gadfly's Profile
Why would anyone.........
To add to your pro-induction arguments - and not to take away from gas, particularly since I see no reason to choose between the two, as modular units are only marginally more expensive than ranges, given the same number of total burners - we've been using induction in laboratories since the 80's when we need a fast, accurate temperature response, as well as the ability to accurately sustain a set temperature over a long period of time, that gas just can't provide.
Are condiments (ketchup, mustard, mayo, aioli, etc.) necessary for burgers?
Definitely not universally true. Plenty of places used ground beef in their chop steaks, and the few places I know to still get one all use ground beef. One person's experience clearly doesn't make for universal truths.
And yes, you will tend to raise ire when making that kind of comment tangentially.
Are condiments (ketchup, mustard, mayo, aioli, etc.) necessary for burgers?
Quite a number of them sure called themselves steak and chop houses. Many used beefsteak in the name, usually the Italian ones, but others had steak and chop house right in the name. So, sure, some people may have thought these weren't fancy enough to count as steak and chop houses, but those people should learn a little history. Steakhouses evolved from the beefsteak banquet, a working class celebration often taking place in church basements in poor neighborhoods, and only later co-opted by the wealthy, originally as a way to buy the votes of the poor. Celentano threw a beefsteak banquet every year in our neighborhood, and I doubt anyone would have voted Republican if not for that.
But this is getting pretty ridiculously off topic from what a hamburger with no bun is called.
Are condiments (ketchup, mustard, mayo, aioli, etc.) necessary for burgers?
Thanks. I was trying to find a dictionary entry and failing. Really, with their accents, if the staff at any of the places we dined at back then tried to say "chopped steak" it would have come out as "chop esteak" anyway. I wouldn't be surprised if that's where the minor difference in terminology arose from.
Are condiments (ketchup, mustard, mayo, aioli, etc.) necessary for burgers?
The places we ate out weren't full of unadventurous Americans. I grew up in a very poor neighborhood of New Haven where almost no one spoke English. Neither of my parents spoke English particularly well until I was a teenager. When we ate out, our fellow diners were usually poor immigrants like us, and eating out was reserved for very special occasions. Even when splurging, it was often difficult to afford much more than a chop steak. When we went as far as Bridgeport or Waterbury - on the train, as we never had a car - it was to visit relatives of the same economic status as us. And most places didn't have menus; they had chalkboards.
Also, I never even heard of a children's menu until the 60's.
And, I don't remember it specifically, but I'm guessing the 95 House was named for its proximity to the turnpike. I was in college by the time the turnpike opened. New Haven and the area around it were a very different place by then, and even more different a few years after the turnpike was finished.
Are condiments (ketchup, mustard, mayo, aioli, etc.) necessary for burgers?
It may have been chopped steak where you were eating, but it was chop steak or even chopsteak, shortened by just about everyone to simply chop, where I was eating in the 40's and 50's.
Are condiments (ketchup, mustard, mayo, aioli, etc.) necessary for burgers?
Could very well be. It still hangs on here at some old places. I was 17 (in 1957) before I ever made it beyond CT, and that was just as far as NYC and Boston to interview at colleges. I think the first time I ever left the Northeast was in my mid-20's for a march on Washington, and we weren't doing too much dining out then. By the time I started to make my way around the US in a capacity where I was dining out it was the late 70's and it was hard enough just to find a chop steak in CT.
Are condiments (ketchup, mustard, mayo, aioli, etc.) necessary for burgers?
Interesting. I've never been to the 21 Club, and I'm pretty sure the first time I ever heard of salisbury steak was when I first saw the old metal tray TV dinners when I was in college. Chop steaks didn't contain any fillers, you ordered them to desired doneness, and you could get them topped with sauteed mushrooms or onions if you wanted, but no gravy. Some of the steakhouses we went to offered steak sauce, but most did not even have it.
Are condiments (ketchup, mustard, mayo, aioli, etc.) necessary for burgers?
That may well be, but the ones I went to as a kid didn't serve anything but steaks and chop steaks. They certainly thought those were the two things their name referred to, and the waiters - always with thick accents from Italy, Greece, or Portugal - nearly always joked, "So whatta you wan? A steaks or a chop?" And it was never chopped steak, just chop steak.
But, I was well into adulthood before I ever went to any of the much older institutions in New York or Chicago, and they did have veal chops, lamb chop, etc. at those places, along with the big steel prime rib cart. So yes, I'm sure you're right, this just never dawned on me, as these weren't items you could get at the little steak and chop houses that dotted towns like New Haven, Bridgeport, and Waterbury, CT, back then.
