Technology vs. Food

Cooking is very much a human endeavor—animals don’t cook their food, even if they do things like bury it or wash it. We benefit enormously from cooking food by needing to spend less time chewing it and by getting more calories and other nutrition from it.

Cooking is inherently about tools and techniques: you can’t really cook without them. Yes, you can bury a sweet potato in some hot coals and let it sit for hours and then dig it out and eat it, but I still think you’re going to want a stick or a rock or something to move the coals with. (Or build the fire, for that matter.) A knife is an indispensable tool for cooking, as well as eating—it just makes every aspect of working with food easier. And applying heat is about the most basic and fundamental cooking technique there is. We build special tools so that we can transform some foods into other foods, like soup or pizza or M&M’s—no other animal does this.

Cooking is technology.