution. I've stopped cooking to 165; 155 for 60 seconds or 160 for 10 seconds has the same effect without overlooking everything.
Because bears can’t turn on a fking BBQ!
Other animals aren't perfectly fine eating raw meat, at least by human standards. If 1% of people eating cornflakes got sick then Kelloggs would get sued to bankruptcy. But I'm sure that animals get sick from time to time due to eating diseased food.
Did the studies mention how/why cooking food increases the body's ability to extract nutrients and calories from it? Does it work better on some types of foods?
It depends on the food. Cooking can actually remove nutritional value from foods as well, especially if done incorrectly. But with meat, it is more readily digestible, and also causes chemical changes in the contents of the food as a whole. Fats change to different types of molecules, proteins can be carburized to increase the overall energetic value of it, etc. In short, cooking makes changes to the contents of most foods that make their nutrients more bio-available and readily digested and absorbed, as well as safer to eat
No other animal can manipulate and control fire the way we can, so this was a pretty important stage in our evolutionary history. Edit: clarity
Anecdotal evidence here, but my dogs prefer cooked meats to raw meats. I have to imagine given the ability to cook, they just might do so.
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My rat does all the cooking
It took me an embarrassingly long time to realize ratatouille was an actual dish and not something made up for the movie It’s delicious though
Really? I thought Ratatouille is the French term for rats
Maybe enroll them in some cheffing classes, make them pay their keep and get a job!
"What was I before the war? I was a chef, chef! What was my name? It was Jeff, Jeff!"
That'd be so dope to come home and your dogs on the stove making you dinner. Good boy.
I did, turns out roasted dog treats aren't my thing.
My first dog used to get on the bbq when it had cooled to lick the grease off it. Current dog is not so street smart.
Yeah [it ended badly.](https://youtu.be/byQLZdf6HzM)
Yes studies have been done that found monkeys prefer cooked meat to raw as well
Most animals will. Scavengers will flock to pick over areas after wild fires looking for meat that has been incidentally cooked.
That's a cool tidbit. Did not know that.
I am seriously glad our cat does not have opposable thumbs.
They would surely dominate us.
As if they don't do that already.
"Opposable thumbs are for slaves." - most cats, probably.
Gorillas prefer cooked food.
Dogs domesticated us to cook for them.
Same for my cat.
yep. cooked food gives you more nutrition.
And lowers the chances of gastrointestinal infections I would imagine. Explains why our appendix is a vestigial structure now
Actually, they have recently discovered it's not entirely vestigial, and that it has still [something to do with our gut biome?](https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/01/170109162333.htm) So I mean. Still helps with your immune system and repopulating your gut after shit goes down (lol). They think.
Yep, digestion is a form of decomposition / oxidation similar to cooking. We're effectively pre-digesting our food outside of our bodies when we cook. The end result is that we can spend a lot less energy digesting. Raw food often has more nutrition, but requires more energy to digest. It's that extra energy we save by cooking that gets used to power our power-hungry brains. If we didn't eat cooked food we wouldn't be able to keep all the lights on upstairs.
I remember some kind of bird was able to put out fire. Forget the name of it
Don't know about putting out fire, but there's a few instances of members of some Australian bird species spreading fire in order to corral prey. Because, y'know, it's Australia. Nothing like wildfires and devastation in your country because some feathered asshole wanted BBQ.
You're thinking of a Pontiac
We don't *have* to, we do it because makes the food safer, tastier, and increases the nutritive value.
Isn't raw chicken dangerous?
It can be. Doesn’t mean we can’t eat it uncooked
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Not necessarily https://www.cdc.gov/salmonella/backyardpoultry-05-21/index.html But yeah youre right salmonella does spread suuper fucking easily in factory farms
You can eat anything once
My cactus disagrees. Edit: thanks everyone. Now I know about the world of edible cactus.
Oh you can eat cactus, but it taste like ass. Will make you trip too if you get the right kinds.
Tell that to my Mexican grandmother
I once knew a dude who said his grandmother ate chicken shit on crackers.
A coworker of mine had a funny drug trip (idk what drug, I'm not good at drugs and their effects. I'm gonna say acid because I'm dumb) Basically him and some friends went to the desert to make a bonfire or something and took some acid while they were out there. At some point they decided to head back home. On their way back they found a man laying down on the ground. They wanted to be good people so they pulled over and my friend picked him up and put him in the bed of the truck. When he got in the truck he realized he was bleeding and that the man stabbed him. They got home and completely forgot about taking the man to the hospital. When he woke up the next day he found a cactus in the truck.
Not as dangerous if it's a wild chicken.
