Santa Claus, the infinite giver. Photo by Donna Turner Ruhlman.
It's arguable that
cooking made us human. Cooked food gave us a huge amount of calories, which made us healthy and we spread our genes and our brains grew and grew. But most important, cooking our own food forced us to
work together, to
cooperate. Because we learned to cooperate, we grew
in groups, and these groups spread across the world and thrived, while others species (Neanderthals, for example) did not.
This is important enough to reiterate: in order to make use of the extraordinary benefits that cooked food gave us, the stuff that made us human, we had to work together. Food taught us how to
cooperate.
But
cooperate is a boring word, a weak word with oblique connotations of subservience, compromise, giving in—everything ...
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