Speaker 1: Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My
Speaker 1: name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday.
Speaker 1: Time for an episode from the Vault. This one originally
Speaker 1: published March twenty second, twenty twenty two, and it's called
Speaker 1: The Beast War in Apron Part one. This was the
Speaker 1: first entry in a series on non human animals doing
Speaker 1: things analogous to cooking or otherwise kind of doing a
Speaker 1: meal prep in some way. Yeah, do animals cook? Well,
Speaker 1: the answer is probably not no, because we talked about
Speaker 1: it for two hours, So join in on the fun.
Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey,
Speaker 1: welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is
Speaker 1: Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and today we're going
Speaker 1: to be starting on as that has to do with
Speaker 1: animal feeding behaviors, but specifically what comes before the feeding itself.
Speaker 1: I got into this topic by wondering about a simple question,
Speaker 1: and it was are there any animals other than humans
Speaker 1: that cook their food? Because if you look at the
Speaker 1: relationship that humans have with food versus the at least
Speaker 1: obvious relationships that we can see on the surface level
Speaker 1: between most wild animals and their food, there were some
Speaker 1: pretty stark differences. So you know, you watch like a
Speaker 1: grazing herbivore mammal that's eating grass or eating leaves, it
Speaker 1: doesn't seem like they're putting the vegetation through any kind
Speaker 1: of external processing. It's just there in the environment. They
Speaker 1: bite it, they chew it, and they swallow it. Though
Speaker 1: once they swallow it. Of course, if you're talking about
Speaker 1: like you know, ruminant mammals or something, plenty of interesting
Speaker 1: things happen to the food after it has been processed,
Speaker 1: say by the teeth in the mouth, there might be
Speaker 1: multiple different interesting stages of digestion. But in that first stage,
Speaker 1: before the food reaches the mouth, there's not really anything
Speaker 1: complex going on that There's just some material in the
Speaker 1: environment that has nutritional value. The animal comes within reach
Speaker 1: of that food, they bite it, they chew it up,
Speaker 1: they swallow it, they just eat it. And if you
Speaker 1: compared that to all of the sometimes mind bogglingly complex
Speaker 1: stages of manipulation, combination, and alteration of raw plant and
Speaker 1: animal materials that go into making a standard human meal,
Speaker 1: even meals that we would perceive as kind of simple like,
Speaker 1: if you think about all of the preprocessing and alteration
Speaker 1: that goes into the foods that make a cheeseburger, the
Speaker 1: difference is overwhelming. Oh yeah, I mean even if you're
Speaker 1: I mean, you can go even simpler than that. I
Speaker 1: guess if even if you just you don't even take
Speaker 1: into accounts they meat, because meat processing, especially something like
Speaker 1: a hamburger, there's a lot of the lot of grotesque
Speaker 1: details that go into that. But so just like thinking
Speaker 1: about yeah, like the bread, you know, the vegetables, even
Speaker 1: you know, being prepared, the various sauces, I mean, all
Speaker 1: the things that go into it. It's it's it's quite
Speaker 1: a lot. And yeah, coming back to what you said
Speaker 1: earlier that we think about animals, we think about purely
Speaker 1: internal food processing and human cuisine. Human cooking is the
Speaker 1: externalization of various processes things that that we tend to
Speaker 1: imagine generally only take place within the bodies of animals.
Speaker 1: We found ways to do them externally to give our
Speaker 1: internal digestion a break, as well as to make things
Speaker 1: that are otherwise inedible edible exactly right. And of course,
Speaker 1: the central idea, the thing that most people think about
Speaker 1: when you say the word cooking is the narrow sense
Speaker 1: of cooking, meaning causing chemical and structural changes to food
Speaker 1: by the application of heat, specifically heating. This is one
Speaker 1: of the most common ways of processing food before we
Speaker 1: eat it. And this does exactly the things you're talking about.
Speaker 1: It takes foods that would not otherwise be edible to
Speaker 1: humans and makes them edible, or makes them safe to eat,
Speaker 1: or increases the availability of nutrition from the same starting
Speaker 1: quantities of food. So you take a mass of raw food,
Speaker 1: you cook it, you can usually increase its nutritional efficiency,
Speaker 1: you can get more nutrition out of it. And so
Speaker 1: to come back to the question of are there animals
Speaker 1: that cook, I would say, based on my research, if
Speaker 1: you're talking about on their own in the wild, it
Speaker 1: appears that the answer is no. In that narrow sense
Speaker 1: of cooking, meaning cooking by applying heat, it seems that
Speaker 1: humans are the only animals that do that in a
Speaker 1: consistent way. That we can talk about a few interesting
Speaker 1: wrinkles to that generalization in a minute. But when it
Speaker 1: comes to the broader sense of cooking, which is you
Speaker 1: would imagine anything that people would do in a restaurant
Speaker 1: kitchen or in a home kitchen any way, that people
Speaker 1: manipulate food, food or prepare meals other than by applying heat.