Are condiments (ketchup, mustard, mayo, aioli, etc.) necessary for burgers?
Not when I was a kid. A chop was just a seasoned ground beef patty , usually a little more oblong in shape than a hamburger patty, and generally a good bit thicker than you'd find hamburgers back then - I've heard some of my older friends lament that these big thick burgers that have become gourmet items these days are really just chop steaks on a bun, not a real hamburger. That's what all the steak and chop houses served as a chop steak through the 40's, 50's, and 60's.
Are condiments (ketchup, mustard, mayo, aioli, etc.) necessary for burgers?
I like a burger to hit all five tastes: sweet, sour, salty, savory, and bitter. I also find it boring to eat the same burger over and over, so how I fill each of the five tastes changes from burger to burger. Usually though, there's salt, pepper or a pepperlike spice, something sharp along the lines of horseradish or mustard, something pickled, and a sweet sauce. Sometimes cheese, sometimes bacon or other cured meat, and sometimes something eggy. If the patty isn't beefy enough to stand up to all that, then I don't consider it to be a good quality patty.
Are condiments (ketchup, mustard, mayo, aioli, etc.) necessary for burgers?
I think a cooked ground beef patty with no bread is great, and I eat this more often than I eat a hamburger, but this used to always be called a chop steak. That's why so many old, traditional steak houses are called steak and chop houses. It doesn't matter to me if you call it a hamburger or a chop steak, I just don't understand the point of taking two perfectly serviceable words and combining them into one less specific word. Of course, it seems like most people these days have never heard of a chop steak, and it doesn't even seem to be in the dictionary anymore. I imagine it fell out of disuse when the hamburger got so popular that no one was interested in the non-sandwich form of the cooked ground beef patty.
Vegetarians craving bacon/pork? Nutritional explanation?
It doesn't matter what a person does or doesn't eat, they're an omnivore. Carnivore, herbivore, and omnivore, given no other qualifiers, refer to what an animal's digestive tract is designed to digest. Carnivores need not eat exclusively animal matter, however, just as herbivores need not eat exclusively vegetable matter. Most examples of both classes do not eat exclusively one or the other.
Vegetarians craving bacon/pork? Nutritional explanation?
Honestly, at this point, I'm just going to have to say, you seem interested enough in this and emotionally invested enough in your ideas that your best bet is to take a course in human evolution, or at the very least buy a book about it. I can't really recommend one unfortunately, as I don't know of a decent one that doesn't assume the reader has at least a bachelor's degree in biology.
I understand very well that there is this public perception that the winds are always changing in science, and that old theories that were once consensus are always being overturned. As someone who has, at various points, needed to work with elected officials, whose faith in science is often virtually nonexistent, particularly in the more rural areas my work has often taken me, I've spent much of my life trying to dispel this notion, because it simply doesn't have even a grain of truth in it. New theories are almost always built on old ones, and new evidence almost always strengthens the consensus. When it does not, it often adds a new facet to our knowledge rather than displacing old knowledge. Theories are constantly being disproven, but these are almost never - and I'm hedging by saying almost, because in my 5+ decades as a scientist I don't know of a single example, but I suppose it's possible there is one somewhere - consesus. They're theories on an issue that is still hotly contested. These issues you are bringing up haven't been contested for decades. They are settled issues. There are few people out there more skeptical than the scientific community. We don't take lightly an assertion that something is absolutely true, and consensus is only reached when the data is both overwhelming and multi-faceted.
These questions are getting increasingly irrelevant, so I'll try to answer them as briefly as possible, and if you have any follow up, I'd urge you to do some reading from reputable academic sources.
The entire community, infants and the elderly included, in a pure hunter gatherer culture goes along for gathering excursions, which become hunts when prey makes an appearance. These hunts rarely go on for more than five miles, as most animals other than humans will begin to die of heat exhaustion after running this far, but ten is not unheard of. This is also not a straight line distance, as zigzaging and doubling back are a part of the evasion tactics of all prey animals. Generally the kill is made within a few miles of where the hunters departed the group. I'll admit I was oversimplifying in saying the kill is eaten on the spot. Not all spots are suitable for cooking. If they're close to camp, they may return there to cook, but they also have a network of areas frequently used as cooking sites spread throughout their gathering range. The most important fact is that every ounce of meat on the animal is consumed as soon as possible after the kill.
