Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation (10 page)

So far at least, Wrangham’s most
convincing arguments are deductive ones. Some new factor of natural selection changed
the course of primate evolution about two million years ago, expanding the brain and
shrinking the gut; the most plausible candidate for this new selective pressure is the
availability of a new, higher-quality diet. Meat by itself could not have supplied that
diet. Primates, unlike dogs, don’t digest raw flesh efficiently enough to thrive
on it. The only diet that could have yielded such a dramatic increase in energy is
cooked food. “We are,” he concludes, “cooks more than
carnivores.”

To demonstrate how the advent of cooking
could have supplied a caloric boon sufficient to change the course of our evolution,
Wrangham cites several animal-feeding studies comparing raw and cooked or otherwise
processed food. When researchers switch a python’s diet from raw beef to cooked
hamburger, the snake’s “metabolic cost of digestion” is reduced by
nearly 25 percent, leaving the animal that much more energy to put to other purposes.
Mice grow faster and
fatter on a diet of cooked meat than on a diet of
the same meat raw.
^*
This might explain why our pets
tend toward obesity, since most modern pet food is cooked.

It would seem that all calories are not
created equal, or, as a proverb quoted by Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin in
The
Physiology of Taste
puts it, “A man does not live on what he eats, an old
proverb says, but on what he digests.” Cooking allows us to digest more of what we
eat, and to use less energy doing it.
^†
What is curious is that animals
seem instinctively to know this: Given the choice, many animals will opt for cooked food
over raw. This shouldn’t surprise us: “Cooked food is better than
raw,” Wrangham says, “because life is mostly concerned with
energy”—and cooked food yields more energy.

It may well be that animals are
“pre-adapted” to prefer the smells, tastes, and textures of cooked food,
having evolved various sensory apparatus to steer them toward the richest sources of
energy. Attractive qualities such as sweetness, softness, tenderness, and oiliness all
signify abundant, easy-to-digest calories. A hardwired preference for high-energy foods
would explain why our evolutionary ancestors would immediately have appreciated cooked
foods. In speculating as to exactly how early humans would have discovered all the good
things fire does to food, Wrangham points out that many animals scavenge burned
landscapes, enjoying particularly the roasted rodents and seeds. He cites the example of
chimpanzees in Senegal, who will eat the seeds of the
Afzelia
tree only after a
fire has passed through and toasted them. It seems likely that our ancestors would also
have scavenged among the remains of forest fires, looking for tasty morsels and, perhaps
occasionally, getting lucky enough to have the sort of
transformative
experience that Bo-bo, the swineherd’s son in Charles Lamb’s story, did when
he first touched that bit of crackling to his tongue.

Like any such theory—indeed, like evolution
itself—the cooking hypothesis is not subject to absolute scientific proof. For that
reason, some will no doubt dismiss it as another “just so” story, Prometheus
in modern scientific garb. But, really, how much more can we expect when trying to
account for something like the advent of ourselves? What the cooking hypothesis gives us
is
a compelling modern myth—one cast in the language of evolutionary
biology rather than religion—locating the origins of our species in the discovery of
cooking with fire. To call it a myth is not to belittle it. Like any other such story,
it serves to explain how what is came to be using the most powerful vocabulary
available, which in our case today happens to be that of evolutionary biology. What is
striking in this instance is that classical mythology and modern evolutionary theory
both gazed into the flames of the cook fire and found there the same thing: the origins
of our humanity. Perhaps that coincidence is all the confirmation we can hope for.

I can attest from personal experience to the
fact that animals are just as attracted as humans and gods are to the aroma of food
cooked over a fire, barbecue included and perhaps especially. This story is hard to
believe, but it is true in every particular. The first particular is
that, as a teenager, I briefly owned a pig, a young white sow by the name of Kosher. My
father gave me the pig; he also gave the pig its perverse name. I’m still not
entirely sure why my father gave me a pig. We lived in Manhattan, in an apartment on the
eleventh floor, and I certainly hadn’t asked for one. But ever since reading
Charlotte’s Web
, I had liked the idea of pigs, and collected pig
books and pig figurines and such. Yet as is sometimes the way with even mild
predilections like mine, other people take them far more seriously than you do. Before
long, I found myself with a bedroom-full of pig paraphernalia to which, at least by the
time I was sixteen, I was more or less indifferent.

