Cooking Hypothesis

Gratefulness is an important part of a happy life, but are we right to be thankful for an ill-gotten bounty?  In a country of 300 million people, a turkey on every table (or a chicken in every pot) means that many birds live hard and die fast.  They are also plucked, gutted, inspected, and packaged as quickly as possible, leaving human workers to pay the price.  On the Pump Handle, Celeste Monforton debunks the National Chicken Council's claim that working in a poultry processing plant is as safe as making omelets at a country club.  According to Bureau of Labor Statistics data, poultry…

Catching Fire is apparently a very popular book and/or movie that everyone is very excited about. But Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human is a different a book about some interesting research I was involved in about the origin of our genus, Homo. You can pick up a copy of our paper on this page. We call it "The Cooking Hypothesis." The basic idea can be summarized with these points: 1) Cooking food transformed human ecology. Many potential foods in the environment can't be consumed by humans (or apes in general) without cooking. But adding cooking to our species-specific technology,…