Speaker 1: It turns out non human animals do all kinds of
Speaker 1: fascinating things to their food before consuming it along these lines,
Speaker 1: And so that's what I wanted to talk about in
Speaker 1: this series. What do animals do that could be construed
Speaker 1: as cooking in one way or another, even accepting that
Speaker 1: no animals in the wild cook their food with heat,
Speaker 1: while with the exception of the ratitu, a phenomenon by
Speaker 1: which a rat, once exposed to culinary traditions in an
Speaker 1: urban environment, will then begin to cook itself, to actually
Speaker 1: copy the various recipes that are around it, improve upon
Speaker 1: those recipes, and sometimes crawl on type of a man's
Speaker 1: head and pull his hair to use said human as
Speaker 1: a puppet to move around the kitchen and prepare you know,
Speaker 1: fine works of French cuisine or yes, I can't recall it. Okay, yeah, yes,
Speaker 1: the ratitui itself. Yes, but it begs the question is
Speaker 1: this is this do we see this only with French
Speaker 1: cuisine or does the ratitui phenomenon repeat itself in various
Speaker 1: other cultures. Animals can only be trained to make sauces
Speaker 1: that are heavy and dairy. So yeah, it is a
Speaker 1: French thing, okay, But no, that's a good point because actually,
Speaker 1: by raising ratitui, you point out that I think you
Speaker 1: could quite clearly find plenty of examples of animals that
Speaker 1: have been trained in some sense to cook. Now, they're
Speaker 1: probably never going to be as versatile as a human cook,
Speaker 1: but I'm sure you can find tons of examples of
Speaker 1: an animal that somebody trained to go turn on the
Speaker 1: microwave or something like that, you know, to boop at
Speaker 1: the oven knob with their nose until it comes on
Speaker 1: or something along those lines. And then of course there's
Speaker 1: the whole area of animals that are willing to benefit
Speaker 1: from cooking without having done it themselves. Like I once
Speaker 1: saw a seagull grab a hot dog half of off
Speaker 1: of a grill at the beach. You know, the seagull
Speaker 1: was not itself barbecuing, but it was more than happy
Speaker 1: to benefit from the barbecuing. Well, that is a great point,
Speaker 1: and that actually feeds right into the next thing that
Speaker 1: I wanted to talk about. So before in this series
Speaker 1: we get into examples of animals doing some kind of
Speaker 1: cooking in the broader sense, meaning you know, preparing foods
Speaker 1: before they eat them in some way that doesn't involve
Speaker 1: the directed application of heat. I do want to talk
Speaker 1: about cooked food in the narrower sense, food that has
Speaker 1: been heated, and one interesting place I thought to start
Speaker 1: there would be with the question in general, would non
Speaker 1: human animals actually prefer cooked food over the raw food
Speaker 1: stuffs that they would encounter in their natural environment. And
Speaker 1: it turns out there have been some studies that looked
Speaker 1: into this, and in some cases there is a clear answer.
Speaker 1: So I wanted to start by looking at a paper
Speaker 1: published in the year two thousand and eight in the
Speaker 1: Journal of Human Evolution by Victoria Wobber, Brian Hare, and
Speaker 1: Richard Rangum called Great Apes Prefer Cooked Food. Now, part
Speaker 1: of the background of this paper is based in the
Speaker 1: exploration of an idea that's come up in passing on
Speaker 1: the show a couple of times before. We've never actually
Speaker 1: devoted a full episode or series to it. Maybe someday
Speaker 1: we will, but it's what is known as the cooking hypothesis,
Speaker 1: And to summarize it briefly, the cooking hypothesis is the
Speaker 1: proposition that the advent of cooking was a major contributor
Speaker 1: to the physiological evolution of the ancestors of Homo sapiens.
Speaker 1: In other words, that a lot of things about the
Speaker 1: bodies of modern human beings are the way they are
Speaker 1: because our primate ancestors figured out how to control fire
Speaker 1: and how to cook their food by applying heat to it.
Speaker 1: Now you might wonder how could our bodies be changed
Speaker 1: in an evolutionary sense by the invention of cooking. Well,
Speaker 1: essentially it would happen by changing the pressures in our
Speaker 1: nutritional regimes. So I think proponents of the cooking hypothesis
Speaker 1: usually argue that because cooked food is more nutritionally efficient,
Speaker 1: again meaning that if food is cooked, you take a
Speaker 1: food item you eat it raw versus you eat it cooked.
Speaker 1: In the cooked version, you can get more nutrition from
Speaker 1: it with less chewing, less energy spent on digestion, and
Speaker 1: so forth. So if suddenly eating and absorbing nutrition becomes
Speaker 1: easier and more efficient, we have to spend less time chewing,
Speaker 1: we have to spend less time gathering large quantities of food.
Speaker 1: The types of food we can eat safely is expanded,
Speaker 1: and we have to spend less energy developing large powerhouse
Speaker 1: digestive tracts, and so forth. So perhaps other adaptive pressures
Speaker 1: fill the void, including bigger brains and so forth. And
Speaker 1: I think one proposed causal mechanism is that once cooking
Speaker 1: is invented, we can get more nutrition from the same
Speaker 1: amount of environmental material. Suddenly the carrying pacity of the
Speaker 1: local environment than is larger. There can be more humans
Speaker 1: per tribe, which requires bigger brains in order to maintain
Speaker 1: relationships with that larger number of humans. The main figure
Speaker 1: behind the cooking hypothesis is a British primatologist. I think
Speaker 1: he either is now or it was at some recent point.
Speaker 1: Was it Harvard named Richard Rangum, and he wrote a
Speaker 1: book laying out this argument in two thousand and nine
Speaker 1: called Catching Fire, How Cooking Made Us Human. Rangum is
Speaker 1: also one of the authors of this paper about whether
Speaker 1: apes prefer cooked food. And I'm not going to go
Speaker 1: into all of the pros and cons the arguments foreign
Speaker 1: against the cooking hypothesis. I would just say that my
Speaker 1: personal evaluation at a cursory reading of it is that
Speaker 1: it looks like it's kind of in the middle zone.
Speaker 1: It's one of those arguments that seems to have a
Speaker 1: lot of interesting things going for it, but it also
Speaker 1: doesn't line up all that well with the best existing
Speaker 1: evidence about the timeline for the control of fire by
Speaker 1: human ancestors. So I don't know. I'd say it's interesting
Speaker 1: but far from conclusive. But regardless of what we think
Speaker 1: about the evolutionary effects of cooking on our direct ancestors,
Speaker 1: pointing out the theoretical background helps us see why the
Speaker 1: researchers performed the experiments described in this paper. So the
Speaker 1: authors of this paper begin raising a relevant question, which
Speaker 1: is that if you were to walk up to one
Speaker 1: of our ancestors roughly two million years ago, maybe to
Speaker 1: a member of the species Homo erectus, and you offered
Speaker 1: them cooked food, are we sure that they would like
Speaker 1: it or that they would prefer it to the same
Speaker 1: food in its uncooked state. You mean, like like a
Speaker 1: hot pocket. If you brought a hot pocket to one
Speaker 1: of our ancestors, what would they make of it? And well,
Speaker 1: let me react, I feel quite certain that somebody who
Speaker 1: showed up with a hot pocket would be regarded as
Speaker 1: a worker of evil magic. But anyway, I mean, I
Speaker 1: think this is a worthwhile question to ask because we
Speaker 1: know that there are lots of types of food that
Speaker 1: we would probably rather eat cooked than raw. Maybe lots
Speaker 1: of you know, in this very person to person, but
Speaker 1: probably most people would rather eat grain, tough vegetables, most meats,
Speaker 1: and so forth in their cooked state. But it's possible
Speaker 1: that's just a cultural preference. So, you know, we like
Speaker 1: cooked food maybe because we're used to it. Is there
Speaker 1: any way to test this out? And the authors here say, well,
Speaker 1: obviously not with archaic commonens, but an interesting analog would
Speaker 1: be to offer both cooked and raw versions of the
Speaker 1: same food to great apes, our closest living relatives, and
Speaker 1: see what their preferences are. So that's what this study
Speaker 1: looked into. So experiment number one, they were like, hey,
Speaker 1: let's try some tubers. Let's get together some carrots, some
Speaker 1: sweet potatoes, and some white potatoes and offer them to
Speaker 1: chimpanzees in a choice task that exposes them to both
Speaker 1: and then allows them to pick between the cooked and
Speaker 1: raw forms. And they found in the case of carrots
Speaker 1: and sweet potatoes, the chimpanzees definitely liked the cooked version better.