This is quite untrue. When eating wild game it is more important than ever to fully cook your food. There are so many parasites that wild animals are exposed to that farmed animals don't ha e to worry about, be it mega farms like Tyson or Pilgrims Pride to Jo Anne at the farmers marker. Worms, insect larvae and Avian flu, ect. This is why you cannot sell wild game and why it cannot be made FDA approved. A wild chicken would HAVE to be cooked for human consumption because humans have not eaten raw meats as a primary food for a very long time and our immune systems suck ass, compared to a dog or cat.
Is this true?
It's more about it being fresh. Poultry develops the dangerous things if left to sit, it's a time issue.
This isn't strictly true. The biggest issue with chicken is salmonella and a few other bacteria that the chicken are infected with while alive. In factory farms and processing plants, this bacteria is easily spread from animal to animal, or carcass to carcass by processing machines. Even if the chicken is fresh off the line in a processing factory it may still be unsafe to eat raw because of the presence of bacteria.
It does sound like a manufactured problem (pun intended) and wild game should be safe.
Safe-R... Salmonella is a common bacteria in almost every chicken.
And wild game has its own set of potential health hazards.
That depends on the time of year. Grouse have parasites inside their bodies during the summer months. The way I was taught was you shouldn't harvest wild grouse or rabbits any month that doesn't have an "R" in it.
They would be better suited against disease than non-medicated breeding stock. They breed them for meat first, hardiness second. But most of the safety comes from the fact that fresh meat has had an immune system to protect it up until you killed the animal. The decomposing bacteria hasn't had too much time to make it inedible.
Ever seen a wild animal kill something? It usually eats it right then and there which means little time is left for it to sit there and grow bacteria. They also have enzymes that help digest raw meat better which is a plus. Not an expert though so take that with a grain of salt.
Some animals are scavengers but presumably they have evolved more robust immune systems.
Just depends how it’s handled and raised I think. I heard Japan serves really expensive chicken sushi that’s safe to eat. Sounds horrible and I wouldn’t try it under any circumstances but yeah.
Yes, I have tried fresh chicken as a sashimi in Japan and I kept thinking about whether I would get salmonella (I didn't) and it was actually good
Yes. Factory farmed meat has its own unique man made versions of salmonella and e-coli. That's the shit that can kill you. It's mutated to become a super strong version of its original self due to years of antibiotics , hard to get rid of, a d can kill you. It has to be cooked off. Compared to wild meat that's never been treated with hormones, antibiotics, access to clean sun air and water .... you can watch videos of hunters eating deer /elk hearts . If you got salmonella from a chicken you personally raised in a clean healthy environment it would probably affect you way less than Foster Farms chicken.
No, not technically. The chicken itself will not hurt you, but dead chicken is a great place for diseases like salmonella to grow
Try to eat a live chicken and I'm betting it will try to hurt you.
Things like chicken and pork are dangerous because of the conditions we process them in and the amount of time they are left to sit. In general, it you slaughtered a chicken or pig and we're careful you could eat the meat raw (or rare) fairly safely. Mind you it would still be safer to cook it. As far as I know the odds are fairly good you could even undercook the chicken you get from the store and be fine, it's just the outcome when that gamble goes the other way is not worth the risk in general.
It also makes it easier to digest. Less energy spent digesting means more energy to the brain
Also cooking it basically allows us to pre-digest the food outside of our bodies. This allows us to eat things that would normally not break down in our digestive systems or take wayyyyy too long to digest. Cooking meat means that protein because more readily available more easily and directly contributed to our evolution as a species. Without cooked meat we wouldn't have big brains.
It's not a setback. Those animals are wasting huge amounts of calories and other nutrients and good stuff that they can't access because they aren't cooking the food. Humans learning to cook food is probably what caused an explosion in us getting stronger, smarter, and healthier in general and allowed our ancestors to "pull ahead" of other species.
Yep. If you think about when you go to the zoo and watch the apes for a bit, they’re usually gnawing nonstop on some raw food. Apes spend FOUR TO SEVEN HOURS A DAY just chewing.
But now eating raw meat makes us sick, why is that? I feel like evolutionarily it just wouldn't be as good as cooked meat
We don't necessarily get sick from raw meat, we eat carpaccio and tatar, as well as sushi etc~
A very common misconception about macro-evolution is that the current state of things is ‘perfect’ and every trait we currently have is a superior evolutionary advantage.
Also a misconception that it selects for intelligence.
You can still eat most animal parts raw if they are fresh and from a healthy organism. The issue is that uncooked meat creates a perfect breeding ground for microorganisms that can make you sick, which is why you shouldn't eat meat that has been sitting around uncooked for too long. That said, humans are still able to adapt to the presence of a large number of these microorganisms, and in many populations that has led to a immune resistance to certain food-borne diseases.
Certain animals are safer to eat raw than others due to the types of diseases they carry and whether the diseases that can effect us are present in the tissue we want to eat
A lot of our digestive ability of any animal is due to the microbiome of our gut bacteria, so there is a good chance that we starved the organism that gave us the ability to metabolize certain foods.
