Feast and Famine

Imagine the smell of your favorite food. Maybe it’s the earthy scent of freshly baked bread coming out of the oven. The spice of a steak on the BBQ. The familiar aroma of your dad’s signature curry. Chocolate cupcakes your spouse makes from an old family recipe. More than likely, this evoked memories of some occasion in your past. Perhaps you remember who you were with, or where you were.

Eating, of course, is ubiquitous to living things. While plants “eat” light, many other animals eat similar things to us - with one important difference. We are the only species to have begun to cook food.

Cooking food in human cultures made an enormous impact on the way we live. Our relationship with food shaped many cultures, and can be found at the heart of religious and social traditions. This made great changes to our collective world. Food needed to be prepared: a fire started, raw ingredients processed, and a procedure applied. Instead of eating lightly as food was found when foraging was the main means of nourishment, groups of humans began to eat at the same time. This new ritual was important in the ancient world, and remains so to this day, where many social events prominently feature sharing food with friends and family. Shared meals and feasts have longtime been common in religious practices in many different traditions.

Biologically, cooking food was important because it allowed us to eat nutritious food that we were unable to digest without first processing and grinding them such as rice, wild wheat, oats, millet, as well as starchy potatoes. It also allowed us to eat less, but gain the same amount of energy, since the cooking process made it easier for us to access the food energy. As we began planning our food intake, our society shifted radically.

Agriculture undeniably shaped human culture as we know it. Food surplus made ever larger populations possible. Both cooking food and agriculture are fundamental to the development of human society as we know it.

Humans have even made machines that eat. Why was the digesting duck, a mechanical duck that ate, digested, and excreted grain, was heralded “the glory of France” by Voltaire? How did this shaped the way we think about creating useful machines?

At an abstract level, any artificial intelligence needs some kind of power source, which we can think of as similar to eating (perhaps more similar to plants than us) but will they ever share a meal? And in doing so, is the shared social bond around eating, which was so important for the development of communities in our history, a unique human trait?

Next: The Roots of Art