Speaker 1: On the other hand, it was interesting the white potato
Speaker 1: was more of a toss up. The authors noted that
Speaker 1: many chimps seemed kind of hesitant to take the initial
Speaker 1: samples of both cooked and raw white potatoes, and it
Speaker 1: was basically there was no difference in their preference between
Speaker 1: the two, which seems surprising to me because like, I
Speaker 1: love raw carrots, the cooked carrots are good too, but
Speaker 1: I cannot imagine wanting to eat a raw potato now.
Speaker 1: But the authors said, well, maybe the chimpanzees are just
Speaker 1: kind of iffy on potatoes in general. Okay, well that
Speaker 1: would make sense now. A second experiment they did had
Speaker 1: trouble really getting much of an answer. But what they
Speaker 1: looked into was to the extent that apes prefer cooked
Speaker 1: food over raw food. Why do they like it better?
Speaker 1: Is it the taste? Is it something about the texture.
Speaker 1: And so they experimented with a number of different grade
Speaker 1: apes they use chimp, spinobos, gorillas, and orangutans, and they
Speaker 1: offered them choices between carrots in the following format, so
Speaker 1: you could have whole pieces of carrot raw or cooked,
Speaker 1: grated carrot raw or cooked, and mashed carrot raw or cooked.
Speaker 1: And they found that when carrots were whole, apes definitely
Speaker 1: preferred the cooked pieces to the raw pieces. Again, they
Speaker 1: like cooked better, But after that things got more complicated
Speaker 1: apes generally did not seem to like the graded carrot
Speaker 1: in any format, and they preferred cooked whole carrots to
Speaker 1: raw graded or cooked. Graded. Preferences were less clear in
Speaker 1: the mashed condition, though. They explained that some difference in
Speaker 1: results between the animal test groups for this experiment could
Speaker 1: have been influenced by neophobia, meaning fear of food in
Speaker 1: unfamiliar forms. Of course, you know, it's common among humans also,
Speaker 1: is that we typically we like foods that we're familiar with,
Speaker 1: and we're a little sometimes we're a little hesitant about
Speaker 1: foods that are unfamiliar. Yeah, like, for instance, the mashed carrot.
Speaker 1: How did he get mashed? Like? Yeah, but you know,
Speaker 1: if you were to encounter a mashed carrot in the wild,
Speaker 1: you know, the possibilities are not all that appetizing. Yeah, Okay.
Speaker 1: Experiments three of four and this one, the authors write,
Speaker 1: quote this experiment provided great apes with choices between raw
Speaker 1: and cooked meat and raw and cooked apple malice domestica.
Speaker 1: We controlled for neophobia in this experiment because one of
Speaker 1: these items was familiar in its raw form apple and
Speaker 1: the other was familiar in its cooked form meat. Thus,
Speaker 1: this juxtaposed preference is determined by taste, slash, texture, and
Speaker 1: those which would be determined by familiarity with the test items.
Speaker 1: And in this test, the apes definitely preferred cooked beef
Speaker 1: over raw beef, but they did not show a significant
Speaker 1: preference one way or the other about the apple. Again,
Speaker 1: it's funny thinking about how much this does or does
Speaker 1: not overlap with our own preferences. Though again, you know,
Speaker 1: human preferences you always have to wonder about being a
Speaker 1: product of cultural familiarity. But they say this shows that
Speaker 1: neophobia is not the only factor affecting preferences, because the
Speaker 1: apes were previously familiar only with raw apple, not cooked,
Speaker 1: and in this experiment, while they did not prefer the
Speaker 1: cook apple, they basically showed no difference in preference between
Speaker 1: the two. Now, I mean, in all of this, we
Speaker 1: have the saying about comparing apples and oranges, and here
Speaker 1: we're comparing apples and meat. Uh So, I don't know,
Speaker 1: it feels, I mean, not that there's really a way
Speaker 1: to improve on this. I'm not I don't mean to
Speaker 1: criticize the study, but it's like they're there are certain
Speaker 1: limitations in place with some of these comparisons. I feel,
Speaker 1: what do you mean that in that they're they're documenting
Speaker 1: different preferences by types of food like well like, for
Speaker 1: for instance, to say, well, we control for neophobia because
Speaker 1: the raw form apple will still looks like an apple,
Speaker 1: and the and the cooked meat still looks like the meat. Um,
Speaker 1: I don't know. I find that kind of a confusing rationale.
Speaker 1: Oh no, no, I think you're misunderstanding what they were doing.
Speaker 1: That they the neophobia thing was that they were familiar
Speaker 1: with cooked meat and with raw apple, but not with
Speaker 1: cooked apple or raw meat, and so they were trying
Speaker 1: to see, um, does this make any like, does it
Speaker 1: just conform to in both cases they prefer whatever they're
Speaker 1: previously familiar with. Okay, in the case of meat they did.
Speaker 1: In the case of apple not so much. But they
Speaker 1: did another test. The fourth experiment was a test for novelty.