Within the initial few weeks of an infant's life it will often be kept at camp, as much because the mother is recovering as because the infant can't be brought along. Food will be brought back for the mother in this case. Given the size of these tribes and the large spacing between births - a woman of this lifestyle is not able to give birth more frequently than every two years, and usually not before the age of 18, and generally will only have 2-3 children - most of the time there is no new mother waiting at camp. Similarly, in the final few weeks of life, the infirm may not join the group - and it is only ever a few weeks, as the infirm die quickly in such a lifestyle. Food will be brought back for them, which they typically will refuse. It is rare that for either a new mother or an infirm individual the tribe will bring meat back, however, as most tribes do not consider it to be the best food for weak individuals. This, of course, varies from culture to culture.
I'm pretty sure anyone who has ever built a campfire knows it leaves obvious evidence behind, even if you let it burn out on its own. This evidence is much smaller than a brushfire, though really we wouldn't go looking for fire remnants without first having found other signs that this would be a potential site for excavation. It helps that rather early on in our history some groups of humans figured out what a good idea it is to bury a spent fire, though it doesn't seem all tribes did this, as we have found many that weren't buried. The way that archaeologists identify where to excavate is mostly a mystery to me, but their success rate in identifying sites is rather stunning.
Yes, there are indeed plenty of animals that store food. They're still a rarity. It's an unusual behavior in the animal kingdom, and it typically evolves over a long period in a whole group, rather than just an individual species. It's even more rare in animals that do not live in nests or burrows. To my knowledge, there are no primates aside from humans that store food, and food storage is not held in common by all humans today, indicating that it probably never has been. All signs point to this being a learned behavior, not an inherent trait.
As I said, the coastlines have been farther in, not farther out, than where they are now, for most of human history. Even during many of the major periods of glaciation, they were farther in than they are now. They were indeed farther out during the almost entirely irrelevant period of time from 110,000 years ago to 10,000 years ago, during which our ancestors first left Africa.
There are some, very rare, abundant coastlines in the world with very easily accessible food. As far as I know, none of them are continental, and none of them are anywhere near our common ancestral homelands. Even in recent history in this portion of sub-Saharan Africa, the number of known, primitive, coastal peoples is remarkably small, and they were far more advanced than anything seen 100,000 years ago. Coastlines are among the most difficult terrains in the world, with only mountains being more difficult. I suppose to most people this might seem odd, but there simply isn't an environment humans are more suited to than savanna. Savannas have the highest concentration of calorically dense foods suited to human needs which do not require advanced technology to harvest. I don't know of any coastal people that has survived without fishing being a way they gathered food. Plenty of coastal peoples have relied more on shellfish, but all the ones I know of also relied on agriculture, and they also fished. Perhaps to someone from an island culture this seems shocking, but it's really pretty basic.
Perhaps the easiest way to understand this is to understand that changes in culture and technology generally always occur due to a stress being placed on its constituent members. The least advanced pre-contact human groups on the earth nearly all came from the savanna. The culture and technology of the Bushmen hasn't changed much at all since well before our ancestors left Africa, because they had no need for it to. It might be a harsh and difficult day to day existence, but on the whole survival from generation to generation is rather easy. While island cultures were becoming some of the most advanced in the world, savanna cultures were staying remarkably primitive, because they had no reason not to. Their 500,000 year old technologies got them through the day at least as well as the state of the art technologies of the rest of the world. And they still do.
Vegetarians craving bacon/pork? Nutritional explanation?
I've never seen any evidence of roasted nuts, but I can't say there isn't any. I can, however, say that this would be pretty unusual behavior for hunter gatherers of the type that humans were before they left Africa. In that life, you find food, you eat it. This is not only necessary to maintain energy levels to continue hunting ad gathering, it's the most efficient possible behavior. It's that simple.
I'm not sure what else there is to say about this skewered meat idea. It might seem obvious to you, but you probably can't remember a point in your life when you weren't exposed to skewered meats. There's no suggestion in the fossil record and no one in the field putting forward the idea that early man did this. It just doesn't make any sense when all the factors and all the evidence are taken into consideration. Likewise, the idea of storing food might seem obvious to you, but it's not a natural decision for most animals, including humans, to make. It's just a rare behavior in nature, and even without the evidence against it, it wouldn't make sense to assume early man was doing this.
It's not hard to identify what burnt material are. Nothing burns that completely, and most things that would form important pieces of evidence don't decompose to totally unrecognizable materials. This kind of testing is one of the most elementary areas of the field. We could even do this pretty easily with what limited technology we had in the 60's. Today it's a cakewalk.
As for the absence of evidence, feel free to think this, but you're completely writing off a whole field of science by doing so. You'd probably be shocked at how much evidence we've collected, and how much we can tell by examining this, and how much we can tell by relating this to extant human cultures. Considering how well forensic investigators are able to piece together the exact events that occurred at a crime scene, it's not hard to understand how easily we can gain such general understandings from fossil evidence. We can even do this with animals, and they haven't left much more behind than their bones.