But my father got it into his head that a
real live pig was just what I wanted, so he had his secretary track down a piglet on a
farm in New Jersey and one evening brought it home in a shoe box. This was not a
pot-bellied pig, not a miniature pig of any kind. No, Kosher was a standard Yorkshire
sow, destined to grow to a quarter of a ton or more if nothing was done to stop her. At
the time, we lived in a doorman building, a co-op on the Upper East Side; the co-op
allowed pets, but I was fairly sure a full-grown pig didn’t qualify.

Luckily, for most of the time I had Kosher,
it was summer and we were living in a cottage on the beach. The cottage stood on stilts
in the sand, and Kosher lived beneath the deck; pigs are susceptible to sunburn (one of
the reasons they like mud so much), so I fenced in the shaded area beneath the house as
her pen. Kosher was the size of a football when I got her; she could, and did, fit in a
shoe box. However, that didn’t last very long. To paraphrase Galen the Physician,
she was a voracious animal, feeding constantly and eliminating incessantly. Often in the
middle of the night, Kosher would empty her bowl of pig chow, flip it over with an
expressive clatter, and then unleash a chorus of deep guttural grunts to alert me to her
hunger. When that didn’t produce a biped at her gate with a bucket of lunch,
Kosher would take to butting the wooden posts with her powerful snout
until the seismic shaking of the cottage woke me. Some nights, having run out of pig
chow, I was forced to empty the entire contents of the refrigerator into her bowl, not
just the produce and leftovers, but everything, down to the eggs, milk, soda, pickles,
ketchup, mayonnaise, and cold cuts, including once (I’m ashamed to admit) a few
slices of Virginia ham. Kosher ate it all, with a gusto that never failed to impress me.
She ate like a pig.

But that isn’t the story. The story is
of the evening Kosher’s Falstaffian appetite got us both into trouble with the
neighbors. Every now and then, when Kosher was feeling peckish or had caught a whiff of
something good to eat, she would make a break for it, forcing her snout under the
fencing and squeezing her muscular body through the gap. Usually she would head for the
nearest garbage can, topple it, and feast on its contents. The neighbors were getting
used to this sort of thing, and I was getting used to apologizing, cleaning up after
her, and then corralling her back into her pen with the promise of a tasty morsel. But
on this particular summer evening, just before sunset, Kosher must have raised her snout
into the breeze and detected a few molecules of something even better than garbage: the
scent of the smoke of meat on the grill. She made her escape and began working her way
up the line of cottages along the beach, until she had located the source of the
aroma.

What happened next I learned from the
neighbor in question within a few minutes of his visit from Kosher. When it happened,
this fellow was sitting on his deck, sipping a gin and tonic, and taking in the last
pastel light of the summer day as his dinner sizzled on the grill. Like just about
everyone on our strip of beach, this man was a well-to-do New Yorker or a Bostonian,
maybe a lawyer or businessman, but likely not a person with much experience of hogs,
except perhaps in the form of hams, chops, and strips of bacon. Hearing the
clatter of hoof on wood, he looked up from his summer reverie to find
a pinkish-white creature the size of an extremely short-legged Labrador bounding up the
steps to his deck, grunting furiously. This was no dog. Kosher had evidently locked on
to the scent of grilling meat, and when she arrived at last at its source, she worked
with the efficiency and speed of a commando, knocking over the barbecue and making off
with the man’s steak.

Only a few minutes earlier, I had stepped
outside to feed Kosher and discovered she had gone missing. I tracked her movements up
the beach—most of the neighbors were on their decks, and had spotted her heading
north—and arrived at the scene of the crime only a few minutes after Kosher had scurried
off with a partially grilled steak clamped between her jaws. To my great good fortune,
either Kosher’s victim had an excellent sense of humor or his gin-and-tonic had
put him in particularly high spirits, because he was doubled over with laughter as he
recounted what Kosher had done. I apologized profusely, offered to drive to town to
replace his dinner, but he waved me off, declaring the story was worth far more than the
price of any steak. The man was still cracking up when I left him to go track down my
fugitive hog.

