The slow cooking and shortage of fuel meant it was hard for men to cook when they were out on the hunt, so during the day they would sometimes eat fresh fish raw, either the flesh or in the case of large fish, just the intestines. Hunters also made caches of excess fish, which they could recover later for a cold meal. However, even though these foods were uncooked they were affected by being stored: fish from the cache became “high”—in other words, smelly because they were partially rotten. Most people liked the strong taste. Jenness saw “a man take a bone from rotten caribou-meat cached more than a year before, crack it open and eat the marrow with evident relish although it swarmed with maggots.”
Though many raw foods were eaten for convenience, some were taken by choice. Blubber was often preferred raw. It was soft and could be spread easily over meat like butter. Other meats eaten raw were also soft, such as seal livers and kidneys and caribou livers. Occasionally there was evidence of more exotic tastes. Stefansson’s hosts were horrified to hear of a distant group, the Puiplirmiut, who supposedly collected frozen deer droppings off the snow and ate them like berries. They said that was a truly repulsive habit, and anyway it was a waste of a good dropping. Those pellets were a fine food, they said, when boiled and used to thicken blood soup. The only vegetable food that was regularly eaten raw was the lichen eaten by caribou, which the Copper Inuit ate when the lichen was partially digested. In summer they would take it directly from the rumen and eat it while cutting up the carcass. As the cold closed in during the fall, they were more likely to allow the full stomach to freeze intact with the lichens inside. They would then cut it into slices for a frozen treat.
The Inuit probably ate more raw animal products than other societies, but like every culture the main meal of the day was taken in the evening, and it was cooked. In a scene captured by anthropologist Jiro Tanaka, the !Kung of the Kalahari illustrate the typical pattern for hunter-gatherers of a light breakfast and snacks during the day, followed by an evening meal. “Finally, as the sun begins to set, each woman builds a large cooking fire near her hut and commences cooking. . . . The hunters return to camp in the semidarkness, and each family eats supper around the fire after darkness has fallen. . . . Only in the evening does the whole family gather to eat a solid meal, and indeed people consume the greater part of their daily food then. The only exception is after a big kill, when a large quantity of meat has been brought back to camp: then people eat any number of times during the day, keeping their stomachs full to bursting, until all the meat is gone.”
The Inuit consumed raw food mostly as a snack out of camp, as is typical of human foragers. In 1987, anthropologist Jennifer Isaacs described which foods Australian aborigines ate raw or cooked. Although foragers sometimes lit fires in the bush to cook quick meals such as mud crabs (a particular favorite), the majority of animal items were brought back to camp to be cooked. A few items, such as a species of mangrove worm, were always eaten raw, and these were not brought back to camp. Isaacs reported three types of food that were eaten sometimes raw and sometimes cooked—turtle eggs, oysters, and witchetty grubs—and in each case they were eaten raw by people foraging far from camp but were cooked if eaten in camp. Most fruits are preferred raw and are eaten in the bush, whereas roots, seeds, and nuts are brought back to camp to be cooked. Everywhere we look, home cooking is the norm. For most foods, eating raw appears to be a poor alternative demanded by circumstance.
What happens to people who are forced to eat raw diets in wild habitats, such as lost explorers, castaways, or isolated adventurers simply trying to survive despite losing their ability to cook? This category of people offers a third test of how well humans can utilize raw food. You might think that when humans are forced to eat raw, they would grumble at the loss of flavor but nevertheless be fine. However, I have not been able to find any reports of people living long term on raw wild food.
The longest case that I found of survival on raw animal foods lasted only a few weeks. In 1972 a British sailor, Dougal Robertson, and his family lost their boat to killer whales in the Pacific and were confined to a dinghy for thirty-eight days. They began with a few cookies, oranges, and glucose candies. By the seventh day they were forced to eat what they could catch on a line. They spent their last thirty-one days at sea mostly eating raw turtle meat, turtle eggs, and fish. There were occasional treats, such as chewing the liver and heart of a shark, but their staple was a “soup” of dried turtle in a mix of rainwater, meat juice, and eggs.