As for the insistence that we might just not have found the evidence for coastal dwelling early humans, there is a fringe in the field that believes this. Their conjectural evidence is mostly ridiculous, and they are, for the most part, the laughingstock of the field. Read up on the Aquatic Ape theory if you want to know more. Early man having inhabited coastlines just doesn't make any sense at all. To start with, there's no reason we wouldn't have found evidence. Coastal environments are often the most effective at preserving evidence, while the coastline has indeed moved in and out over the course of human history, it's been farther in from where it is now for a larger chunk of human history than it has been farther out. Most of time it was farther out from where it is now was over the last 110,000 years, when the evolution of humanity as a whole was very nearly complete.
The only species wide changes after this point came through the bottleneck around the time of the most recent common ancestor - popularly referred to as y chromosomal Adam in the media. This individual and his kin are known with near total certainty to have lived far inland. The natural environment of humans is savanna and desert. Animals tend to stick to the environment they evolved to be suited to. It is only major technological advances that have allowed humans to do otherwise. There is little food that would have been available for early humans to eat along coastlines. Nets, bows, and spears useful to catching fish are very recent innovations - throwing spears of any kind are not only very recent, but are not common to all of humanity. Add to this the harsh and unpredictable weather of the coasts, which more primitive humans simply could not have survived, and it starts to take fantastic stretches of the imagination to keep the claim up. There may very well have been early humans that gave it a try, but they wouldn't have lasted long and we definitely do not descend from them. As a whole species, we came of age on the savanna primarily, and it wasn't until we split off and started to leave Africa that we ever lived anywhere substantially different.
Vegetarians craving bacon/pork? Nutritional explanation?
No, most mutations that carry on do so entirely by accident. Most are not advantageous, but either neutral, or, more rarely, detrimental. It's not as if mutations are rare, or happen one at a time. Ever person - or animal, or plant, etc. - has hundreds or even thousands of genes that they inherit from their parents in mutated form. Only one of these needs to be successful for it to take root because of a survival of the fittest situation, while the rest just come along for the ride. These can combine in unexpected ways over successive generations. But this is also only one mechanism of evolution. Mutations are often selected for that are not advantageous or even just carried along with an advantageous gene. Sometimes, mutations get carried along for millions of years that serve no purpose, or are detrimental, only to mutate again and again thousands of times to eventually become advantageous in a process reliant largely on the luck that there was no bottleneck in those millions of years before the mutation became a true adaptation. This is how legs and wings are widely thought to have first developed. But as often as not, the characteristics that make a species unique have evolved for no good reason at all. Consider birds of paradise. Their unique mating rituals and the male features that are used to attract mates are at best of neutral benefit to survival. The males that get to breed are those with the prettiest plumage and the best dancing skills, not those who are actually the best at the day to day work of survival. This is sexual selection functioning on parameters that have nothing to do with fitness, and this is something we see happening again and again throughout nature.
The way that you seem to be defining sex selection, the way that Darwin defined natural selection, as dependent on individual fitness, is merely one actor in a cast of thousands, and it hasn't played a leading role in human evolution for any of the period of time in which the characteristics that make us human have developed. Certainly, some of our traits are a product of this mechanism. It's hard to believe that the thumb or our upright stance did not come about for this reason, though there is still a healthy amount of debate on this topic. But, if we examine chimpanzees, it is clear that individual survival fitness plays no role in their continuing evolution. The one male in a particular group that does the majority of the breeding is usually one of the poorest at basic chimpanzee survival skills like remembering where to find food, tool use, and fending off predators. What allows him to dominate the other males is a propensity for what, in humans, we would term psychotic behavior. Stronger males will submit to him because they fear his recklessness. Many primatologists feel that chimpanzees are becoming progressively less intelligent and less fit to survive overall due to this. They very certainly have a smaller brain and a much smaller range than the homini ancestors we share with chimpanzees.
Because of the complex nature of animal societies, individual fitness selection's role is generally limited, as with humans and chimpanzees, but it is a much more major factor in more solitary animals, or in species with solitary males, in more simple animals, in pure predators, and in prey animals. The species it plays the most substantial role in tend to be specialists, like cheetahs and their gazelle prey. In some animals, like the African elephant, it plays a role because, while males mate essentially at will when they come across females, the females being generally unable to ward them off, both competition with other males and how long a male's lifespan is determine the number of times he will be able to mate. But, this is severely limited by the fact that the largest males are the most successful in competing against other males over a particular female, but generally live shorter lives, and often, due to their great weight, injure a female during mating. Their offspring then die, as the injured mother is not able to adequately care for them. Even in animals where individual fitness is a more major factor in natural selection, there are too many other factors and the interplay between them all is too delicate for this to have been considered as the driving force in evolution at least since I was an undergrad in the late 50's.
