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I heard an interesting tidbit in a radio interview (sorry, can’t remember what show) with Richard Wrangman, author of the new book Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human

His (possibly too catch-all) thesis is that human evolution… what really accelerated us towards intelligence, tool manipulation, and so on, has been profoundly shaped by the development of cooking. Without going much deeper I’ll just say that without having read the book it sounds plausible enough.

But what was interesting to me was this little piece he kind of tossed in where he said, approximately, that where previously very early men and women had been obliged to spend much of their days seeking and chewing raw foods, once cooking was developed it meant that a woman, staying at home, could process enough food to keep a man. Which, he said, let men go out and do other stuff.

Since I identify with Sulamuth Firestone’s (genuinely) radical feminist thesis that domestic gender oppression was the original form of oppression (in the sense that it could occur equally in castle, hovel, or cave) I’m untroubled by Wrangman’s proposition. Again it sound plausible enough.

What’s interesting though, is that from his perspective it’s not that men “domesticated” women into cooking in order to provide themselves free labor, or that men heroically went hunting in order to feed the whole family (including the dependent partner and offspring) by “bringing home the bacon.” Instead, at least the way Wrangman put it in that interview, women undertook cooking in order to attract and keep men! Which, all things considered (note: the interview was not on All Things Considered) may not have worked out so well in the long run but in the short run might have made a great deal of sense.

The fly in the ointment being the classical surplus-labor argument that once freed of individual subsistence provision men could go out and, among other things, decide they were entitled to come home to a good meal instead of, oh, say, feel darn lucky to have someone to come home to. They’d also have time to talk, politic, conduct warfare, and generally hone their skills for organization and violence such that over time women no longer had a say in the matter of who should provide and who should be provided for.

So! Is the story true? I dunno. I regularly mock other evolutionary-psychology/sociobiology “just so” stories so I’m not going to roll over and celebrate this one just because it appeals to my sensibilities. But it does appeal to my sensibilities. Not least because it’s the first time I’ve heard an established male anthropologist or paleoanthropologist give women credit for initiating civilization, let alone evolution from neotenous apes to human beings.

This would be, incidentally, an invisible 4th-dimension to sociobiologists since it goes against contemporary standards of gender wherein all human behavior is driven by men trying to get pussy from otherwise reluctant women, and making sure women’s adultery didn’t, well, adulterate their “large investments” in helping to rear their own, as opposed to interloper’s, offspring.

Worse for the standard model of ev-psych/sociobiology, there could even be a sexual component to women taking up cooking for two in order to keep men hanging around. There weren’t light bulbs back then, so they didn’t need men to help change them. And by definition if they were able to gather and cook enough food to feed prospective partners then they weren’t driven by that need for male “providers.” So what could they have wanted to keep men around for?

No, couldn’t be! Nowhere in The Flintstones (sociobiology’s source for primary research) does Wilma keep Fred around for the occasional roll in the hay. So it can’t be true.

Er, well, it could be true. It just doesn’t fit any of the standard models.

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Heck, I’ll even do a little theory unification here and say those well-fed-looking paleolithic “venus” figurines they keep digging up and calling cave-man porn? If Richard Wrangman is even fractionally correct then a more likely explanation would be that the figurines served as reminders not so much hot sex as hot supper!

(Doh! Money quote via Tyler Cowen’s preview of Wrangman’s book “...a bachelor is a sorry creature in subsistence societies…”

And for the record, modern anthropologists say in most “primitive” pre-agrarian, hunter-gatherer societies women generally contribute anywhere from 50% to more than 90% of calories consumed by the community. So again, Wrangman at least has the benefit of plausibility. Which is more than can be said about the latest ev-psych “research” trying to winnow meaning out of statistical noise about men’s allegedly “evolved” preferences for waist/hip ratios of exactly .7.)

Going a step further into “evolutionary” explanations for everything, you know all the myriad theories about why women have bigger boobs, bellies, butts, thighs, and in-general curves compared to other primates? What if the appeal for men wasn’t so much youth or virginity or (for boobs) “this end up” reminders of buttocks for really (really!) primitive men. What if curves on women are “meant” to singal an increased likelihood that not just her offspring but her partner won’t starve?

Hey, you can make up all sorts of sociobiological/ev-psych “just so” stories that don’t look much like today’s dominant paradigms at all!

Images via the very neat Neatorama.com

I heard on the radio about some mashup of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and a zombie novel. It rang a bell and sure enough.

It seems to me that the problem with zombies, and what makes them such a great pop icon/metaphor, is that they want to eat your brains, sure, but it doesn’t make them feel any better when they do!

And they’re so distracted by their quest for something that doesn’t help they never stop to reflect on what they could be doing differently instead.

Going one step further, the humans being chased around by the zombies rarely reflect on what they could give the zombies instead. Ok, there’s some discussion of this in the original Omega Man, at least the book version, and I think maybe the Will Smith movie remake. But still.

Not sure why reading this made me think of that.

Photo by Flickr user stu_spivack. Used under a Creative Commons license.

Political blogger Ezra Klein, who sometimes moonlights about food on the weekends, wrote a cool point about cooking.

I like the basic idea behind this Grist article coaxing folks to incorporate the farmer’s market into their daily lives, but I don’t think it quite demystifies the task.

