Cooking may have been the technology that made humans human

Pollan draws on the "cooking hypothesis," associated with primatologist Richard Wrangham, which argues that applying heat to food radically increased the calories and nutrients humans could extract from a given amount of raw material, because cooking begins digestion outside the body — breaking down fibers and proteins that would otherwise cost far more energy to process internally. This freed metabolic resources that, over evolutionary time, plausibly helped fuel the growth of unusually large human brains relative to body size.

Cooking also compressed the time needed for eating itself; raw diets among other primates require many hours of chewing daily, while cooked food can be consumed far faster, freeing hours for other activities, including the social bonding Pollan sees as tied to shared meals. This hypothesis remains debated among anthropologists, but Pollan treats it as a compelling frame for why cooking sits at the center of human development rather than at its periphery.

Takeaway: cooking isn't just a cultural nicety — it may have been a precondition for human cognitive evolution.