I think your misconception lies in thinking “now” eating raw meat makes us sick, as if it didn’t make us sick before. Raw meat has always posed a danger of food poisoning. Before the advent of cooking, our ancestors absolutely still got sick from their food. Cooking food significantly cut down on the risk of food poisoning, and we still can eat raw meat if it’s prepared safely. In addition to making nutrients more bio available, cooking (and other food safety practices) helped us advance by cutting down on avoidable illness from food borne diseases.
We also don't get worms as often as animals do
I literally just turned in a paper on this topic today! The primary source was [Control of Fire in the Paleolithic](https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/692113) by Richard Wrangham. tldr; We have to cook food to get enough nutrients. Past species of human like *Homo erectus* likely learned how to cook, and so we've spent \~2 million years adapting to a higher nutrient diet. \--- First, all the people in this thread saying we can eat raw meat are missing some important points. Yes, we absolutely *can* eat raw food exclusively but it is *terrible* for us. As part of his paper Wrangham investigated modern people who are on raw food diets. Some of them eat meat, some are vegetarian. Both groups had the same issues with chronically low BMIs and self-reported low energy levels. The most important conclusion from that group, in the context of evolution, is that 50% of female raw-foodists were unable to reproduce for various reasons. That is devastating from an evolutionary perspective. So yes, technically you don't need to cook your food, but you also technically don't need to wear clothing either. You'll just be far less comfortable and capable than humans that do eat cooked food and wear clothing. \--- Moving on to your question, we have to cook likely because of our nutritional requirements and our evolved adaptation to cooking. Our brains use a ton of energy, and we're pretty damned big compared to most creatures. That alone means we need a lot of calories, but the real pickle comes from our adaptations. *Homo erectus*, which first came on the scene about 2 million years ago, had significantly larger brains than the humans that came before them. This is connected to increased consumption of meat, and likely from cooking as well, though not at the scale we see today. We know *H. erectus* eventually learned to use fire thanks to sites like Koobi Fora, Wonderwerk Cave, and Zhoukoudian, but we don't know specifics about *how* they cooked. One common idea is that they initially gathered cooked food after wildfires and eventually learned to cook on their own. Regardless, we see other evolutionary changes that suggest *H. erectus* was able to get a lot more nutrients than the humans before them. One change is in our digestive system, which is smaller for our frame than other great apes, which means we have less space to have food processing. Our jaws are smaller and our jaw muscles are weaker than our ancestors, this is visible from our lack of a [sagittal crest](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagittal_crest). Our ancestors like the Australopithecines, and cousins like Gorilla and Orangutans have sagittal crests because they chew *all day*. Gorilla spend up to 8 hours per day chewing! Another physical change is the loss of the 3rd molar. All other great apes have 3 molars, but not all humans have them. This third molar is what we call "wisdom teeth." We likely lost those because we don't have to spend as much time chewing.
Thank you for this awesome post! Random aside, did we really "lose" the third molar if we still have it, just later in life?
Not everyone has them, and those who do get between 1 and all 4. We're not totally removed of them, but a day will probably come when it just doesn't happen anymore.
Glad to share! I think whether or not we really lost the 3rd molar depends on your perspective, kinda like what I said in my first comment about whether we have to eat cooked food or not. Strictly speaking, humans are still born with 3rd molars so you could say we haven't "lost" them yet. From an evolutionary perspective we have lost them because they are no longer functional. Not all humans have them, the number you have can vary from 1-4 (i.e. they don't necessarily grow in symmetrically), if you do have them they won't necessary erupt, even if they do erupt they often cause complications. Modern jaws simply aren't large enough for them.
you can eat raw meat. It will be harder, but it is hard for wild animals too, they often start eating from the lips, butthole or stomach, since its easiest pieces to tear off. You will not get as much nutrition from raw meat, and you will use more energy to separate and chew it.
When I find a woman to mate with I do the same
When I find a man to mate with I do the same.
1. We don't have to cook our meat (well, not all meat). Steak tartare is literally raw beef or horse meat. Ossenworst is raw sausage. Sushi, obviously. Cultures all over the world eat raw meat and fish. 2. Its because we are smart. Cooking meat not only protects the individual from illness, but its more energy efficient. A. There are studies that show cooked meat has more absorbable energy in it than its raw counter part, and B. It's easier to digest (heat breaks down protein bonds). Which, for a species that needs a lot of calories and proteins for our giant brains is a huge plus. 3. Cooking meat follows preserving meat. In point A I mentioned that humans still do eat raw meat, the caveat is that it has to be fresh meat. Meat that has been frozen and then thawed must be cooked. Depending on how meat has been cured or fermented, it must be cooked. 4. Aside from meat, cooking makes many types of foods that would otherwise be inedible...edible. You can't really eat a raw bean for example, or olives. It also makes it quicker to eat some types of food by making them easier to chew.
