March 25, 2023 • 45 mins
Are there any animals other than humans that cook their food? In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe explore the world of non-human animal meal preparation. Bon appétit! (originally published 03/22/2022)
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Speaker 1 (00:06):
Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My
name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday.
Time for an episode from the Vault. This one originally
published March twenty second, twenty twenty two, and it's called
The Beast War in Apron Part one. This was the
first entry in a series on non human animals doing
things analogous to cooking or otherwise kind of doing a
(00:29):
meal prep in some way. Yeah, do animals cook? Well,
the answer is probably not no, because we talked about
it for two hours, So join in on the fun.
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey,
(00:52):
welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is
Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and today we're going
to be starting on as that has to do with
animal feeding behaviors, but specifically what comes before the feeding itself.
I got into this topic by wondering about a simple question,
and it was are there any animals other than humans
(01:15):
that cook their food? Because if you look at the
relationship that humans have with food versus the at least
obvious relationships that we can see on the surface level
between most wild animals and their food, there were some
pretty stark differences. So you know, you watch like a
grazing herbivore mammal that's eating grass or eating leaves, it
(01:37):
doesn't seem like they're putting the vegetation through any kind
of external processing. It's just there in the environment. They
bite it, they chew it, and they swallow it. Though
once they swallow it. Of course, if you're talking about
like you know, ruminant mammals or something, plenty of interesting
things happen to the food after it has been processed,
(01:57):
say by the teeth in the mouth, there might be
multiple different interesting stages of digestion. But in that first stage,
before the food reaches the mouth, there's not really anything
complex going on that There's just some material in the
environment that has nutritional value. The animal comes within reach
of that food, they bite it, they chew it up,
(02:18):
they swallow it, they just eat it. And if you
compared that to all of the sometimes mind bogglingly complex
stages of manipulation, combination, and alteration of raw plant and
animal materials that go into making a standard human meal,
even meals that we would perceive as kind of simple like,
if you think about all of the preprocessing and alteration
(02:41):
that goes into the foods that make a cheeseburger, the
difference is overwhelming. Oh yeah, I mean even if you're
I mean, you can go even simpler than that. I
guess if even if you just you don't even take
into accounts they meat, because meat processing, especially something like
a hamburger, there's a lot of the lot of grotesque
details that go into that. But so just like thinking
(03:03):
about yeah, like the bread, you know, the vegetables, even
you know, being prepared, the various sauces, I mean, all
the things that go into it. It's it's it's quite
a lot. And yeah, coming back to what you said
earlier that we think about animals, we think about purely
internal food processing and human cuisine. Human cooking is the
(03:25):
externalization of various processes things that that we tend to
imagine generally only take place within the bodies of animals.
We found ways to do them externally to give our
internal digestion a break, as well as to make things
that are otherwise inedible edible exactly right. And of course,
(03:46):
the central idea, the thing that most people think about
when you say the word cooking is the narrow sense
of cooking, meaning causing chemical and structural changes to food
by the application of heat, specifically heating. This is one
of the most common ways of processing food before we
eat it. And this does exactly the things you're talking about.
It takes foods that would not otherwise be edible to
(04:08):
humans and makes them edible, or makes them safe to eat,
or increases the availability of nutrition from the same starting
quantities of food. So you take a mass of raw food,
you cook it, you can usually increase its nutritional efficiency,
you can get more nutrition out of it. And so
to come back to the question of are there animals
that cook, I would say, based on my research, if
(04:31):
you're talking about on their own in the wild, it
appears that the answer is no. In that narrow sense
of cooking, meaning cooking by applying heat, it seems that
humans are the only animals that do that in a
consistent way. That we can talk about a few interesting
wrinkles to that generalization in a minute. But when it
comes to the broader sense of cooking, which is you
(04:52):
would imagine anything that people would do in a restaurant
kitchen or in a home kitchen any way, that people
manipulate food, food or prepare meals other than by applying heat.
