The Omnivore's Dilemma - Michael Pollan [149]
Last but not least, cooking abruptly changed the terms of the evolutionary arms race between omnivores and the species they would eat by allowing us to overcome their defenses. Apart from fruits, which have a declared interest in becoming another species’ lunch (this being their strategy for spreading their seeds), and grasses, which welcome grazing as a strategy to keep their habitat free of shady competitors, most wild foods are parts of plants or animals that have no interest in being eaten; they evolved defenses to keep themselves whole. But evolution doesn’t stand still, and eaters are constantly evolving counteradaptations to overcome the defenses of nutrient sources: a new digestive enzyme to detoxify a plant or fungal poison, say, or a new perceptual skill to overcome an edible creature’s camouflage. In response, the plants, animals, and fungi evolved new defenses to make themselves either more difficult to catch or to digest. This arms race between the eaters and the potentially eaten unfolded at a stately pace until early humans came on the scene. For a countermeasure such as cooking bitter plants completely changed the rules of the game. All at once a species’ painstakingly developed defense against being eaten had been breached and, assuming it could erect a new defense, that was going to take time—evolutionary time.
Cooking is often cited (along with tool making and a handful of other protohuman tricks) as evidence that the human omnivore entered a new kind of ecological niche in nature, one that some anthropologists have labeled “the cognitive niche.” The term seems calculated to smudge the line between biology and culture, which is precisely the point. To these anthropologists the various tools humans have developed to overcome the defenses of other species—not only food-processing techniques but a whole gamut of hunting and gathering tools and talents—represent biocultural adaptations, so-called because they constitute evolutionary developments rather than cultural inventions that somehow stand apart from natural selection.
In this sense learning to cook cassava roots or disseminate the hard-won knowledge of safe mushrooms is not all that different from recruiting rumenal bacteria to nourish oneself. The cow depends on the ingenious adaptation of the rumen to turn an exclusive diet of grasses into a balanced meal; we depend instead on the prodigious powers of recognition, memory, and communication that allow us to cook cassava or identify an edible mushroom and share that precious information. The same process of natural selection came up with both strategies; one just happens to rely on cognition, the other goes with the gut.
3. THE ANXIETY OF EATING
Being an omnivore occupying a cognitive niche in nature is both a boon and a challenge, a source of tremendous power as well as anxiety. Omnivory is what allowed humans to adapt to a great many environments all over the planet, and to survive in them even after our favored foods were driven to extinction, whether by accident or because of our own too-great success in overcoming other species’ defenses. After the mastodon there would be the bison and then the cow; after the sturgeon, the salmon, and then, perhaps, some novel mycoprotein like “quorn.”
Being a generalist offers us deep satisfactions, too, enjoyments that flow equally from the omnivore’s innate neophilia—the pleasure of variety—and neophobia—the comfort of the familiar. What began as a set of simple sensory responses to food (sweet, bitter, disgusting) we’ve elaborated into more complicated canons of taste that afford us aesthetic pleasures undreamed of by the koala or cow. Since “everything that is edible is at the mercy of his vast appetite,” Brillat-Savarin writes, “the machinery of taste attains a rare perfection in man,” making “man the only gourmand in the