I've been absent from my blog lately, and don't actually have a recipe to post today.  But I feel compelled to ruminate on cooking and eating....One of the books I read recently was "Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human."  (No, not the Hunger Games book with the same title).  The premise is fascinating and actually simple.  Before we cooked our food, it literally took virtually all of our daylight hours to CHEW enough raw food to sustain ourselves.  When we began to cook food, thereby making it easier to obtain the nutrients from it, we began to evolve into the big-brained species we are today (well, most of us).  Our brains use something like 20% of the calories we consume each day, so compared to smaller-brained mammals, our caloric needs are pretty high.  Quite simply, it wasn't agriculture that made us human, but cooking!

It all got me thinking about where we are today, and how little attention we now pay to the gathering, growing/raising, preparing, and sharing of our food.  And my thought is that if we continue along this path, we are losing something essentially, intrinsically...well, HUMAN.  I read recently that Americans now consume more than 50% of their meals away from home, i.e., in restaurants and fast food chains.  And even at home, Americans consume huge amounts of processed foods, foods that have been engineered to taste great--fooling our tastebuds, but not fooling our bodies. These foods bear little resemblance to their raw ingredients.  It is staggering the numbers and ways that corn can be manipulated!  (Google it...it will blow your mind). Crazy as it may seem, we seem to be overweight/obese and starving at the same time.

By my calculation, we are easily seeing the second and in some cases, even the third generation of "non cooks."   People who think cooking is opening a box or a can and a microwave.  Where will this lead?  People literally spend more time watching cooking shows than they actually spend cooking.  And like watching the Olympics from the couch isn't going to make you an athlete, watching Rachel Ray isn't going to put dinner on your table.

I have no answers; I wish I did.

So I guess what I will do is go into the kitchen....the last bastion of the alchemist.  While I may not turn lead into gold, I can turn raw, simple ingredients into something delicious.

Sigh.