Vegetarians craving bacon/pork? Nutritional explanation?
Lots of burnt sticks far older than that have been found. Fires leave one of the clearest and most recognizable traces of any human activity. But skewering and smoking meat how exactly? As a spit maybe? A spit requires supports, making this a multi-part tool, and pretty complex. We developed things like this around the same time we started building shelters, as the two idea are very similar, technologically. Or do you mean simply holding a stick over the fire? That's really great, if you have a cutting tool, like a knife, to section the meat into manageable pieces, but such cutting tools were very late developments, and were never even developed in parts of the world.
It's not at all unsafe to push a hot rock with a stick into a pit, or even to clear away still hot embers from the rock to use the rock itself as a cooking surface. These are common things many tribal cultures still do today, that i've been fortunate enough to see with my own eyes. It's one of the simplest processes imaginable.
I'm not sure what rancidity has to do with this. Once again, the storage of meat is a relatively late development in human history. Smoking also does not prevent rancidity. Even if this was somehow both logical and relevant, I'm not sure how early man eating dung or even brush smoked meats would somehow translate to a taste for wood smoked meats.
I never said anything about a fire pit. The fire did not go in the pit. It still doesn't in any culture I'm familiar with living in the areas of Africa which were the only home to homo sapiens for over ten times as long as they've lived in any other area of the world.
Again, burned material leave very clear traces. They're one of the easiest things to analyze, right down to the exact material that was burned, even to such a degree of specificity that if it's dung, we know what animal the dung came from, and often what that animal had eaten.
I'm not sure how preserved meat is handy in harsh environments. The nice things about savanna and desert environments is that while food can be difficult to find, the relatively stable nature of things means that food sources are remarkably steady. It's dry today, and you know it's going to be dry tomorrow. The flora and fauna of the region deal with this just fine.
And some Bushmen carry water, but this was adapted from the Bantu tribes that pushed them out of most of their original range. Most that carry water have also adopted Bantu pastoralism. The rest do not carry water, and early man certainly did not do so until very late in his development. There simply isn't a need to. They know their homelands incredibly well, and have memorized a vast number of fresh water locations across the hundreds of square miles they hunt and gather in. More importantly, the majority of their water is provided through the food they eat. Caloric needs rise much more sharply with high levels of activity than does the need for water. Thus, given a diet of identical foods, a person who needs to consume 5000 calories in a day will need to consume less water than a person consuming 2000 calories in a day - unless of course the foods are very dry or very salty, which the foods in question are not.
And no, very young infants react to the smell of smoke with anxiety. This has been very thoroughly studied for a relatively long time. Any positive association is learned over time, though infants do learn such things very quickly. It is still debated by many whether we have a true ancestral fear of fire, or if the anxiety in the infants is merely the product of the irritating quality of smoke. I find the latter much more likely, but the former is bolstered by the fact that smoke makes anxiety levels rise across nearly any animal which has no experience with fire, and does so to a much greater degree in adult animals than other nasal irritants.
Vegetarians craving bacon/pork? Nutritional explanation?
Follow a tribe of Bushmen - who live a lifestyle more or less universally agreed upon by those who study human evolution as being incredibly close to that of the earliest homo sapiens, and are also genetically closer to these than is any other human group - around for a week and you'll understand why they don't save any meat. With a lifestyle that difficult and active, you eat what you find as soon as you find it. They can all eat enormous amounts of food in one sitting, and storing those calories in your own body is more efficient than storing them as preserved meat which needs to be hauled around as you go about your 20+ miles of daily hunting and gathering.
Preserved meat is great when you get out of the harsh environments humanity grew up in and to more plentiful lands. As I said, in colder climates, it occurred earlier, largely because of the megafauna appearing on our menu that were never part of the diet of homo sapiens until the migration out of Africa. Preservation in the more glacial environments where humans were more reliant on meat for calories was easy: leave it outside, out of the sun.
An imu clearly works differently than the earliest known cooking methods. We have found clearly dug pits dating back over 500,000 years containing char marked rocks - that is, they clearly had been heated in a fire - but no separate burned matter, indicating that no burning materials were put in the pit. The method is still used widely by hunter gatherers in Africa today, and they generally let the fire completely burn to ash before pushing the rocks into a pit. Charred rocks going back over a million years covered in traces of animal proteins - indicating meat had been cooked directly on a hot rock, go back even father. In cultures that still practice this technique, the stones are either removed from the fire first, or they wait until the embers cool down enough to clear the first away from the area of the stone. The more common method than the hot rocks, however, today and going back to over a million years back, was to bury the material to be cooked and build a fire on top of this, or build the fire first first and brush the embers on top of the dirt covering the pit..