Speaker 1: They said, quote, we tested chimpanzees that were not given
Speaker 1: meat as a regular part of their diet and as
Speaker 1: far as was known, had never eaten cooked meat. And
Speaker 1: so they're offered raw and cooked beef. And again they
Speaker 1: definitely preferred the cooked beef better than the raw. So
Speaker 1: in the final discussion they say, yeah, on average, and
Speaker 1: the foods they tested here, apes liked cooked food better
Speaker 1: than raw food. With some exceptions. They definitely prefer cooked beef, carrots,
Speaker 1: and sweet potatoes. They don't seem to have much of
Speaker 1: a preference on average between the cooked and raw forms
Speaker 1: of apple and white potato, And it seemed like in
Speaker 1: general just didn't really love white potato. And so they
Speaker 1: said neophobia might be a contributing factor to some of
Speaker 1: these results, But in experiments that tried to control for it,
Speaker 1: the ape still on average thought were pretty cool with
Speaker 1: the cooked version of food. But finally, this experiment had
Speaker 1: difficulty determining which characteristics of cooked foods the apes were
Speaker 1: responding to, you know, was it taste, was a texture,
Speaker 1: and so forth. And I do think that's an interesting question,
Speaker 1: like if animals other than humans also prefer cooked food
Speaker 1: in most cases, why is it like does it taste
Speaker 1: better to them? Is it like because it's softer to chew?
Speaker 1: I don't know. Maybe maybe we can come back to that,
Speaker 1: but anyway, the authors, you know, I mean, it's difficult
Speaker 1: too because we have to stop and realize, like when
Speaker 1: they're talking about the difference between a cooked and a
Speaker 1: raw white potato, the cooked white potato in this experiment
Speaker 1: is also not buttered and salted and you know, and
Speaker 1: prepared in these other ways. Like we're just stripping it
Speaker 1: down to the basics of what cooking does to this
Speaker 1: particular substance. So yeah, like if I were to you know,
Speaker 1: trying to set aside as much a you know, human
Speaker 1: complexity as possible, if I were presented with just a
Speaker 1: plain white potato and a raw potato, I mean, I'd
Speaker 1: like to think I would still prefer the pick potato
Speaker 1: to the raw potato, but without anything added to it,
Speaker 1: it's still not a very attractive offer. Like the potato
Speaker 1: is is something that is best um consumed when there
Speaker 1: are other things done to it, other seasonings, other styles
Speaker 1: of preparation, etc. The human mind cannot comprehend the depths
Speaker 1: of blandness of a of an unseasoned potato. Yeah. The
Speaker 1: carrot is really the one that that throws me the most,
Speaker 1: you know, like because it part of me would guess
Speaker 1: that there's nothing quite like the raw crispness of the carrot.
Speaker 1: Like the carrot is crisp, we identify that with with freshness.
Speaker 1: The carrot is sweet. Um, Like what is changed in
Speaker 1: cooking the carrot that that would that would make it
Speaker 1: more preferable, like, is it just it's just softer? Is
Speaker 1: it therefore seem riper in that sense? And then how
Speaker 1: does that affect the sweetness of it? Would the sweetness
Speaker 1: be in any way enhanced by the cooking? I think
Speaker 1: in general, I can't speak to carrots in particular. But
Speaker 1: the authors actually address this, They say so they talk
Speaker 1: about hypothesizing reasons that non human animals would prefer cooked
Speaker 1: food over raw food. And so one of the avenues
Speaker 1: they talk about is that cooking tends to cause chemical
Speaker 1: changes that increase the availability of flavor compounds that animals
Speaker 1: of all kinds seem to like. And so the two
Speaker 1: main examples they offer are available sugars and available glutamates.
Speaker 1: Now sugars, that's I'm pretty clear to understand, and we
Speaker 1: can know that from experience. I don't know about carrots.
Speaker 1: It probably conforms to this and carrots, but I think
Speaker 1: about like onions, like eating a raw onion versus eating
Speaker 1: a cooked onion. The cooked onion is so much sweeter
Speaker 1: like the you know, the amount of sugar you can
Speaker 1: taste in it is I don't know, it feels like
Speaker 1: it's exponential above a raw onion. And yeah, and that's
Speaker 1: that's a case too, where by cooking the onion your
Speaker 1: kind of blunting it's um it's effects like the chemical
Speaker 1: weaponry if the onion is diluted. Yeah, the sulfur compounds
Speaker 1: and stuff. Yeah, so that's sugars. Apparently lots of foods
Speaker 1: have more available sugars when you cook them, so they
Speaker 1: taste sweeter. Tons of different animals can differentiate the levels
Speaker 1: of sugar and a food they're eating, and obviously prefer
Speaker 1: the thing that tastes like it's got more sugar in
Speaker 1: it because it is probably going to be more nutritionally dense,
Speaker 1: it has more calories per same amount of food. The
Speaker 1: other thing is the available glutamates. Glutamates are you know,
Speaker 1: does that ring a bell? Maybe it's in the phrase
Speaker 1: monosodium glutamate, the msg flavor, the umami flavor. Glutamates are
Speaker 1: are largely responsible for savory flavors that we associate with
Speaker 1: meat and h and also things like tomatoes and hard
Speaker 1: cheeses like parmesan and soy sauce. Those those glutamates or
Speaker 1: that delicious savory umami feeling and that's not just for
Speaker 1: humans either. It turns out tons of animals. I think
Speaker 1: even some invertebrates can detect umami flavor through the presence
Speaker 1: of free glutamates, which are increased by cooking. And while
Speaker 1: I was reading about this, I did get really amused
Speaker 1: by the idea of like invert I don't know which
Speaker 1: invertebrates exactly, but like with lobsters really love soy sauce,
Speaker 1: would like there be centipedes who are going nuts for
Speaker 1: parmesan cheese anyway. Okay, So cooking often increases the availability
Speaker 1: of sugars and glutamates, So that's a favor increasing flavors
Speaker 1: that broadly lots of animals seem to like. And cooking
Speaker 1: tends to change the texture of food, usually by making
Speaker 1: it softer and easier to chew, and of course that
Speaker 1: appeals to the natural laziness present in all kinds of animals,
Speaker 1: not just us. So I think you could possibly argue
Speaker 1: that in a way, cooking, by massively increasing the presence
Speaker 1: of taste and texture qualities that our bodies and brains
Speaker 1: are already naturally on the look for, cooking could be
Speaker 1: viewed as a sort of ancient form of supernormal stimuli,
Speaker 1: like evolution shaped animal appetites to seek out nutritionally dense
Speaker 1: things like sugar and glutamates, which we detect by taste.