They caught more food than they could eat, and they survived in good cheer. Indeed, their diet suited them so well that by the end of their ordeal, Robertson reported that their physical condition was actually better than when they had begun their journey. Sores that had been present when their boat was sunk had healed, and their bodies were functioning effectively. The only problem was that nine-year-old Neil, despite being given extra portions of bone marrow, was disturbingly thin.
And all were hungry. They “enjoyed the flavour of the raw food as only starving people can.” Their fantasies focused on cooked food. By the twenty-fourth day, Robertson recorded, “our daydreams had switched from ice cream and fruit to hot stews, porridge, steak and kidney puddings, hotpots and casseroles. The dishes steamed fragrantly in our imaginations and as we described their smallest details to each other we almost tasted the succulent gravies as we chewed our meager rations.” The Robertsons’ raw diet supported survival but it also brought a sense of starvation.
Their resourcefulness enabled them to emerge from a terrifying situation in fine condition. They may have been hungry and thinner, but they were apparently not starving to the point of danger. Their experience shows that with abundant food, people can survive well on a raw animal-based diet for at least a month. But people sometimes survive with no food at all for a month, provided they have water. The lack of any evidence for longer-term survival on raw wild food suggests that even
in extremis
, people need their food cooked.
The case that comes closest to long-term survival on raw wild food is that of Helena Valero. This exceptional woman was a Brazilian of European descent who reportedly survived in a remote forest for some seven months in the 1930s. She knew the jungle well because at about age twelve she had been kidnapped by Yanomamö Indians. She became a member of their tribe but her experience was very hard. One day, after her life was threatened, she escaped her captors. She took a firebrand wrapped in leaves so she could cook, but after a few days a heavy rain drenched it. Unwilling to return to Yanomamö life, she wandered alone, fireless and increasingly hungry, until she found an abandoned banana plantation. Valero was lucky because villagers had planted the trees in a dense grove. There, she said, she survived by eating raw bananas. She counted the seven months by the passage of the moon. Valero did not record her condition at the end of her exile, but she was eventually found by Yanomamö. She returned to the comforts of village life, married twice, had four children, and eventually feared for her children’s lives and escaped again at about age thirty-five. She never found happiness in Brazilian society.
Valero’s tale could not be verified, but if anyone were to survive on raw food in the wild, it makes sense that they would have the fortune to have an abundant supply of a high-calorie domesticated fruit. Bananas are often touted as nature’s most perfect food.
In more ordinary circumstances starvation is a rapid threat when eating raw in the wild. Anthropologist Allan Holmberg was at a remote mission station in Bolivia in the 1940s when a group of seven Siriono hunter-gatherers arrived from the forest. They were so hungry and emaciated that, as one of them told Holmberg, if they had not arrived when they did they might have died. This group had been part of a band that had thrived in the rain forest until they were taken to a government school. They had been so resentful of their forced removal that they had escaped with the aim of returning to their ancestral homeland. To avoid capture they had moved fast, walking even in heavy rain. Without proper cover the smoldering logs they were carrying were extinguished. After that the little group was reduced to a raw diet of wild plants until they were rescued after three weeks. They walked less than five miles per day and even though they knew the forest intimately and found raw plants to eat, they still could not obtain sufficient energy from their diets. Two of the men had bows and there was lots of game, so they might have done better but for a taboo on raw meat, which they claimed not to eat under any conditions. But even hunter-gatherers often live well with little meat for weeks on end, as long as they cook. The Siriono experience suggests that raw diets are dangerous because they do not provide enough energy.