We say with a great deal of certainly that heating over a fire developed much later because this requires complex tools which are not only not in the archaeological record until you get into the last 100,000 years or so, but are more advanced than anything in the archaeological record before then. We can't dismiss the notion that many an early human tried just depositing a warthog carcass right on top of some burning wood, but they'd likely have learned pretty quickly that by the time this all cooled down enough to retrieve the meat safely, much of the meat was rendered inedible, and almost all of the fat was cooked away.
Cooking the bones directly on burning embers is not unlikely, but I've done this many times myself, and the marrow takes on no smoky characteristic whatsoever. It's also worth noting that when we talk about smoky flavor, we're thinking of burning wood. There wasn't a huge supply of wood around in the environment inhabited by early man, and he lacked the tools to harvest more or split logs. While wood was still a common material for fires, it was hardly the only one. The evidence shows that they burned anything they could find, from brush to dung. Cooking over wood fires is a lot less common worldwide and historically than your average Westerner believes, simply because the smoke of the actual combustible materials many cultures have relied on give food a terrible taste.
It's easy to think that, because the smell of smoke makes so many of our mouths water, this is some genetically inherited characteristic. But when a baby or someone from a culture where foods are not smoked smells smoke, they don't get hungry. They generally think, "Oh shit! Something is on fire!" You and I just learned, very early in life, to associate that smell, and the flavor, with delicious food, rather than danger.
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Vegetarians craving bacon/pork? Nutritional explanation?
You're very welcome. I quite like how much I can learn about food here, and I wish I had more to contribute on food centric topics. Contributing a little scientific knowledge here and there is the least I can do.
Vegetarians craving bacon/pork? Nutritional explanation?
Cooking through the heat of a fire and cooking over a fire are two very different things. To begin with, I'm not sure where you're getting the data that says cooking is only a quarter of a million years old. The earliest cooking implements are about that old, which could mean this is around when we started cooking over a fire, but evidence of cooked foods is far older than this. There have been many charred animal bones found with distinctive hand axe markings that are between 1 and 2 million years old - it's very difficult to date burnt remains with a high level of accuracy - and many of these have been in middens. While it's likely that the absolute earliest humans to realize that it's way easier to extract marrow from a cooked bone than a raw one figured this out from scavenging the remains of antelope that were killed in brush fire, and it's not possible to establish at what point the transition to intentional cooking occurred, it definitely did not take over a million years for humans who long since mastered fired to put 2 and 2 together.
From the fossil record we know that humans were using indirect cooking methods for hundreds of thousands if not millions of years before they were cooking over fires. The two main methods would have been burying food and pushing burned embers over the dirt covering the food, and using rocks heated in a fire in a variety of ways to heat foods. Neither of these puts food into contact with smoke. I can't say I know anything about rangi or imu, but the time from the start of the neolithic era to today accounts for less than a half of a percent of human history, and started at least 70,000 years after the most recent common ancestor of all humans. It can't be looked at as a factor in evolution.
And the understanding of when salt came into play has nothing to do with the earliest evidence. We all know that salting could have been taking place long before the earliest salt vessels we have found were made. But we also know that human access to salt before the last 20,000 years was incredibly limited. Coastal and island people are a real rarity before the end of the last major glaciation. Coastlines were the absolute last terrain to be settled by humans; even deserts came first. Our oldest evidence or salt use actually shows up in desert peoples, who also were the first with both a need and effective means to preserve meat.
More importantly, there's no reason for us to believe that, before the advent of agriculture, meat preservation was widely practiced, except in the coldest areas of human habitation where salt was neither accessible nor needed. We have a pretty good understanding of the behavior and diet of early human hunter gatherers. When they acquired meat, they consumed it right then, often even building the fire to cook it at the spot of the kill. Before the development of more advanced weaponry during the last major glaciation, it would have been a poor decision not to do so, as humans had no real defense against their kill being taken by other predators and scavengers.
The leanness of meat is perfectly relevant. It's also relevant that, before our most recent common ancestor, we weren't eating wild boar, mastodons, hares, seals, or fowl. We may have had a very limited amount of fish in our diets, but evidence for this is scant. Our meat came primarily in two forms, antelope and warthog. Despite their similarity in appearance to pigs, warthogs are very lean and taste nothing like pork. It's not possible, in any sense, for a craving to be genetically coded into humans if they weren't even eating it that far back.
