6 Reasons Why Do We Cook?

There are various reasons for cooking, but our existence depends on our cooking ability. Cooking makes food more palatable and reduces the time it takes to digest. Great apes, our ancient ancestors, spend 80 percent of their day chewing their food. Learning to grind, grind, dry, or preserve food helped us digest it more quickly, but the advent of cooking, at least a million years ago, allowed us to chew and digest food. Enabled less time and thinking and more time spent. Focusing on other tasks. Today we spend only five percent of our day eating. So what does cooking do for us?

To make food safe

It makes food safe. Cooking kills bacteria, microbes, and many of the toxins they produce. Raw meat and fish can be preserved, and heat destroys many plant toxins, such as the deadly substance in kidney beans, and phytohaemagglutinin.

Flavors Enhance

Cooking makes food taste incredible. hot brown meats, vegetables, breads, and cakes; caramelized sugar; and releases the locked-in flavors of herbs and spices in a process known as the Maillard reaction.

Cooking helps digestion

Fat melts, the chewing connective tissue in the meat softens into nutrient-rich gelatin, and proteins are dislodged from their tightly bound structures, or “denatured” so that they are more easily broken down by digestive enzymes.

Softened are Starches

When heated in water, the hard-to-digest carbohydrate clusters break open and soften. This “gelatinization” of energy-rich starches transforms vegetable and grain flours so that the intestines can easily process them.

Nutrients are released

Without cooking foods to break down their starches, significant amounts of the food’s nutrients are locked up in “resistant” starches that cannot be digested. Heat also forces out some vitamins and minerals that are locked inside cells, increasing how much of these essential substances the body can absorb.

It helps us socialize

The ritual of cooking and sharing food is embedded in our psyche, bringing families and friends together. Research shows that regularly eating with others improves health.