The Why of Cooking

Stolen wholecloth from Food Timeline, with my thanks for their indulgence.

Why did humans start cooking their food?
 
Excellent question! Food historians, archaeologists, and paleontolgists do not have exact an answer due to the age of the evidence. They do, however, have theories:
 
"For hundreds of thousands of years the evolving human race had eaten its food raw, but at some time between the first deliberate use of fire--in Africa in 1,400,000BC or Asia in 500,000BC (depending on which theory happens to be the flavour of the month)-and the appearance of the Neanderthals on the prehistoric scene, cooking was discovered. Whether or not it came as a gastronomic revelation can only be guessed at, but since heat helps to release protein and carbohydrate as well as break down fibre, cooking increases the nutritive value of many foods and makes edible some that would otherwise be inedible. Improved health must certainly have been one result of the discovery of cooking, and it has even been argued, by the late Carleton Coon, that cooking was the decisive factor in leading man from a primarily animal existence into one that was more fully human'. Whatever the case, by all the laws of probability roasting must have been the first method used, its discovery accidental. The concept of roast meat could scarcely have existed without knowledge of cooking, nor the concept of cooking without knowledge of roast meat. Charles Lamb's imaginary tale of the discovery of roast pork is not, perhaps, too far off the mark. A litter of Chinese piglets, some stray sparks from the fire, a dwelling reduced to ashes, and unfamiliar but interesting smell, a crisp and delectable assault on the taste buds... Taken back a few millennia and relocated in Europe this would translate into a piece of mammoth, venison or something of the sort falling in the campfire and having to be left there until the flames died down. But however palatable a sizzling steak in ice-age conditions, the shrinkage that resuts from direct roasting would scarcely recommend itself to the hard-worked hunter, so that a natural next step, for tough roots... as for meat, would be slower cooking in the embers or on a flat stone by the side of the fire. Although the accidental discovery of roasting would have been perfectly feasible in the primitive world, boiling was a more sophisticated proposition."
---Food in History, Reay Tannahill [Three Rivers:New York] 1988 (p. 13-14) [NOTE: This book contains much more information on early cooking techniques than can be paraphrased here. Your librarian will be happy to help you find a copy.]
 
"Homo erectus may have used fire to a very limited extent some 300,000 years ago, but the evidence is sparse and questionable. Fire's general use, according to both paleontological and archaeolgical records, began only about 40,000 to 50,000 years ago...The use of fire, extended to food preparation, resulted in a great increas of plant food supply. All of the major domesticated plant foods, such as wheat, barley, rice, millet, rye, and potatoes, require cooking before they are suitable for human consumption. In fact, in a raw state, many plants contain toxic or indigestible substances or antinutrients. But after cooking, many of these undesirable substances are deactivated, neutralized, reduced, or released; and starch and other nutrients in the plants are rendered absorbable by the digestive tract. Thus, the use of fire to cook plant foods doubtless encouraged the domsetication of these foods and, thus, was a vitally important factor in human cultural advancement."
---Cambridge World History of Food, Kenneth F. Kiple and Kriemhild Conee Ornelas [Cambridge University Press:Cambridge] 2000 (p. 1571)
 
"Just as we do not know how, where or by whome fire was first domesticated, we cannot really tell anything about the way food was cooked in the most distant Paleolothic period. We can only base conjectures on the customs of existing primitive peoples. Bones and walnut or hazelnut shells have been found on excavated sites, but there is no means of knowing whether they are the remains of cooked meals, the debris of fires lit for heat, or even the remnants of incincerated raw waste matter...[researchers] are inclined to think the meat was roasted, from the evidence of Mousterain sites in Spain and the Dordogne..."
---History of Food, Maguelonne Toussaint-Samat [Barnes & Noble:New York] 1992 (p. 90)
 
"Food has long been baked in coals or under heated rocks, steamed inside animal stomachs and leaves, boiled in rockpots by heated stones, and so forth. An oven could be as simple as a hole in the ground, or a covering of heated stones. However, improved textures and flavours may not have been the reason fire was first controlled. People could have employed fire to keep wild beasts at bay, to trap them, to scare them out or to create open grassland, where tender shoots and leaves would be more accessible. People have long used fire to harden wooden weapons, and to keep warm at night. But even these uses, while not cooking in the narrow sense, improve the cooks' supplies, expanding the human niche."
---A History of Cooks and Cooking, Michael Symons [University of Chicago:Urbana] 2000 (p. 221)
 
"French prehistorian Catherine Perles accepts that we share many aspects of feeding with other animals: other animals carry food to their lairs or transform it before consumption. However, she says, we transform food on a different level. The human species prepares its food by heat...and combines ingredients...She proposes that the culinary act distinguishes the human species, and is not just a symbol of, but a factor in, that very humanisation...Cooking is highly intentional...the culinary act is essentially sharing."
---A History of Cooks (p. 213)
 
Recommended reading (general history of cooking):

• Food in History/Reay Tannahill
• History of Food/Maguelonne Toussaint-Samat
• Food: A Culinary History/Flandrin & Montanari
• Cambridge World History of Food/Kiple & Ornelas
• The Kitchen in History/Molly Harrison