And genetic selection for liking smoked things is not only counter to the evidence - it's not something that is held in common by all humans, smoky flavor being valued in some cultures and reviled in others - it makes no sense. It could, of course, have occurred completely by accident, but it definitely has no evolutionary benefit. Smoke is a very poor preservative when taking into account the particular foodborne diseases early humans needed to worry about.
There is, of course, no denying, despite all that, that humans, like all mammals, have an inherent taste for salt, sugar, and fat. This does not, however, equate, even remotely, to an evolutionary craving for processed pork. Those who crave processed pork, and I count myself in their number, have learned that it tastes good to them. This makes any craving for these psychological, plain and simple. Whether or not they fulfill deeper cravings is irrelevant to this, as not only do cravings not at all have to relate to actual biological need, but there are plenty of foods which would fulfill the biological need much better - ice cream or salted peanuts being two easy examples - that aren't what is being craved here.
Vegetarians craving bacon/pork? Nutritional explanation?
In response to both this and your post above in reply to me, this is certainly logical. But I'm confident I don't need to tell you that just because something is logical does not mean it is truth. Your explanation of evolution is essentially the one posited by Charles Darwin in The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex. It's a very interesting read, but it hasn't been considered important in the scientific community for nearly 100 years as anything more than a piece of our history.
It would be impossible to give an explanation of evolution in this space that would be even remotely adequate. The introductory text I used when I taught the subject in the 80's is over 500 pages long, and I don't think it's possible to do the subject justice or to develop even a basic understanding in a shorter treatment. But the salient points here would be these: almost all genetic mutations passed on through evolutionary mechanisms are done so accidentally, and are of no benefit to a species; and the beneficial characteristics possessed by a certain organism which survives over another of its species are usually only beneficial over a very brief time frame.
More importantly, while we do have a genetic predisposition towards sugars, fats, and salt, this has no correlation to human evolution. These characteristics have probably been present in the mammalian lineage since the earliest synapsids, roughly 300 million years ago. If not, they have at least been present since the time of the most recent common ancestor of placental mammals, which is no more recent than 125 million years ago. I can't really speak with more certainty than that, as eutheria are the only within chordata that I have extensively studied (well, also galliformes and anseriformes, collectively fowl, but that's neither here nor there). Regardless, the propensity for these things is much, much older than humanity, or even primates, and is present in nearly all mammals. Give a french fry to a rabbit, and you'll see what I mean.
Now, while sugars would indeed have been difficult for early man to obtain - and, for these purposes, let's limit our definition of early man to the period from the divergence of our lineage from that of the pan genus to the earliest post most recent common ancestor migration of humans out of Africa, as this is the only period of evolutionary history that is specific to all human beings and no other animals - fats were not so difficult to come by. Our knowledge of the diet of humans over the million years before the migration out of Africa is very thorough, and while it gets less thorough as you go back through each of the four million years before that, we still know enough about the environment of the time and the purposes of the tools used, in addition to having much evidence from middens, to know that nuts were in great abundance through the range of early man and formed the backbone of their diets. In the case of true homo sapiens, we know this diet ranged from 3000 to 6000 calories in adults (the lower end for a small childless females, the upper end for large males and pregnant or breastfeeding females) and that about 60% of these calories came from fatty nuts.
Also, a little bit on sex selection: it's relevant in evolution, but ceases to be relevant at a certain point in human evolution. We can't pinpoint exactly when, but likely around the point that the earliest members of the homo genus mastered fire, human tribes took on a very egalitarian structure. One of the greatest evolutionary benefits to the homo genus from that point forward was that, within a tribe, every single member was a breeder, and that bonded pairs devoted so much attention to child rearing. Fossil records from this period indicate that individual tribes devoted energy to the survival of their weak and injured members even when this was to the potential detriment of the tribe's survival. From then on, which genetic traits carried on has almost nothing to do with individual fitness, and almost everything to do with which societies survived. As often as not, this was simply a matter of being in the right place at the right time. When it wasn't, it usually was not a function of genetic traits, but of societal knowledge being passed on. For example, it's very clear that language was of enormous evolutionary benefit, but contemporary human beings have no more inherent genetic capability for language than the earliest humans did. We have simply passed on more and more complex language over time. Isolate a child from that for their first few years and they'll be no more capable of developing language skills than a chimpanzee is.
Oh, also it's only partly true to say that very few hunter gatherer cultures ate mostly meat. Over the broad historical perspective, this is true. But for long periods of human history, most importantly the last major glaciation (or what is usually inaccurately referred to as the last ice age), the majority of humans on the earth have derived the majority of their calories from meat.
