Yuriria Iturriaga: Not just bread...

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For 45 years we have dedicated ourselves to observing and investigating, where possible through consuming and practicing, the eating habits of societies on five continents in order to learn about the most diverse cuisines... The basic question was: what is cooking? until we thought we had found a definition that can account for all the cuisines of the world: from prehistoric to modern day, and which is expressed as follows: cooking is the series of acts to transform food in order to make it attractive to the five senses and digestible for the body . This definition gave us the starting point to investigate the history of food and its particularities of production and transformation, up to those of consumption, which allowed us to establish this principle: the phenomenon of cooking is exclusive to the human race and appeared alongside its own construction long before the mastery of fire, the latter being the medium used in most kitchens , but not all , as we will see.

On the other hand, although the relationship between food and evolution in general, and human evolution in particular, is not an original discovery, we were lucky enough to be able to tie up some loose ends to arrive at the exact function of a particular food in the construction (self-construction is more precise) of what is specifically human and that was created on planet Earth, between 50 million and 35 million years ago through the unavoidable ingestion of a historically casual food but which continues to be the irreplaceable cause of the maintenance of humanity in the 21st century AD .

In this first installment we reveal our theory about the origin and development of the human .

Humans built themselves up between 50 and 35 million years ago, based on the ingestion of carbohydrates (slow-acting sugars that feed brain neurons and whose function is to regulate muscle movements).

If before this period different families of primates had developed useful movements for survival with an incipient brain, it is in the period of time in which the cataclysms happen that modify the face of the Planet, creating the great mountain ranges and the plains of grasses, while the tropics were adjusted in the equatorial belt and the ice in the poles, causing a migration of the fauna towards the new valleys whose period was named by specialists as the Age of the Grasses, precisely because the tropical forest is confined to the terrestrial waist and the food for the higher fauna arises in valleys where the grasses carrying the gramineae that contain carbohydrates will proliferate : sugars that are slowly integrated into the bloodstream and directly feed the neurons that command muscular movement. Which immediately refers to the assertion (highly proven that practice develops consciousness: Karl Marx) that the grains of fragile branches must be reached at different heights from the ground, taken between the fingers and shelled to be ingested) which forced the primates of the tropics to develop bipedalism and the opposable fifth finger in a virtuous circle that continues to develop today, millennia after having changed their diet based on fruits, fungi, insects, for a diet based on grains and starchy tubers whose characteristics would build, with practice, the characteristics of what is properly human, starting by transforming what is ingestible into food and developing the elements that constitute and reproduce every society, such as, first of all, spoken language: sounds-concrete meanings for the collective-evolution to signs-writing-drawing with conceptual content... The universe and its parts are named, people in their individuality, the relationships between them, objects, uses, the work of modification and invention, the customs of coexistence, the foods, the cuisines... their ingredients and attributes.