The rise of cooking

Unless you want to subsist on a diet of ceviche and sushi, cooking is pretty much the bee’s knees when it comes to turning ingredients into food. But how did we figure it all out?

There are two possibilities as I see it. One. A wild pig gets itself caught up and roasted in a forest fire. Picking through the embers, an intrepid hunter gatherer gets a good whiff of roast pork, rips off a nicely baked haunch and decided there and then that steak tartare is for the birds.

Two. A kid, mucking about with the prehistoric version of a box of matches and a  can of petrol, sets fire to everything that isn’t moving, and some things that are. Having singed  the family’s saber-toothed tiger and gotten a telling off from his mother he does what every self-respecting teenager does, he sulks. This he does in the not-yet time honored tradition of slumping himself down in front of the family fire in a huff. He forgets two things, the rock he sits on has a lump of soften grass seeds on it. He flattens them into a patty and at the same time the tomatoes that he has in the back pocket of his loin cloth are crushed and spread across the patty of mushy seeds.

Realizing that he has just condemned his family to starvation, he tosses the tomato smeared patty into the fire where it lands on a hot flat rock and becomes the first pizza and he the first pizza delivery boy.