Take that, raw foodies
The raw food movement is big in Marin. I think it’s insane. As the veteran of not one, but two major attacks of food poisoning, and as the friend of someone who almost died from unpasteurized milk, I believe in cooking with an unmatched passion.
It turns out that my instincts are backed by science. Richard Wrangham has written a book about how cooking makes humans truly special: Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human
He then delivers a thorough, delightfully brutal takedown of the raw-food movement and its pieties. He cites studies showing that a strict raw-foods diet cannot guarantee an adequate energy supply, and notes that, in one survey, 50 percent of the women on such a diet stopped menstruating. There is no way our human ancestors survived, much less reproduced, on it. He seems pleased to be able to report that raw diets make you urinate too often, and cause back and hip problems.
Even castaways, he writes, have needed to cook their food to survive: “I have not been able to find any reports of people living long term on raw wild food.” Thor Heyerdahl, traveling by primitive raft across the Pacific, took along a small stove and a cook. Alexander Selkirk, the model for Robinson Crusoe, built fires and cooked on them.
I feel smugly vindicated. I also plan on reading the book in its entirety. It’s on my list now.