Speaker 1: Cooking causes chemical reactions that make more of those molecules available.
Speaker 1: Cooking softens food, appealing to our natural laziness. We don't
Speaker 1: like to spend an hour chewing on some tough bit
Speaker 1: of something to get it down. Tender food is better
Speaker 1: than tough food. So it's kind of like it's it's
Speaker 1: taking all these things we naturally seek out in foods
Speaker 1: we would find in our environment, but making them way
Speaker 1: more dependably present in all kinds of foods. But anyway,
Speaker 1: the authors of this study I was talking about, they
Speaker 1: say that their findings conformed other bits of pre existing
Speaker 1: evidence that many other non human animals on average prefer
Speaker 1: cooked food over raw food. For instance, they cite a
Speaker 1: book by Brewer in nineteen seventy eight alleging observation that
Speaker 1: chimpanzees in the wild would preferred eat seeds that have
Speaker 1: been naturally cooked or at least heated by wildfires. This
Speaker 1: was in a book by Brewer called The Chimpanzees of
Speaker 1: Mount Assyriek and well I thought that was interesting. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: like that it's kind of primordial cooking right there. And
Speaker 1: they cite findings of preferences in other mammals. For example,
Speaker 1: Bradshaw at All in two thousand found that once cats
Speaker 1: have been exposed to both raw and cooked meat, they
Speaker 1: tend to prefer the cooked version. And they point to
Speaker 1: Ramirez in nineteen ninety two, which found that rats preferred
Speaker 1: cooked starch over raw starch. But I was looking at
Speaker 1: another study that actually asked a complimentary question. So if
Speaker 1: the first question is do grade apes such as chimpanzees
Speaker 1: prefer cooked food over raw food, it seems in the
Speaker 1: majority of cases they do. The second question is do
Speaker 1: they in fact possess the ability to understand and the
Speaker 1: cooking process? Would they, in theory at least be able
Speaker 1: to cook for themselves? And the study that looked into
Speaker 1: this was by Felix Varniken and Alexandra g Rosati, published
Speaker 1: in Proceedings of the Royal Society b Biological Sciences, called
Speaker 1: Cognitive Capacities for Cooking in Chimpanzees. And this was twenty fifteen,
Speaker 1: and so the author's right here quote the transition to
Speaker 1: a cook to diet represents an important shift in human
Speaker 1: ecology and evolution. Cooking requires a set of sophisticated cognitive abilities,
Speaker 1: including causal reasoning, self control, and anticipatory planning. Do humans
Speaker 1: uniquely possess the cognitive capacities needed to cook food? And?
Speaker 1: Oh man, when I was reading that line about about
Speaker 1: cooking requiring self control and anticipatory planning, I felt a
Speaker 1: little bit cheapish because it immediately made me think about
Speaker 1: the problem of rob I don't know if you do
Speaker 1: this too, but you're like cooking something and you just
Speaker 1: kind of keep snacking on it. Yeah, I mean you
Speaker 1: encounter that definitely with your more complicated recipes where um,
Speaker 1: I don't know, say you've, like a shepherd's pie comes
Speaker 1: to mind. I've recently made a vegetarian shepherd's pie for
Speaker 1: the weekend Saint Patty's Day, And uh, yeah, once you've
Speaker 1: made like one part of it, like maybe you've made
Speaker 1: them the mashed potatoes, or you've made the you know,
Speaker 1: the the the meat and vegetable filling. Uh, you might
Speaker 1: be tempted, especially if you're a little bit hungry, you
Speaker 1: might be tempted do taste and keep tasting those portions
Speaker 1: before everything comes together is one. However, we tend if
Speaker 1: we're making shepherd's pie, we're usually not tempted to eat
Speaker 1: the raw potatoes or right or something like that before
Speaker 1: we begin cooking. But yeah, you know, like you've you've
Speaker 1: gone past the point where you're testing it for seasoning
Speaker 1: or whatever. Is just like okay, yeah, maybe have a
Speaker 1: little another bite of this, right, We're like, we're not
Speaker 1: going to go hog out eating a much of just
Speaker 1: raw flour right out of the bag. But of course
Speaker 1: once the cookie dough is prepared, that is where the
Speaker 1: temptation may set in. Well, it turns out some chimpanzees
Speaker 1: have the same problem, but they do better at these
Speaker 1: kinds of anticipation and delay of gratification tasks than you
Speaker 1: might expect. So this study address these questions by performing
Speaker 1: some experiments with our closest living relatives, chimpanzees. The authors
Speaker 1: conducted a total of nine studies on chimpanzees living in
Speaker 1: a nature sanctuary in the Democratic Republic of Congo, with
Speaker 1: the following results. They found. First of all, they replicated
Speaker 1: the finding that chimpanzees in general prefer cooked foods over
Speaker 1: the same foods in their raw form. Second finding is
Speaker 1: that chimpanzees in some way do understand that food is
Speaker 1: changed by the cooking process. They can tell the difference,
Speaker 1: and they understand something is happening when a raw food
Speaker 1: is exchanged for a cooked food. Third, they will delay
Speaker 1: gratification in order to upgrade a raw piece of food
Speaker 1: to a cooked version of that same food. Fourth, they
Speaker 1: will give up possession of a raw piece of food
Speaker 1: already in hand in order to transform it into a
Speaker 1: cooked food. And then fifth they will transport or store
Speaker 1: raw food in anticipation of later opportunities to exchange it
Speaker 1: for its cooked form. And an interesting note on the method.
