I'm a big fan of evolution. Among the fantastic things it has gifted me – the ability to walk without dragging my knuckles, central heating, Sky Plus – my favourite is the silver cupboard with the knobs on that I keep in the kitchen. It's called an oven, and the mere fact I own one is proof that I am no longer a hairy-bummed ape, who nests in trees and pulls flies out of his mate's hair and eats them (unless she's been really sweet to me and asks nicely).
We are humans, ergo, we cook. The celebrated anthropologist Richard Wrangham recently published a whole book, Catching Fire, which argues it is cookery which made us human. Heating food makes it possible to extract the maximum amount of energy from ingredients. That meant our ancestors could waste less time foraging for stuff to keep them going and could instead concentrate on really cool things like inventing machinery, developing language, and becoming artists so they had something to talk about. Without the appliance of fire to food we really would still be hanging about in trees doing the fly-eating thing. Wrangham's argument is rigorous and compelling. You would have to be an A-grade, gold medal-winning, premier league arse of mammoth proportions to dismiss it as bunk.
Which brings me to the raw foodies, those swivel-eyed enemies of all that is edible who swear that the route to human salvation lies in taking an evolutionary step backwards and not cooking. God, but I hate them. I hate their self-satisfied, smug mien. I hate their dippy thinking and their delusional, anti-science worldview. Hunting the web for quackery is a little like trying to get wet by jumping in a river: unavoidable. Still, a few minutes scanning the rubbish spouted by raw foodies can be useful, if only to give you an extra jaw work-out from the grinding of teeth.
They will tell you there is a nut, the eating of which, will instantly cut your risk of developing cancer by 50%. This is bollocks. They will tell you a raw food diet will increase your energy levels, when it will do the opposite. They will tell you it will make your skin glow, your asthma subside, and bring world peace. I wish I could tell you I made the last one up but I didn't.
What they won't tell you is this: the food is dull. Look, I eat salad, quite a lot of it, as it happens. No one makes a green salad like me. I knock up a terrific red and green pepper salad, and the wonders I can perform with beans, white onions, parsley and a scoop of Dijon mustard are frankly embarrassing. But a diet of this and this alone, is like seeing in black and white, or hearing without any bass tones. It's an approximation of human life, not the real thing. Raw tomatoes are terrific; the sauces they produce when cooked are so very much better. Give me a sticky-bottomed oven dish of roasted carrots and onions, salsify and butternut squash, caramelised by the appliance of heat and quality oil. A big hello to steak tartare; a hoo-bloody-rah to a grilled rib-eye, the colour of an oak table, the fat just beginning to run. And sure, a salad on the side. But do not try telling me the meaning of life lies in that side dish. It doesn't. Cooking is why we clambered out of the trees. And I for one am not going back up there. OFM
jay.rayner@observer.co.uk
