Why humans cook their meat

Dear Matthew Alice: How come carnivorous animals can eat raw meat but we humans must cook it or else we get sick? Did we invent fire so long ago that we have biologically come to depend on it? — Chris Herring, cherring@cts.com

I’m clearing off desk space again for the steaming heaps of irate mail from the veggie brigade next week. (A diet of soybeans and Swiss chard sure seems to make people touchy.) Anthropologists say we started eating meat, along with weeds and bark and berries, hundreds of thousands of years before we tamed fire. A raw lamb chop is not necessarily a lethal weapon. We still could eat raw meat if we chose to. We just don’t.

Cooking was probably invented accidentally, but if you believe the science guys, cooking made man smarter. When you cook food, you are partially predigesting it, breaking it down, and, in the case of meat, releasing some nutrients not available to ou r bodies in meat’s raw form. As we began routinely to cook food, we evolved a shorter digestive tract and redirected that developmental energy to our burgeoning brains. This also suggests that the idiot down the street who seems to have more guts than brains very well might.