Storie e cultura del cibo

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.

The first "human" fires date back some 400,000 years. It went something like this. Many trapped animals could not escape the natural fires. They ended up being toasted. And most probably this was one of the steps, one of the stages of our evolution that led us to appreciate cooked meat or rather roasted meat.

The consequences of cooking food were shocking. The intestines shrank enormously by virtue of a diet of more easily digestible food. As a consequence, there were changes in the anatomy itself. Think of the disappearance of the hair that we needed to defend ourselves from the cold..

It was said of the gods. The gods must have liked the smell if one of the first "religious" practices was to sacrifice animals to them, to obtain their protection, their favours. In ancient Greece the ritual, Enágisma, consisted in sacrificing one or more animals (ox, pig, goat or sheep) to the deceased, to the heroes: generally, in this sacrifice, the sacrificial victim was entirely burnt.