Discovery News : Discovery Channel : Great Apes Prefer Food Well-Done

This study potentially pushes back our earliest we started eating cooked food to just after we first began to control fire. The reasoning is that since our ape relatives appear to prefer the taste of many things cooked over raw (they tried different fruits, vegetables and meats, these are chimps, who are omnivorous), we didn’t have to evolutionarily acquire a taste for it over time. A tendency would have already existed, since cooking makes many foods softer and sweeter, both things meaning more calorie efficient.

I’m a big fan of technology, and as a strict vegetarian myself, I believe I owe much to two technologies developed during prehistoric times – grain and cooking. What technologies will humanity come up with to feed ourselves for the next million years? I hope to be part of the answer to that question.