Speaker 1: I was like, wait a minute, are they going to
Speaker 1: be giving apes like an oven or something. They did
Speaker 1: not do that, actually, because of course they didn't want
Speaker 1: to run the risk of the animals burning or otherwise
Speaker 1: injuring themselves. Instead, they used a plastic box with a
Speaker 1: false bottom that would exchange a piece of raw food
Speaker 1: for a piece of cooked food when shaken. Okay, I
Speaker 1: mean there are some limitations there, obviously, but that's essentially
Speaker 1: what an oven does, I guess, right, Well, obviously this
Speaker 1: is not the exact same thing as the cooking process.
Speaker 1: But they're trying to figure out, well, the chimpanzees at
Speaker 1: least figure out that there is a process they can
Speaker 1: put raw food through and get cooked food out. And
Speaker 1: will they delay gratification to go through that process? Yeah,
Speaker 1: and the answer is broadly. Yet the authors of the
Speaker 1: study right quote together, our results indicate that several of
Speaker 1: the fundamental psychological abilities necessary to engage in cooking may
Speaker 1: have been shared with the last common ancestor of apes
Speaker 1: and humans, predating the control of fire. And I was
Speaker 1: reading a write up of this article in The Guardian
Speaker 1: by Hannah Devlin that had some good supplemental details. One
Speaker 1: thing I wanted to read this paragraph definitely made me
Speaker 1: say all buddy out loud. It was quote the chimps
Speaker 1: continued to opt for the cooked option sixty percent of
Speaker 1: the time when they had to carry the food some
Speaker 1: distance in order to place it in the quote oven,
Speaker 1: although since they often carried it in their mouths, this
Speaker 1: was a challenge, and they sometimes appeared to eat the
Speaker 1: food on the way quote almost by accident. I sympathize
Speaker 1: with that the best of intentions. You know, sometimes that
Speaker 1: sweet potatoes in your mouth and you're just going to
Speaker 1: start you in the other thing was that, in terms
Speaker 1: of hoarding raw ingredients in the hopes that they could
Speaker 1: later be exchanged for cooked food, chimps in some cases
Speaker 1: hoarded up to twenty eight slices of sweet potato, and
Speaker 1: Varniken said to the Guardian quote delayed gratification is a
Speaker 1: problem for us as well. We also have a tendency
Speaker 1: to nibble at food before we finished cooking. So that's
Speaker 1: exactly what we were talking about. And they don't even
Speaker 1: have excuses for it, like you know, they can't use
Speaker 1: the Rationelle Well, I need to taste it to make
Speaker 1: sure that the flavor profiles appropriate. They need to make
Speaker 1: sure I don't need to add more salt or pepper. Right.
Speaker 1: But while I think this is interesting and it's informative
Speaker 1: to the question of when humans first started cooking their
Speaker 1: food and what effects that may have had on our
Speaker 1: ancestors one to two million years ago. Of course, the
Speaker 1: fact remains that there are no widely observed natural instances
Speaker 1: of animals in their natural habitat cooking foods by applying heat.
Speaker 1: But as we said earlier, heating is not the only
Speaker 1: form of cooking. Humans do all kinds of things to
Speaker 1: food that fall under the umbrella of cooking or cuisine
Speaker 1: that are unrelated to heat. So we take raw or
Speaker 1: cooked food items and we wash them, or we age them,
Speaker 1: or we ferment them, or we season them, we butcher
Speaker 1: them in certain ways, we skewer them or cut them
Speaker 1: up in special ways, we combine them together in interesting ways.
Speaker 1: And it's frankly surprising how many of these culinary manipulations
Speaker 1: and modifications that humans do are mirrored at some level
Speaker 1: throughout the animal world. And so I thought that's what
Speaker 1: we could explore for the remainder of this series, all
Speaker 1: the different ways that animals cook. And you had some
Speaker 1: really interesting examples. I think that had to do with
Speaker 1: maybe what could broadly be called some form of butchering
Speaker 1: or skewering of food as a preparation method. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I have a couple of good examples here, and one
Speaker 1: of them I think is a pretty pretty obvious one.
Speaker 1: Let's start with an amusing one, but perhaps the less
Speaker 1: involved one, and that is the case of the lamber
Speaker 1: guy or bearded vulture. So these birds are found in
Speaker 1: parts of Africa and Eurasia, and these birds are known
Speaker 1: for their amazing ability to eat and digest bones. And
Speaker 1: I think that's that's one of the reasons this is
Speaker 1: a great example bird to start with, because it already
Speaker 1: has robust anatomical features and internal abilities when it comes
Speaker 1: to the processing of of what is, you know, arguably
Speaker 1: a very difficult food. They're they're eating bones, but they
Speaker 1: have you know, they have these wonderful bites. They can
Speaker 1: bite through brittle bones, they can swallow large chunks of bones,
Speaker 1: and their digestive system can handle it. And yet there
Speaker 1: are still going to be challenges that are too great
Speaker 1: for them to handle without a little ingenuity. And so
Speaker 1: basically they have a butchering challenge ahead of them. You know.
Speaker 1: Butchering is what we do when we have a carcass
Speaker 1: and we don't just want to eat from the carcass.
Speaker 1: We can't cook the whole carcass. We have to take
Speaker 1: things apart, remove things that are inedible, are not desired
Speaker 1: or used for at another time or for another purpose,
Speaker 1: you know, all the various reasons you have to take
Speaker 1: a part of a carcass. Yeah, And in fact, external
Speaker 1: processing of animal carcasses is Hypothi's not known for sure,
Speaker 1: but it is hypothesized to be one of the earliest
Speaker 1: drivers of tool use in humans. That yeah, why would
Speaker 1: a human start using a flat rock as a cutting surface,
Speaker 1: maybe to get meat and tough hide parts and stuff
Speaker 1: off of an animal kill. Yeah, yeah, that We've talked
Speaker 1: about that on the show in the past when when
Speaker 1: talking about early tool use and evidence of how those
Speaker 1: tools are being used, you know, we can look for
Speaker 1: those signs on the bones of them having been scraped.