It was long overdue: the Pig’s Revenge
on Barbecue. I have to think that if hogs had their own mythology, in which they passed
down tales of heroism from one generation to the next, the daring achievement of my pig
would figure prominently in it: Kosher, the porcine Prometheus.

Now, of course, to a Southerner,
Kosher’s theft wasn’t a theft of
barbecue
, not really: Only a
deluded Northerner would ever refer to a steak grilled over an open fire as
“barbecue.” Southerners will argue without end about the precise definition
of the word—and in fact any comprehensive definition of barbecue would have to include
the fact that it is a food the definition of which is endlessly being contested—but to
qualify for the term this cooking must include at a minimum meat, wood smoke, fire, and
time. Beyond that, the definition of barbecue changes state by state, and even county by
county. I have a map over my desk called “The Balkans of Barbecue.” It
purports to depict the different barbecue regions of the Carolinas, and superimposed
over a map of the two states are the outlines of five distinct barbecue cantons:
whole-hog here, shoulders there, strictly vinegar east of this line, tomato-based sauce
to the west, mustard-based sauce to the south and east.

And that’s only the Carolinas. The map
stops before you get anywhere near the ribs of Tennessee or the smoky briskets of Texas,
which, because they’re
beef
, no Carolinian would deign to call barbecue.
Every one of these barbecue nations regards the practices of every other as an
abomination. As you might expect, the trash talking among pit masters is endlessly
inventive. Damning with faint praise is one common rhetorical strategy. Once, when I
asked someone in Texas to assess the quality of a fellow Texan’s barbecued
brisket, he allowed, in a drawl, that though his brisket was “goooood, it
wasn’t knock-your-dick-in-the-dirt good.”

Perhaps the most generous definition of
barbecue I’ve come across attempts to bridge all these regional differences. Put
forward by a black pit master from Alabama named Sy Erskine, this definition
diplomatically elides the whole vexed issue of sauce; it also hints at the sacramental
quality of barbecue. Barbecue, he told a writer, is “the mystic communion among
fire, smoke, and meat in the total absence of water.”
^*
I suspect most
Southerners could rally under that broad banner. But the other thing they could agree
on? That my own Northerner’s conception of barbecue—which wasn’t even clear
as to whether the word referred to the cooking process or the apparatus used in that
process or the resulting food or the accompanying sauce—was just
wrong
. I had
been in North Carolina long enough now to know at least this: “Barbecue” is
a noun (not a verb) that refers either to a social event or to the kind of food prepared
and served at that event.

Thus far my own experience of Southern
barbecue had been limited to observer and eater. Though I had now tasted the food, I had
not yet been to a real barbecue. So I left Ayden with an aspiration: to see if I could
learn at least a few of the secrets of barbecue, by apprenticing myself to one of its
masters, and not in a kitchen but at a barbecue. I didn’t want to watch anymore. I
wanted to do.

Before I came to North Carolina, I thought I
had
done and knew something about how to barbecue; I do it all the time at
home. As for most American men, the cooking of meat outdoors over fire constitutes one
of my most exalted domestic duties. And like most American men, I do a fine job of
mystifying what is at bottom a very simple process, such a fine job, in fact, that my
wife, Judith, is by now convinced that grilling a steak over a fire is as daunting a
procedure as changing the timing belt on the car.

Indeed, North
or
South, it is
remarkable how much sheer bullshit seems to accrete around the subject of barbecue. No
other kind of cooking comes even close. Exactly why, I’m not sure, but it may be
that cooking over fire is actually so straightforward that the people who do it feel a
need to baste the process in thick layers of intricacy and myth. It could also be that
barbecue is performed disproportionately by self-dramatizing men. For my own part, I
made much of my special talent for determining the doneness of a chunk of grilled meat,
which involved touching the meat on the grill and then, with the same finger, touching
various sectors of my face. If the meat responds to pressure like my cheek does, that
means it is rare; if it feels more like my chin, it’s medium; if like my forehead,
then it’s well done. I’d seen some chef demonstrate the technique on
television and it seemed to work, not just as a handy metric but, much more important,
as a further aid to mystification. Judith has come to doubt her own face could possibly
work as well.