Still at the beach today, and it seems we'll stay here at least until Saturday. I will be working every day this week except for Jan 1st, which is a holiday here. It will probably be very chill as all my coworkers are from the US and they're all away till sometime next week. I'm currently running some experiments for a whitepaper we're writing showcasing (yet another) AI benchmark we're working on, so most of my work will likely consist of monitoring those and maybe writing a bit.

...

These past few days I've noticed that it takes me a bit of a runway to start writing in earnest, especially on days when I'm not particularly inspired. I need to put down around 50 or so words before things start flowing a bit better. I've been thinking about adding a "collapsible" section I can just spew random stuff in before I actually start writing. That would be fun! But at the same time it would be kind of weird, because the main content usually follows naturally from what I've written at the top, though not always. I could also take the less exciting approach of just deleting the warm up exercise, or do it somewhere else, but that seems a bit meh. Maybe just using ellipsis to separate it as part of the normal flow would work. That's what I'm going to do today.

...

I've been thinking about the link between "cooking food" and "technological advancement".

(Now, I know nothing about what I'm going to say here, so just take this as the ramblings of a crazy person brainstorming a plausible explanation for an interesting connection.)

I want to raise the hypothesis that we owe our technological progress to the fact that we like to eat good food. Sounds weird at first, but if you think about it it's not so far-fetched.

In school we learned that humans discovered fire by accident¹, and that somehow some foodstuff fell into it and was magically cooked, and ever since then humans have enjoyed cozy warm meals by the fireside.

It makes sense. In all the random occurrences that can happen throughout hundreds of thousands of years, it can be expected that at some point some person brought back a pretty burning branch and then on one of those occasions, after more branches were set alight, someone decided to throw food into it for funsies.

They tasted the cooked food and liked it and boom, a new culinary door was suddenly opened². But why did they keep doing it? Why continue cooking food? I assume that at some point they cooked something and liked it.

(begin interlude) I investigated a bit while writing this, and it seems the prevalent hypothesis is that humans actually first used fire to preserve food, not to cook it. The idea is that smoking or drying meat will make it edible for longer, and the fact that cooking unlocks further nutritional value was discovered as a byproduct of this.

Still, I raise the question of why ever put meat (or food in general; ancient humans actually didn't eat meat as often as we like to think) on the fire in the first place? By accident? Maybe some guy fell asleep with his homies by the fire and his chunk of prime steak just rolled into it by accident, and somehow they just left it there for a few days, and they discovered it lasted more this way? Maybe...

For this post I'll go ahead with the idea that this makes sense, but humans need a motivation to do something³, so I'll assume that cooking comes first as it's more fun. (end interlude)

They liked it so much that they kept on doing it. Probably the role of cook even became an important part of their social dynamics, or maybe they all helped with preparing meals. The point is that the cooking kept happening specifically because they enjoyed eating good food.

Who knows. If this is so then it could be that "liking to eat good food" is actually an evolutionary advantage. After all, you're less likely to catch a stomach bug and die of dysentery if you eat a properly cooked meal. Ancient humans were unlikely to be worrying about these things, but it did maximize their chance of survival, and those who didn't like the charred taste were more likely to be culled by natural selection.

Maybe the fact that I enjoy eating so much is because it's maximizing my survival. Think of that next time you're intending to pig out at a restaurant: it's natural selection that's guiding you.

Maybe evolution and technological progress is not always about problem solving and survival. Maybe, sometimes, there's space for simpler things like enjoying what's given to us.

---

Good Reads:

• https://www.zenpencils.com/comic/kevinsmith/ — nice, short comic strip about how the outcome of encouraging an artist might be your favorite book or movie, but if you discourage them then the outcome is sure to be nothing.

---

Footnotes

1. Though we really all know that fire wasn't discovered, it was actually gifted to humans (with great sacrifice) by bad-boy Prometheus. ↩

2. As I write this I can't help but think of an ancient human in a situation similar to The Spellshop, excitedly discovering and cooking delicious food for everyone. Who knows, might be a good cottagecore idea? ↩

3. Of course, one could easily envision a situation where the "charred food" is left unattended for an appreciable while. Maybe they were eating and had to leave the fire for some reason and only came back some days later. Or maybe, more likely, they just discovered some edible charred food after a natural forest fire. ↩