After all, what distinguishes women and men from the other animals that populate the Earth? Three manifestations of human intelligence: art, religion and cooking. This is the provocative - but not that much - starting point of the beautiful book "The monkey in the kitchen" (Carocci editore, 2021, pp. 168) by the gastronome and expert in food history Alexandre Stern.
And Stern, since many have already spoken extensively about art and religion, has chosen to tell us how cooking has influenced the evolution and history of us humans. All in a fascinating and documented story, which helps us to understand that only by putting in the "stove" the "monkey", that is our ancestors, was able to make edible, more nutritious, more easily assimilated and also healthier - cooking destroys many pathogenic microorganisms - many foods.
The use of fire in the earliest forms of cooking thus made large quantities of proteins available already in prehistoric times for our ancestors who saw their brains grow in size until they took on the brain capacities of modern humans. How was this possible? Simply cooking foods makes them more easily digestible and therefore digestion requires fewer energy resources than those required for an entirely raw diet. The energy saved has largely benefited our brain activity. Furthermore, cooking has made our diet more varied and adaptable and this has allowed us to establish ourselves in ever larger territories. Again: the kitchen has favored forms of sociality, since prehistoric hearths where people gathered around the fire to prepare food together. And it has become an integral element of different human cultures, so much so that for us it is now common to talk about French, Italian, even Sardinian, Lazio or even typical cities and locales cuisine.
In short, the culinary art distinguishes us from other animals and also distinguishes us among ourselves. Or at least it distinguished us, says Stern, who after having retraced millennia of human experience in the kitchen and having told us, just to give examples, how Egyptians and Romans cooked to get to today's starred restaurants, closes the book with a clear SOS. For more than two million years, the way we prepare food has had a decisive impact on our life. Today, however, we are witnessing a sort of "disinvention" of the culinary practices accumulated over the millennia. In fact, cooking is no longer a collective, social activity, but a private one. Above all, fewer and fewer people are actually cooking, preferring to resort to ready-to-use foods or preparations.
Of course, everything is more comfortable this way, but Stern tells us how much we lose by completely relying on pre-packaged and industrialized products. We no longer know foods, we no longer know the right ways to choose, store and prepare them for consumption. We totally entrust nutrition, a fundamental element of our well-being - "Make food your medicine", Hippocrates already said - to others and the results are not always encouraging if we see the data on obesity, even among children, in Western world.
Of course, we cannot and do not want to go back to the housewife who does the shopping at the farmer and sautéed from morning to evening. Stern's book, however, wants to raise clear questions in us, giving us a push to ask ourselves what we can learn from the past. And through a critical look at our eating habits, it formulates a crucial question for the future: what do we want to eat from now on?