In 1860 Robert Burke and William Wills led an ill-fated expedition from southern to northern Australia. When they ran out of food they asked the local Yandruwandha aborigines for help. The Yandruwandha were living on the abundant nardoo plant. They pounded nardoo seeds into a bitter flour, washed it, and then cooked it. The explorers liked the flour but apparently omitted the washing and cooking. The result was disaster. “I am weaker than ever,” wrote Wills, “although I have a good appetite, and relish the nardoo much, but it seems to give us no nutriment.” Burke and Wills died from poisoning, starvation, or both. However, they had a companion who survived and joined the Yandruwandha, ate lots of cooked nardoo flour, and was in excellent condition when he was rescued ten weeks later.
The cases I have listed are exceptional because it is rare for people to even attempt to survive on raw food in the wild. When Thor Heyerdahl took a primitive raft across the Pacific to test his theories about prehistoric migrations, he had a primus stove with him and one of his crew was a cook. When an airplane crashed in the Chilean Andes in 1972 and stranded twenty-seven people for seventy-one days, the survivors resorted to cannibalism and cooked the meat. When the whale ship
Essex
went down in the Pacific and its sailors cannibalized one another in small lifeboats, they cooked on stone-bottomed fires. Several Japanese soldiers lived alone in the jungle after World War II. One of them, Shoichi Yokio, stayed in Guam until 1972, surviving on fruits, snails, eels, and rats. But he did not eat them raw. Life in his underground cave depended on his smoke-blackened pots, just as it did for all such holdouts.
Perhaps the most famous real-life castaway was Alexander Selkirk, the model for Robinson Crusoe. In 1704, after quarrelling with the captain of his ship and rashly demanding to be put ashore, Selkirk began more than four years alone on the island of Más a Tierra, 670 kilometers (416 miles) west of Chile in the Pacific Ocean. He had his Bible, a musket with a pound of powder, some mathematical instruments, a hatchet, a knife, and a few carpenter’s tools. He ended up very wild, dancing with his tamed goats and cats and barely recognizable as human. But when his gunpowder was nearly spent, “he got fire by rubbing two sticks of Piemento Wood together upon his knee.” He was able to cook throughout his time in isolation.
Raw-foodists, it is clear, do not fare well. They thrive only in rich modern environments where they depend on eating exceptionally high-quality foods. Animals do not have the same constraints: they flourish on wild raw foods. The suspicion prompted by the shortcomings of the Evo Diet is correct, and the implication is clear: there is something odd about us. We are not like other animals. In most circumstances, need cooked food.
CHAPTER 2
The Cook’s Body
“Domestication of fire probably reacted on man’s physical development as well as on his culture, for it would have reduced some selective pressures and increased others. As cooked food replaced a diet consisting entirely of raw meat and fresh vegetable matter, the whole pattern of mastication, digestion, and nutrition was altered.”
—KENNETH OAKLEY,
Social Life of Early Man
A
lthough humans fare poorly on raw diets nowadays, at some time our ancestors must have utilized bush fruits, fresh greens, raw meat, and other natural products as efficiently as apes do. What can account for the change? Why, given all the obvious advantages of being able to extract large amounts of energy from raw food, have humans lost this ancient ability?
In theory an evolutionary mishap might be responsible for this failure of our biology: the genetic coding for a well-adapted digestive system could have been lost by chance. But a failure of evolutionary adaptation is an unlikely explanation for something as widespread and labor-intensive as cooking. Natural selection mostly generates exquisitely successful designs, particularly for features that are as important and in such regular use as our intestinal systems. We can expect to find a compensatory benefit that has been made possible by our inability to utilize raw food effectively.
Evolutionary trade-offs are common. Compared to chimpanzees, we climb badly but we walk well. Our awkwardness in trees is due partly to our having long legs and flat feet, but those same legs and feet enable us to walk more efficiently than other apes. In a similar way, our limited effectiveness at digesting raw food is due to our having relatively small digestive systems compared to those of our cousin apes. But the reduced size of our digestive systems, it seems, enables us to process cooked food with exceptional proficiency.