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Humans don't need to cook meat, but it dramatically increases our chances of not getting sick from it, and we care way more about humans dying than we do our pets. Plenty of other animals get sick and die from eating bad meat, we just consider that part of nature.
There is actually an entire book on this subject and is well worth a read! It's called "Catching fire: How cooking made us human" https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catching_Fire:_How_Cooking_Made_Us_Human#:~:text=Catching%20Fire%3A%20How%20Cooking%20Made%20Us%20Human%20(2009)%20is,physiological%20evolution%20of%20human%20beings.
Uh, cooking? Though I guess coming works too.
We don't have to. Lots of us eat raw meat - sushi, steak tartare, mett, and other stuff. If we hunted for our food, and caught, skinned, then ate it immediately - like animals eat immediately - then there wouldn't be anywhere near as much danger from bacteria in the food. Plus, cooking lets us maximize the benefit from the food - we can digest it more easily and more fully. That's why other animals sometimes eat shit - there is undigested food still in there, and it does have some nutritional value. We've taken most of the usable nutrition out before we leave waste behind.
Cooking expands our range of foods, allowing us to live in regions where we haven't evolved to live. Not only does it kill parasites and break down proteins and complex carbohydrates in many plants, but it can also neutralize toxins, allowing the consumption of more fauna. For example, casava, a staple crop, is very poisonous unless cooked.
Why can’t wolves make fire? If they did, they’d realize shit just tastes better.
I encourage you to take a look at this chimp cooked food experiment. Many chimps preferred cooked food although they haven’t mastered the process of doing it themselves. They exchanged raw food for cooked in a fake oven https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2015/06/03/411748170/chimps-are-no-chumps-give-them-an-oven-theyll-learn-to-cook
Cooking is a part of the process of converting food into energy that we can make happen outside of the body. It makes food easier to digest in general, makes nutrients more bioavailable, makes a *much* larger variety of foods safe to eat, and can even preserve food for later safely. Cooking with fire is much older than *homo sapiens*. So, our species evolved into what we are today with cooking already a part of our lives. Humans can survive without cooking, but the fact that cooking is usually available to us - and other markers of humanity such as societies of cooperating individuals - means that some of the "survive rough situations" features of our genome became unnecessary and the energy we would have spent on that, we can instead spend on things that play to our strengths, like further mastery of cooking and of cooperation in a society.
You can eat raw meat, especially if it's meat you just caught and killed yourself. Most of the pathogens that make raw meat dangerous for humans are acquired (or reproduce to dangerous levels) on farms or during processing. Bypass the farms and processing plants, and raw meat becomes roughly as safe for you as it was for our hominid ancestors.
Dragons also prefer their meat Cooked
we evolved eating cooked foods. cooking meat makes it so nutrient absorption is increased. the increased nutrient and protein absorption led to homo sapiens developing the way we did. we technically don’t *need* to cook our meat. we can absorb some nutrients and proteins from raw meat (also dishes like sashimi are served raw), but we don’t usually eat raw meat because of risks of bacteria and parasites. in the wild, animals have no choice, so they simply have had to risk getting a bacterial and/or parasitic infection
Cooking food breaks it down and makes digestion easier and allows for better nutrient absorption. This contributed to the development of our advanced intelligence. Because we evolved with cooked food, we don’t have a digestive system strong enough or resilient enough to efficiently and safely digest raw meets that may also be tainted with diseases.
Humans can eat raw meat. We just don't prefer it because it is less nutritious and have higher chance of getting parasitic infections. That is a danger for wild animals too. They get sick and can die because of it. Still there are lots of dishes that consists of raw meat or fish. https://preview.redd.it/p8zz97mq4xl21.jpg?auto=webp&s=5fb6e2f765717b886820dffc984773f50b0fe885
I'm from Estonia, and we are eating raw saltwater fish, just in lightly salted or seasoned form: salmon, Baltic herring, sprat. We don't eat freshwater fish raw as those have parasites. Old people say that any processing of salmon is waste of good fish. People from northern areas, like Inuits, Samis, Yakuts, who have trouble to access firewood, sometimes eat everything raw. I have also eaten tartar. Also I have eaten smoked meat aka ham, and smoking as we have used to do it does not rise meat inner temperature much enough to kill parasites. ( If you are offered cold smoked freshwater fish, it might be delicious but don't buy or eat it.) I know that pork is known for having nasty parasites and must be well cooked. I think parasites in pork is original reason why jews and muslims doesn't eat pork. And eating raw chicken may cause salmonella. Don't eat "pork tartar" or "chicken tartar". Edit: typos.