"food theories" news and stories

Toss a steak on the grill and you may be reenacting an event that helped separate men from apes thousands of years ago.

Cooking, according to a new theory from a Harvard anthropologist, was a key turning point in human evolution, and without it, we would still spend significant chunks of our day chewing heaps of raw foods, BBC News reported.

Humans would need to eat more than 10 pounds of fruits and vegetables a day -- a task which would require six hours of chewing, Harvard Professor Richard Wrangham told BBC News. Cooking, he said, allowed humans to begin eating meat.

"I think cooking is arguably the biggest increase in the quality of the diet in the whole of the history of life," he said.