You know, if I had it to do all over again, I’d seriously think about becoming a food anthropologist.
It doesn’t seem like this is a profession that rakes in the big money. But I think it’d be kind of fun to figure out how they made beer 9,000 years ago, or what the Anasazi indians ate, or how teosinte became corn. Why is meat inside some form of dough common across so many cultures?
What prompts this thought? Tuesday night, my mother and I went to see Steven Raichlen’s “Man Food Fire: The Evolution of Barbecue” lecture at the Bob Bullock Texas State History Museum. (We had a very nice meal at Lambert’s beforehand. I had forgotten how much I liked their charcuterie plate.)
I hadn’t really thought much about the relationship between evolutionary biology and cooking. Part of Raichlen’s lecture was that we went from this:
(Lucy, Australopithecus afarensis. Note the large jaw and the protruding attachment points for jaw muscles.)
to this:
(Homo erectus)
largely due to our ancestor’s use of fire to cook meat. I may be glossing over some subtleties here, but the short version is that cooking meat (and other foods) allowed our ancestors to use their food more efficiently, leading both to the evolution away from the large jaw and large jaw muscles, and to an increase in cranial capacity – thus, larger brains to fill the space. And that’s how we got to modern man.
(It isn’t that I don’t trust Raichlen, but I’d really like to sit down and talk about his ideas with someone like LabRat, who knows a lot more about this stuff than I do. By the way, that linked post over at the Atomic Nerds site is well worth reading.)
Some other highlights:
- Raichlen (and, I assume, his escorts) hit three barbecue places for lunch: Franklin Barbecue, John Muller’s (“tx@bugmenot.com”, “texas”), and…Stiles Switch. I still haven’t made to Franklin (I’m waiting for the circus to die down), and I need to try Muller’s. But Stiles Switch is probably my current favorite barbecue joint (at least in the Austin area) so it fills me with delight that it earned the Raichlen seal of approval. Here’s a review of the Switch from the Statesman.
- This one goes out to our great and good friend Carol: grilled ice cream, an Azerbaijani recipe that I’d like to try. (Azerbaijan has TV chefs? I wonder if there is Azerbaijani public television, and if it has pledge drives.)
- This one goes out to our brother-in-law. Raichlen on ceramic cookers (like the Big Green Egg): there’s really not much difference between them, so go with the one that matches your patio furniture best.
- Packaged charcoal briquets actually originated with Henry Ford, as a method of recycling wood scraps from the Model T. Ford started converting them into charcoal, packaging them, and selling the bags; this venture became the Kingsford company.
- The Statesman pretty much f’ed up their coverage of this event. The first article I saw on it said it was free, you just had to call and RSVP. A few hours later, they amended that to “free for museum members, $4 for everyone else“, and blamed the museum for the error. I can tell you we were not museum members, and nobody was collecting money for admission. (They were selling Raichlen books, and he did do a signing after the talk.)
- Raichlen seems to me to be a pretty swell guy. I was impressed not just with his presentation, but his willingness to stay and answer questions afterwards. I think we would have been there all night long if the museum staff hadn’t cut off the Q&A (and he was still answering questions during the signing). My biggest surprise of the night: he has a degree…in French literature. Hmmmm. Maybe there’s hope for my food anthropology dreams after all.
- Raichlen’s blog, though he hasn’t put up anything from Austin yet. There is stuff in his Twitter feed.
Edited to add: Let me throw this in. The patron saint of barbecue and barbecue pitmasters? Saint Lawrence. This explains much.