Fire made man a cook. The first of a short series of articles by Prof. Danilo Gasparini, teacher of agricultural and food history at the University of Padua.

Every single day when we flick a switch, start a motor… there is always something burning behind it… there is fire.  “The control of fire is so ancient and represents such an epochal turning point in the history of human beings that it has spawned a great many myths and theories to explain how it came about”. This is what Michael Pollan, author of an extraordinary book, Cotto, (2014) dedicated to the four elements of nature: earth, air, fire and water, writes. The real question, then, is not who invented fire, because fire existed in nature, but when and who began to control fire, to bend it to their own needs, in short, to “domesticate” it, to monitor it because it can become dangerous and devastating if not controlled.  The chronicles of recent years tell us of the dramatic effects of fires at every latitude.

It all began when someone, instead of trying to put out a fire, caused by lightning, by a long drought, by the sparks caused by chipping a flint, decided that perhaps it would be useful to preserve that flame, to keep it burning, to transport it for good use. Fire was the oldest and most powerful tool mankind had for shaping the natural world. Thanks to hominids, much of the world’s flora and fauna consists of species that have adapted to fire (pyrophytes), whose growth was encouraged through the use of fire. Our ancestors must have noticed the transformations of the land following natural fires: the way they removed old vegetation and encouraged rapid colonisation by large numbers of grasses and bushes, many of which carried seeds, berries, fruits and nuts.

Native Americans used fire to make the land suitable for the animals they hunted: elk, deer, beaver, hare, porcupine, partridge, turkey, quail… They created hunting grounds and used fire to hunt even large game. The Amazon rainforest bears indelible traces of the use of fire to clear the vegetation and open the canopy formed by the trees. Over time, this represents a deliberate disruption of ecology by concentrating more resources for subsistence in smaller areas: veritable food niches, and in this way, by using fire, the radius of a meal has been shortened.

Prof. Danilo Gasparini

Food historian, writer, guest and consultant of Geo & Geo (Rai Tre)