STORY OF ROOTS

Hunters & Gatherers

According to National Geographic hunter-gatherer culture is a type of subsistence lifestyle that relies on hunting and fishing animals and foraging for wild vegetation and other nutrients like honey, for food. From the day humans started walking on earth until approximately 12,000 years ago, all humans practiced hunting-gathering. Because agriculture was not in the books, it was like strategic hunting, and foraging the bushes until the population could not sustain to live in the region. Then it is moving day. For many millennia humans had the nomadic eating habits or trends in modern terms.

Fire

When did we, humans, started cooking the food and why? According to a study by Herculano-Houzel (The Human Advantage: A New Understanding of How Our Brain Became Remarkable), raw food nutrients are harder to absorb whereas cooking the food starts the degrading process and our digestive track easily separates the nutrients and uses them faster to provide energy for the system. Coming all the way to today, she also argues that some new trends steer the wheel towards raw food for the reasons of losing weight. Imagine you are a gatherer in the 21^st century and eat fruits and veggies raw, some of us may have even tried this method. It is very unlikely not to feel starved all the time because the raw food we are digesting are harder for us to get nutrients from hence causes weight loss. Either it is ages ago or today, cooking food comes naturally to get the most out of the food we eat as our bodies evolve and need more energy to sustain.

Comes cooking, more and easier nutrients, more energy led humans to cook their food before consumption. The first cooking trend is the simple bare fire. When it started is a mystery sometime between 2 million years to 400.000 years ago without any physical evidence, meaning humans did not modify any methods for cooking food during that period. It is believed that only open fire and some heated stones were used to cook. On archaeological sites from around 30.000 bc remains of animal bones are found in earth made domes which are thought to be ovens for roasting and slow cooking methods (Why (and How, Exactly) Did Early Humans Start Cooking?). For a very long-time humans did have complex equipment for hunting, gathering, eating but not for cooking until the earth made ovens were a thing.

Throughout the days of history, open fire cooking trend had many names and diversities across regions and nations. It was “Barbecoa” for the Spanish, “Barbecue” for North America, “Barbie” for the Aussies, “Braai” for the South African, “Yakitori” for the Japs, “Mangal” for the Turks and many more (A Guide to Different Types of Barbecue). Some styles used meats with marination of herbs and spices, some preferred it in the meats raw form. The equipment has changed over the years and shaped according to the type of cooking but the fire remained as the common aspect. Food relied for the longest period of time as a cooking method just on the heat and flames of an open fire. Even today according to WHO 3 billion people are still continuing to use the open fire cooking technique.