>For Lévi-Strauss, cooking is a metaphor for the human transformation of nature into culture, but in the years since “The Raw and the Cooked,” other anthropologists have begun to take quite literally the idea that cooking is the key to our humanity. Earlier this year, Richard Wrangham, a Harvard anthropologist, published a fascinating book called “Catching Fire,” in which he argues that it was the discovery of cooking by our early ancestors — not tool-making or language or meat-eating — that made us human. By providing our primate forebears with a more energy-dense and easy-to-digest diet, cooked food altered the course of human evolution, allowing our brains to grow bigger (brains are notorious energy guzzlers) and our guts to shrink. It seems that raw food takes much more time and energy to chew and digest, which is why other primates of our size carry around substantially larger digestive tracts and spend many more of their waking hours chewing: up to six hours a day. (That’s nearly as much time as Guy Fieri devotes to the activity.) Also, since cooking detoxifies many foods, it cracked open a treasure trove of nutritious calories unavailable to other animals. Freed from the need to spend our days gathering large quantities of raw food and then chewing (and chewing) it, humans could now devote their time, and their metabolic resources, to other purposes, like creating a culture.

On a nit-picky note, sushi means seasoned rice – no need to worry about consuming it or vegan nori rolls. Raw fish is sashimi. I get that most people in the U. S. consider sushi to be fish, but if you’ve never eaten a creative nori roll at the vegan restaurant – Angelica’s – in Boone, NC, you haven’t lived it all yet!

I think too many people still confuse raw food diets with “all salad, all the time” – not even close. Last weekend, I had a great lunch at a raw restaurant in Boston. Walnut-veggie burger with a raw salsa and cashew cheese, on housemade onion bread with kale chips. I would never had made that at home, and it was delicious and so inventive.