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and Neanderthals could not. We have seen that most protein-rich vegetables—grains and beans particularly—require cooking to become nutritious. Homo sapiens were able to gain a new and stable supply of protein by disabling the nutrition blockers and toxins in raw vegetables and thus achieved a crucial advantage in the battle for survival. The way I see it, Neanderthals, with their flat receding foreheads and bad posture, continued to eat salad and crudité until they died out, which is why we call them Neanderthals, which means crude and stupid people, and also why we use the term for people who still eat the way Neanderthals did. I cannot say whether they preferred Thousand Island or Green Goddess, but then again, anthropology is not my field.

Vitamin and mineral blockers merely hoodwink people who believe that salad is good for them. Much more sinister are the toxins in raw vegetables, which can make them very ill. Some of these are destroyed by cooking, and some are not. As you would expect, vegetables that have been bruised or attacked by mold or fungus manufacture these poisons many times more enthusiastically than healthy ones.

The earliest published description of poisoning by lima bean is from 1884 in Mauritius. Seven deaths were reported in Puerto Rico between 1919 and 1925 from the ingestion of undercooked beans. Lima and other broad beans contain high concentrations of cyanogens, which poison just like the cyanide in those death-row-on-Alcatraz movies. (Cyanide pellets attached to the underside of the prisoner’s chair are released by remote control into a pan of acid below. The lethal gas curls up toward her nose and mouth.) Cyanogens are also found in unripe millet, young bamboo shoots, and cassava (see also manioc, tapioca, and so forth), the starchy root that supplies 10 percent of the world’s caloric requirements and still turns up in the Nigerian newspapers as a cause of death. Cassava is unlikely to turn up in your salad, but immature bamboo shoots probably will. Both must be carefully peeled, washed in running (not still) water, and boiled without a lid to prevent the cyanide from condensing back into the pot.

Goitrogens are chemicals that cause extreme enlargement of the thyroid among people with little iodine in their diets by preventing iodine uptake. Goitrogens are found in raw cabbage, broccoli, brussels sprouts, kale, turnips, rutabagas, cauliflower, mustard seeds, and horseradish, and contribute to their characteristic flavors. Some studies blame high cabbage consumption in the Midwest among German and Eastern European immigrants and their families for the high incidence of goiter there. Cows that forage on marrow-stem kale in parts of Tasmania transmit goitrogens through their milk, which accounts for endemic goiter in the population. Goitrogens are largely broken down by cooking.

One reason to travel to France and Italy is that they don’t force salad on you with the napkins, the silverware, and the incantation “French, Italian, or oil and vinegar?” When you request a salad, it is not thrown together by the dishwasher between his more demanding tasks. It is treated as food, not fodder. It is thoughtfully composed, animated with duck or smoked fish or foie gras, and often served as a first course. Consequently, it does not delay dessert. On the other hand, France and Italy are the source of the current culinary love affair with foods like fava beans, chickpeas, and plantains—all native to exotic lands where life after forty is not an everyday thing.

Favism is a disease named after the fava bean, or vice versa. This darling of the nouvelle cuisine may well turn up raw in your salad. Mild cases of favism result in fatigue and nausea, acute cases in jaundice. The mathematician and cult figure Pythagoras, who was nobody’s fool, forbade his followers to eat fava beans. The Iranians never listened to him, and a recent survey of 579 cases of favism there blamed the broad bean for all but four. The good news is that favism attacks mainly people who have something called G6PD genetic deficiency and eat