Speaker 1: In some cases, it's also evidence of cannibalism taking place
Speaker 1: in a given people versus you know, I'm just mere
Speaker 1: you know, murder or warfare. Oh, because of the signs
Speaker 1: of tool use on the brains. Yeah, yeah, so yeah,
Speaker 1: this is a case where the lambur guyer is going
Speaker 1: to occasionally find some chunks of bone that are too
Speaker 1: big to handle. They need to butcher it, they need
Speaker 1: to take it apart. But what tools are available to them. Well,
Speaker 1: luckily they can. They can pick up a pretty big bone,
Speaker 1: I think, I think they can basically take off with
Speaker 1: something equal to their own weight. So they've developed the
Speaker 1: practice of taking larger bones up high into the air
Speaker 1: and then dropping them onto rocks in order to break
Speaker 1: them open or shatter them. Sometimes it takes more than
Speaker 1: one try, and it's it's also a learned tactic, so
Speaker 1: generally it takes around seven years for one of these
Speaker 1: birds to master it. And you'll find examples of immature
Speaker 1: birds just dropping bones incorrectly, like they haven't really figured
Speaker 1: out exactly where you're supposed to drop them or or
Speaker 1: when you release them. But they'll get there. They'll eventually
Speaker 1: learn it, and it will open up new possibilities to
Speaker 1: them in terms of what they can eat. Oh that's
Speaker 1: my second al buddy of the episode, imagining the vulture
Speaker 1: is dropping the bones wrong. Yeah, nice job, Ted. Now
Speaker 1: they sometimes prey on live creatures as well, it's not
Speaker 1: just bones. And probably one of the more alarming and
Speaker 1: interesting examples is that of the tortoise. They may fly
Speaker 1: up with a tortoise that again has to be a
Speaker 1: tortoise that can physically carry up, but then they can
Speaker 1: drop that as well, treat it like an oversized bone
Speaker 1: in attempt to bust through those bony defenses. And this
Speaker 1: may ring a bell for for some of you out there,
Speaker 1: because this is of course how the Greek father of tragedy, Escalus,
Speaker 1: was said to have died in four fifty eight BCE.
Speaker 1: This according to the two accounts by Valerius Maximus and
Speaker 1: our old friend Plenty of the Elder. Now this may
Speaker 1: well just be a story. We have to drive them,
Speaker 1: but it basically goes like this. Yeah, Escalus goes to
Speaker 1: an oracle. He receives a prophecy that he will he
Speaker 1: will one day be killed by a falling object. So
Speaker 1: he's a smart guy. He says, well, nothing can fall
Speaker 1: on me if I'm outdoors. So he spends more and
Speaker 1: more time outdoors because yeah, there's nothing's going to fall
Speaker 1: from the roof. There no shelves. Sounds like a pretty
Speaker 1: safe debt. Yeah, that makes sense. It's like, if there's
Speaker 1: an earthquake, where do you want to be get away
Speaker 1: from buildings? You're gonna be out in the middle of
Speaker 1: a field, right. Unfortunately he is in the territory of
Speaker 1: the Lambur guy or it's thought that this may may
Speaker 1: be referring to Lambur guyers. Suddenly a great bird flies overhead.
Speaker 1: That great bird has a tortoise in its clutches, and
Speaker 1: it mistakes Escalus's head for a hard rock. A lot
Speaker 1: of times he's depicted as being, you know, bald on top,
Speaker 1: and so the bird drops the tortoise on him, killing
Speaker 1: him instantly. Again, possibly just a misunderstanding or an entertaining tale,
Speaker 1: But you'll find various accounts of deaths like this from
Speaker 1: the ancient world where you have to stop and ask,
Speaker 1: did they really die like this or is this just
Speaker 1: a nice story? This is the story that developed about
Speaker 1: their death. If true, he died by accidentally running a
Speaker 1: foul of an avian butchery process. Yes, I'm seeing vague
Speaker 1: connections to the Texas chainsaw masker. But now when it
Speaker 1: comes to a van butchery. The best example, of course,
Speaker 1: is the shrike. Now, if you've never seen a shrike,
Speaker 1: look up pictures of them. But they're generally, I mean,
Speaker 1: for me, they're an unimpressive looking bird. This is going
Speaker 1: to be different for you depending on how into birds
Speaker 1: you are and if you're a board birdwatcher, etc. But
Speaker 1: you know, they when you compare what they look like
Speaker 1: with what they do, they don't look quite as impressive
Speaker 1: in my opinion, because what they do is very impressive.
Speaker 1: They are thirty four species of shrike in four genera
Speaker 1: in the family Lanta day And if you're yeah, if
Speaker 1: you're not a bird enthusiast or a birdwatcher. You might
Speaker 1: just look at a shrike and say, well, that looks
Speaker 1: like a bird, but it's not what they look like.
Speaker 1: It's what they do. And basically what they do is
Speaker 1: they engage in a kind of a complex butchery situation.
Speaker 1: That's why we call them butcher birds. Lanta day is
Speaker 1: derived from the Latin lantius, which means butcher. So they
Speaker 1: don't wear little aprons or wrap morsels of meat and
Speaker 1: white butcher's paper. But what they do is they take
Speaker 1: insects and even small vertebrates that they kill and they
Speaker 1: impale them onto thorns like little lad draculas. Wow. And
Speaker 1: by the way, their methods. You know, it's one thing
Speaker 1: to get those various bugs and insects, but their method
Speaker 1: of killing small rodents is actually quite brutal, as pointed
Speaker 1: out by Hannah Waters in a twenty eighteen article for
Speaker 1: the Audubon Society. Quote, they grasp mice by the neck
Speaker 1: with their pointed beak, pinch the spinal cord to induce paralysis,
Speaker 1: and then vigorously shake their prey with enough force to
Speaker 1: break its neck. Oh that's interesting because it's like a
Speaker 1: bird version of a common predatory tactic. I think he
Speaker 1: used about like some big cats, right. I think we
Speaker 1: talked about this with Mary Roach in her book, talking
Speaker 1: about various kinds of big predatory cats that will attempt
Speaker 1: to bite along the back of the neck, which is
Speaker 1: how their characteristic attacks are identified in humans. Yeah. I
Speaker 1: have noticed this when I watched all the Jurassic Park
Speaker 1: movies with my son a year or so ago. Well,
Speaker 1: I forget which one it was in, but there's one
Speaker 1: in particular where you see the dinosaurs, the raptors in particular,
Speaker 1: killing by by clamping onto the back of the neck,
Speaker 1: which I thought was a nice touch. So anyway, but no, waits, no,
Speaker 1: but I've got a question. Okay, so this seems gratuitous.
