Bits & Bites. The Invention of Food.. Tom Hillenbrand

      The book

      The author

      Introduction

      To invent, Thomas Edison once remarked, you need “a good imagination and a pile of junk.” Seeing as the human race possesses inexhaustible quantities of both imagination and junk, it seems our inventiveness is boundless. But what was the greatest innovation in our history? One could hire technology sociologists or economic historians to wrestle with this question. The British retailer Tesco chose a different path: it asked people. By conducting a large-scale representative survey the company sought to find out what people in 2010 thought were the most important inventions of all time.

      The more than four thousand Britons surveyed put the good old wheel at number one. The airplane took second place, followed by the light bulb (3), the Internet (4), and the computer (5). That these inventions were chosen for the top spots makes a certain amount of sense, as does the high regard for the telephone (6) or penicillin (7). That the iPhone (8), however, is more important than the washing machine (12) is something that can only be claimed by those who have never soaked their shirts in a boiling tub of water and then hand-scrubbed them clean on a washboard.

      There have been other similar polls—and gadgets and computers always do extremely well. But why do so many Silicon Valley innovations end up occupying the top spots on these lists? It’s because for most of us the idea of innovation has become synonymous with computers and the Internet. Over the past years these inventions have changed our lives dramatically: we’ve watched as the Web has shattered the music industry, brought the retail sector to the brink of collapse, and turned many other aspects of our world inside out. Because we’ve had these personal experiences we have a tendency to overvalue the more recent inventions in our history. It’s why we consider e-mail (27) to be more groundbreaking than the chair (67), and Google (25) to be more important than matches (49). But our high-tech fixation is not only nonsense, it may even be dangerous: our silicon obsession obscures our view of many other worthwhile inventions. Our passion for smartphones or Facebook causes us to overlook the ideas that transformed our society in the past and have the potential to radically reshape it in the future.

      If we want to see the next big thing coming we should spend more time looking to the left, to the right, and especially behind us, to the past. This essay is intended as a modest contribution to this and focuses attention on an area most of us would not associate with the concept “invention”: our food. We view its existence as God-given—as God-given as that of chairs or matches. But the food we eat has not been around since day one; we humans had to invent it first. The combination of food and ingenuity upended our world— and there are strong indications it will do so in the future as well.

      Not one single foodstuff made it onto Tesco’s list of the top one hundred inventions. What’s also missing, oddly enough, is fire. And it’s with this invention that we need to begin—specifically, with the innovation that results when we mix fire with food: barbecue. From today’s perspective this may not seem like a particularly revolutionary invention—but such an assessment would be false. Because it was barbecuing that made us human.

      Of Cavemen and Campfires

      So, without barbecues we were just a bunch of big apes? It’s not quite that simple.

      Before the discovery of fire we spent a lot of time being pretty cold. So it was probably the warmth that initially attracted us to fire. We hesitantly held out our hairy hands in front of the flames and noticed they didn’t turn to ash. Once fire no longer filled us with terror we started domesticating it. It seems to have taken until around 125,000 BC for the on-demand fire idea to catch on, a fire that could be sparked at any time with a spindle or bow. Prior to this, we had to go out and scare up, say, a blazing branch from a forest fire—and then watch over and nurture our flame so it wouldn’t go out. The communal campfire was born.

      Before we tamed fire we had no way of preparing a decent meal for ourselves—we consumed everything in its natural state. Even lovers of rare, blood-dripping steaks have to admit that uncooked meat is not only hard on the stomach but also requires a great deal more chewing power than a goulash that has been simmering for hours. So chateaubriand of mammoth won’t have been the tastiest dish for our ancestors. Things weren’t much different with grains or roots. It may be that early humans ground their meat between stones to make a paste, or let it age a while—this would have made it a little easier to chew, but hardly any more palatable. Quite the opposite.

      It was fire that made food edible. Apart from the fact that it was now possible to eat much better, fire had a number of other effects on our forebears. To start with, the whole barbecuing thing changed

      their group behavior. No one knows exactly how and where the hunter-gatherers of the early Stone Age took their meals; anthropologists assume, however, that they frequently ate alone since there was no real reason for them to dine together. More likely, when they found fruits or berries they crammed them in their mouths on the spot before some other bigger, stronger troglodyte could steal them away.

      Thanks to fire, however, food now acquired a social component. Our forefathers started assembling each evening to cook over their carefully tended campfires. The paleoanthropologist Richard Leakey believes that these Stone Age barbecues may have been the key event that separated man from ape: “Certainly, the hominids included more meat in their diet than their non-hominid relatives, but that difference was merely one of degree. The significant departure was the strategy of collecting food to be eaten later, and the consumption of food within a social network. An immediate consequence of such an arrangement would have been that social interaction, already well developed in higher primates, was enhanced still further.”

      Say what one will about seating arrangements and social interaction—dinner conversation during these early barbecues is likely to have been pretty limited as these early humans couldn’t talk yet. Their jaws were too crude, having been made not for articulating sequences of sounds but for crushing rock-hard nuts or mashing scraps of tough meat. With the boiling and simmering of food, jaws built for grinding became superfluous and gave way to more refined mouth structures that made speech possible.

      So without fire and without cooking our iPhones wouldn’t be much use to us. The barbecue anecdote demonstrates that culinary innovations may have been more vital for the human race than many of us believe. Now, one could object that it’s nonsense to speak of innovations in this connection. One could argue that food can’t be invented. After all, a carrot has always been a carrot just like an ear of corn has always looked like an ear of corn. Through constant cultivation over the centuries we may have made these vegetables somewhat bigger or more robust, but we hardly invented them.

      This view is certainly understandable. But it’s wrong.