“Many of my friends want to shop at the farmers market, but they complain that they end up with drawers of rotting produce. It’s a common problem with an easy solution: a well-stocked pantry.” Sort of. Having staples is the first step. Most people who go to farmer’s markets, however, have some dry pasta at home. Even so, I know a lot of folks who walk by the produce stands and freeze: What the hell do you do with kale, anyway? Or with Swiss chard? And if you don’t come to the farmer’s market with a recipe in hand, won’t you then have to go back out later for more ingredients?

Here’s the thing: Just about nothing at the farmer’s market is specific to itself or its own recipes. Buy whatever. Buy anything. There are relatively few combinations of grain, vegetable, and protein that don’t work, and having a couple types of grains on hand will generally ensure you never have to face one of them down. That’s the point of the pantry. It lets you buy anything fresh, because you already have the basics at home.

He said it here.

I can’t say what a great point this is. My big breakthrough happened in college when, as always too broke to eat even in my college cafeteria I dashed home between classes to whip up a box of supermarket-brand macaroni and cheese only to discover the cupboard was… pretty much bare. In a bit of a panic to whip something up and still make it to class I boiled some dry spaghetti and then, at the last minute, decided to grate a bit of cheddar cheese from the fridge into the drained noodles. I sprinkled a bit of butter and then a splash of milk as the cheese melted in the residual heat, stirred, added a dash of salt and a twist of pepper from a pepper mill and… it was the best mac and cheese I’d ever eaten in my life. And incrementally quicker and cheaper than even the boxed stuff! I think I ate that stuff every day for lunch for the next five months. It was only several years later, when in a similar rush I discovered there was no cheddar or butter and tried… parmesan cheese and olive oil. If it took forever to try something besides cheddar it took only till the next day to try adding a few dried basil flakes to go with the parmesan and olive oil. A bit of cream instead of milk and more parmesan and I suddenly had a better-than-average-restaurant alfredo sauce! Again in as much time as it took to whip up a box of Kraft knockoff… and on a starving-student budget, schedule and skill level!

Which I think illustrates Klein’s point: sure, it might be nice to have a degree from Culinary Institute of America, a kitchen full of copper and chrome, Anthony Bourdan’s hair, and Rachel Ray’s travel budget… but if you look at what you actually need the list is a lot shorter: a little olive oil, chocolate, and maybe some wine, a few good utensils, somewhere to store things till you need them, clean surfaces to work on, something to heat things up and cool them down, something to keep things sanitary, a couple of simple how-to books, and a little unselfconscious willingness to fumble around a bit. Oh yeah, and someone to do it for or, no less important, with. (You’d think I’d add “enthusiasm” but I’ve found that tends to follow from positive results even when it doesn’t precede them.)

Now I could just stop there, and if this wasn’t a blog about relationships and sex I might. Instead I’ll add that my list for success applies in many aspects of life.

For instance I got an interesting comment on my post about flannel pajamas as “lingerie” from Texture612 who said, among other things

I know the fashionistas aren’t keen on it, but they don’t know this beauty since they’re all daisy-chaining each other.

...at least if the sentence means what I’m going to assume he or she meant then it’s a good point that popular culture sort of trains us to expect that “exotic” activities like “daisy-chain” group sex require that one wear “exotic” attire as well. In fact, however, my strong impression from various sources is that most people who regularly do “exotic” things tend more towards the practical… and easily laundered. Flannel pajamas being practical as well as comfortable and (especially important for folks in temperate climates) warm would work fine.

In fact it might be nice to have memorized all versions of The Joy of Sex, furnished your bedroom from JTStockroom, own a custom-fit leather corset or chaps, and have so much in-depth knowledge that vibrator manufacturers beg you to review their pre-release products, a Body by Jake, and any car that isn’t a minivan**. But really? All you need is…

...a little olive oil, chocolate, and maybe some wine, a few good utensils, somewhere to store things till you need them, clean surfaces to work on, something to heat things up and cool them down, something to keep things sanitary, a couple of simple how-to books, and a little unselfconscious willingness to fumble around a bit. Oh yeah, and someone to do it for or, no less important, with.

Flannel jammies optional.

[Two words for the wise: Minivans rock. —fl]

Heather Corinna, writing at RHRealityCheck.org continues to demonstrate by example that when people say “gray area” they usually mean “poorly lit.” She illuminates the “gray area” of “asking for it.” (Even better, she does it with a food analogy.)

I’m a very talented cook, and my friends love it when I cook for them. Some crave my meals intensely. If I have a friend over, and I have them smell some fresh basil I picked up at the market, show them a beautiful tomato from my garden, does my doing that oblige me to cook something for them with those ingredients? Have I promised, committed or consented to doing so? Could we reasonably say that if, after showing them those things, they forced me to cook against my will with the rationalization that I “teased” them with those ingredients, that they’d be in the right and that forcing me to do something I didn’t want to do was anything but an exploitation and an abuse? Even if I did at some point say I was going to cook, and then decided that I just wasn’t in the mood, would it be okay for them to force me to, anyway, because I “made” them hungry, and thus, am somehow obligated to sate them? She said it here.

Look ma, no gray!