The importance of cooking

Not just for the joy of it, but how cooking has affected human evolution.

Richard Wrangham's Catching Fire. - By Christine Kenneally - Slate Magazine:

"the more cooked food we ate, the less industrial-strength digestion we had to do, and the smaller our guts became. In the same way that our bodies evolved to better walk on two legs, our bellies changed to better handle well-done over rare. This had two enormous payoffs. First, as our guts got smaller, this freed up energy for our brains to operate on a larger and larger scale. .. Second, as we spent less time eating, we had more time to do other things with those rapidly expanding brains."