Speaker 1: The bird just takes its prey, which normal bird would
Speaker 1: would just capture and then kill and then eat. But
Speaker 1: this bird impales it on a thorn on a plant.
Speaker 1: Why do we have any idea like what the purpose
Speaker 1: of this is? Yeah, and there seemed to be three
Speaker 1: different reasons, um and and I do have to acknowledge that, yes,
Speaker 1: this is exactly what you mentioned Texas Chainsaw, Maska earlier.
Speaker 1: This is exactly what happens in one of the kills
Speaker 1: in TCMU. He cracks a victim on the head, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, and take takes her out, but then he
Speaker 1: sticks her onto a meat hook. Uh. And that's that's
Speaker 1: basically what the shrike is doing. So there are three
Speaker 1: different reasons to do this that that researchers have identified.
Speaker 1: One and this is pretty neat and this is this
Speaker 1: is that it's about tearing the meat once. And let's
Speaker 1: say an insect is impaled on that thorn. You can
Speaker 1: then pull on the creature's body and you can rip it,
Speaker 1: cut it into smaller pieces. So it's leverage. It allows
Speaker 1: you to get better leverage on the for butchering the
Speaker 1: insect body. Right. It's it's not something we really do
Speaker 1: because we you know, we can use farm, you know,
Speaker 1: all these other tools. But imagine if you didn't have tools,
Speaker 1: if the thorn was the only tool. Um, because that's
Speaker 1: particularly I mean, that's exactly the situation that the bird
Speaker 1: is in. The Next reason it's for the shrike to
Speaker 1: put something on the on the thorn is just as
Speaker 1: a means of storing the meat. Uneaten portions of the
Speaker 1: meat can be left on the thorns and the bird
Speaker 1: can return later to eat some more m okay, as
Speaker 1: opposed to like storing it on the ground where something
Speaker 1: else is more likely to come along and take it. Right.
Speaker 1: And then finally, this is I think probably the most
Speaker 1: interesting of the three and one that I wasn't really
Speaker 1: familiar with that I was. I knew about the shrikes
Speaker 1: and about the category one and two here. But the
Speaker 1: third reason is to potentially detoxify the meat. And this
Speaker 1: is where we get more specific with some of the
Speaker 1: prey species that are targeted. Uh, it's a way of
Speaker 1: processing the meat of a toxic prey animal so that
Speaker 1: the bird can then eat it. So the bird will
Speaker 1: leave a body on the spike for like a period
Speaker 1: of one to two days, allowing the toxins in the
Speaker 1: body to degrade to the point where it can be
Speaker 1: safely eaten. Okay, So this might be the case in
Speaker 1: like an insect that has a poison within its body
Speaker 1: that has a fairly short chemical half life, and it's
Speaker 1: if it's not replenished by the live animals body, it's
Speaker 1: going to eventually degrade over time exactly. Yeah, and some
Speaker 1: for some specific examples, the loggerhead shrike does this with
Speaker 1: luber grasshoppers as well as with a species of beetle
Speaker 1: and moth, and great gray shrikes have been observed to
Speaker 1: do this with black cone headed grasshoppers. So so, yeah,
Speaker 1: the shrike is fascinating, not only because there's something kind
Speaker 1: of grizzly and wonderful about what it does, but yeah,
Speaker 1: by doing these three things with its practice, it's engaging
Speaker 1: in a in several different things that that we do
Speaker 1: with our cooking process, you know, the butchery of the meat,
Speaker 1: the butcher or they just the taking a part of
Speaker 1: a given element, the storing of that element, and then
Speaker 1: detoxifying that element. Now, we tend to we do this
Speaker 1: in a number of different ways. It may be cooking
Speaker 1: something and the cooking process, the heating process itself destroys
Speaker 1: the toxins. It also maybe, and we've touched on this
Speaker 1: before in our Dangerous Food series, it may also be
Speaker 1: about removing parts of the body or parts of the
Speaker 1: plant that would otherwise be toxic to us. But we
Speaker 1: have just specific cases of the shrike carrying this out
Speaker 1: just by leaving it on the thorn long enough. Well,
Speaker 1: I'm impressed. Yes, they are impressive creatures. All right, Well,
Speaker 1: we need to wrap up part one here, but we're
Speaker 1: going to be back next time with more of the
Speaker 1: quote cooking or otherwise, you know, meal prep, cuisine, behaviors
Speaker 1: of non human animals. Definitely want to talk about some
Speaker 1: interesting behaviors that have been called washing, but maybe more
Speaker 1: obscure in nature than that. Yeah, in some cases at
Speaker 1: least it's kind of mysterious. And we'll get into into
Speaker 1: all of that, plus plus other examples in the meantime. Certainly,
Speaker 1: right in, let us know what you think about what
Speaker 1: we discussed here today, especially if you have any direct
Speaker 1: experience with us. Have you observed the shrikes in the
Speaker 1: wild have Lammergeyer's drop tortoises at you, and you've luckily
Speaker 1: been able to get a less rocky looking hat over
Speaker 1: your head just in time. Do you prefer raw potatoes
Speaker 1: to cook? Oh? Yeah, yeah, I mean he's going to
Speaker 1: have some insight on all of that, so yeah, right in,
Speaker 1: let us know, we'd love to hear from you. In
Speaker 1: the meantime, if you would like to check out other
Speaker 1: episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind. Core episodes published
Speaker 1: on two season Thursdays. On Monday, we do a listener mail.
Speaker 1: On Wednesday, we do a short form monster fact or
Speaker 1: artifact episode, and on Fridays we do Weird House Cinema.
Speaker 1: That's our time to set aside most serious concerns and
Speaker 1: just talk about a strange film, huge things. As always
Speaker 1: to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you
Speaker 1: would like to get in touch with us with feedback
Speaker 1: on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic
Speaker 1: for the future, or just to say hello, you can
Speaker 1: email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind
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