Vegetarians craving bacon/pork? Nutritional explanation?
Meat was a part of the diet of the earliest humans, as well as many of our pre-human ancestors. Humans have been cooking meat for roughly half of the time they've been on the earth, but nothing about cooking or the use of fire is instinctual. The earliest known methods of cooking would also not have produced a smoky flavor in the foods being cooked.
While a craving for salt in a characteristic inherent to all mammals, the addition of salt to food is not common to the human evolutionary experience, as it is not something that has developed as a part of all cooking cultures. Those cultures in which it has developed have been doing it for well under 1% of human history. They've been curing meats for even less time than this, and there are even fewer cultures curing meats than there are using salt in cooking.
The meats eaten by humans for well over 99% of human history were very lean. Most of the fat in the human diet during that time would have come from nuts. Even from the dawn of agriculture up to the industrial era (the agricultural era accounting for about 0.5% of human history, and not being something held by humanity in common) most of our meat has been lean, and most of our dietary fat has come from vegetable sources. There are, of course, many exceptions to this, as pastoralists relying primarily on meat for sustenance have been around since near the dawn of agriculture, and hunter gatherers relying primarily on meat have been around for at least 50,000 years.
Humanity has to have held something in common for roughly the last 100,000 years for it to be considered as potentially being an evolutionary trait. Even when we have held something in common for that long, the chances of it actually having made its way into our DNA are 1 in 1,000,000, but that's getting into the biological mechanisms of evolution.
Vegetarians craving bacon/pork? Nutritional explanation?
There are a lot of claims being made here that these cravings may have some kind of evolutionary basis. These claims seem fairly common in society at large as well. To be blunt, anyone with any understanding of the biological mechanisms of evolution would find such claims to be absurd. That's not how evolution works, and even if it did work that way, nothing in the human evolutionary experience would have created a craving for processed pork products.
These cravings are psychological, plain and simple. Like anything else psychological, they are a product of an uncountable number of factors interacting with each other in myriad ways. Some of these factors are genetic, while some are experiential, and the ratio between these two things is not only unique to the individual, it is in a constant flux, though one that trends more toward experience as life moves along.
In this case, it sounds to me like you like it, and your inner longing for it grows over time until you feel you need it and satiate that desire, restarting that process. I have always been the same way with bad science fiction movies, and I'm 100% positive my body doesn't need those and that cavemen never watched them.
What are you a stubborn purist about?
White wine flavored with green chiles? That does sound terrible. I do think good wine can be made directly from (as opposed to flavored with) vegetables, however, perhaps because I grew up with my grandparents homemade beet wine.
There is some rather good green chile flavored beer available in New Mexico. I used to make a couple of trips a year to work with various ranches and slaughterhouses in New Mexico, and was frequently offered home brewed green chile beer on these trips. In later years, I started to see it being sold in brew pubs too, but I don't know of anyone bottling it commercially. Good as it was, it was never as good as beers I've had made with other types of chiles, particularly various smoked chiles.
Anyway, my question was a poor attempt at biology humor, as chiles are, botanically, a type of berry.
Top 10 Sexiest Chefs?
It may be getting harder for straight people to tell, but I don't think the same is true for gays. I've never thought Chiarello was gay, and nothing about his appearance or mannerisms has ever suggested otherwise to me. Sure, he's a soft spoken guy, but I wouldn't call him effeminate. And even back in my day, when gay men still had to hide in the shadows, the effeminate ones were a tiny minority. It's always been my experience that effeminate men usually really, really like women. "Metrosexual" men have always seemed really, really straight to me.
Foster's in New Haven closing
Yes. I gave it a shot. It's not bad, but it's nothing special. For the price, there is much better in New Haven, and for the type of food, there is much better in New Haven. Considering what it is replacing, it's a huge step down.
Kitchen Nightmare 9/25 Maine vs Canadian Lobster?
North Atlantic technically just means that part of the Atlantic north of the equator. Chances are, this tail came from the Bahamas. There are multiple species of spiny lobster fished throughout the Caribbean, Gulf of Mexico, and Mediterranean. I find they all taste essentially the same. I would never buy one here in New England, but I think they taste great consumed in situ. Fresh out of tropical waters, their flavor is strong, though not nearly as sweet as the American Lobster. Sold as a frozen tail far from their home, I find them bland. You also miss out on the best part this way, as the tomalley of the spiny lobster is even better than that of the American Lobster, and there is a lot more of it.
Do Calories on Menus Really Help?
No way man. Having information is, like, so oppressive. That's like, what Big Brother was always doing. Telling people stuff.
Knowing things totally takes all the fun out of life.