It turns out non human animals do all kinds of
fascinating things to their food before consuming it along these lines,
And so that's what I wanted to talk about in
(05:14):
this series. What do animals do that could be construed
as cooking in one way or another, even accepting that
no animals in the wild cook their food with heat,
while with the exception of the ratitu, a phenomenon by
which a rat, once exposed to culinary traditions in an
urban environment, will then begin to cook itself, to actually
(05:38):
copy the various recipes that are around it, improve upon
those recipes, and sometimes crawl on type of a man's
head and pull his hair to use said human as
a puppet to move around the kitchen and prepare you know,
fine works of French cuisine or yes, I can't recall it. Okay, yeah, yes,
(05:59):
the ratitui itself. Yes, but it begs the question is
this is this do we see this only with French
cuisine or does the ratitui phenomenon repeat itself in various
other cultures. Animals can only be trained to make sauces
that are heavy and dairy. So yeah, it is a
French thing, okay, But no, that's a good point because actually,
(06:19):
by raising ratitui, you point out that I think you
could quite clearly find plenty of examples of animals that
have been trained in some sense to cook. Now, they're
probably never going to be as versatile as a human cook,
but I'm sure you can find tons of examples of
an animal that somebody trained to go turn on the
microwave or something like that, you know, to boop at
(06:42):
the oven knob with their nose until it comes on
or something along those lines. And then of course there's
the whole area of animals that are willing to benefit
from cooking without having done it themselves. Like I once
saw a seagull grab a hot dog half of off
of a grill at the beach. You know, the seagull
was not itself barbecuing, but it was more than happy
(07:05):
to benefit from the barbecuing. Well, that is a great point,
and that actually feeds right into the next thing that
I wanted to talk about. So before in this series
we get into examples of animals doing some kind of
cooking in the broader sense, meaning you know, preparing foods
before they eat them in some way that doesn't involve
the directed application of heat. I do want to talk
(07:26):
about cooked food in the narrower sense, food that has
been heated, and one interesting place I thought to start
there would be with the question in general, would non
human animals actually prefer cooked food over the raw food
stuffs that they would encounter in their natural environment. And
it turns out there have been some studies that looked
(07:46):
into this, and in some cases there is a clear answer.
So I wanted to start by looking at a paper
published in the year two thousand and eight in the
Journal of Human Evolution by Victoria Wobber, Brian Hare, and
Richard Rangum called Great Apes Prefer Cooked Food. Now, part
of the background of this paper is based in the
(08:08):
exploration of an idea that's come up in passing on
the show a couple of times before. We've never actually
devoted a full episode or series to it. Maybe someday
we will, but it's what is known as the cooking hypothesis,
And to summarize it briefly, the cooking hypothesis is the
proposition that the advent of cooking was a major contributor
(08:29):
to the physiological evolution of the ancestors of Homo sapiens.
In other words, that a lot of things about the
bodies of modern human beings are the way they are
because our primate ancestors figured out how to control fire
and how to cook their food by applying heat to it.
Now you might wonder how could our bodies be changed
(08:52):
in an evolutionary sense by the invention of cooking. Well,
essentially it would happen by changing the pressures in our
nutritional regimes. So I think proponents of the cooking hypothesis
usually argue that because cooked food is more nutritionally efficient,
again meaning that if food is cooked, you take a
food item you eat it raw versus you eat it cooked.
(09:15):
In the cooked version, you can get more nutrition from
it with less chewing, less energy spent on digestion, and
so forth. So if suddenly eating and absorbing nutrition becomes
easier and more efficient, we have to spend less time chewing,
we have to spend less time gathering large quantities of food.
The types of food we can eat safely is expanded,
(09:38):
and we have to spend less energy developing large powerhouse
digestive tracts, and so forth. So perhaps other adaptive pressures
fill the void, including bigger brains and so forth. And
I think one proposed causal mechanism is that once cooking
is invented, we can get more nutrition from the same
amount of environmental material. Suddenly the carrying pacity of the
(10:01):
local environment than is larger. There can be more humans
per tribe, which requires bigger brains in order to maintain
relationships with that larger number of humans. The main figure
behind the cooking hypothesis is a British primatologist. I think
he either is now or it was at some recent point.
Was it Harvard named Richard Rangum, and he wrote a
(10:23):
book laying out this argument in two thousand and nine
called Catching Fire, How Cooking Made Us Human. Rangum is
also one of the authors of this paper about whether
apes prefer cooked food. And I'm not going to go
into all of the pros and cons the arguments foreign
against the cooking hypothesis. I would just say that my
personal evaluation at a cursory reading of it is that
(10:44):
it looks like it's kind of in the middle zone.
It's one of those arguments that seems to have a
lot of interesting things going for it, but it also
doesn't line up all that well with the best existing
evidence about the timeline for the control of fire by
human ancestors. So I don't know. I'd say it's interesting
but far from conclusive. But regardless of what we think
(11:06):
about the evolutionary effects of cooking on our direct ancestors,
pointing out the theoretical background helps us see why the
researchers performed the experiments described in this paper. So the
authors of this paper begin raising a relevant question, which
is that if you were to walk up to one
of our ancestors roughly two million years ago, maybe to
(11:26):
a member of the species Homo erectus, and you offered
them cooked food, are we sure that they would like
it or that they would prefer it to the same
food in its uncooked state. You mean, like like a
hot pocket. If you brought a hot pocket to one
of our ancestors, what would they make of it? And well,
let me react, I feel quite certain that somebody who
(11:47):
showed up with a hot pocket would be regarded as
a worker of evil magic. But anyway, I mean, I
think this is a worthwhile question to ask because we
know that there are lots of types of food that
we would probably rather eat cooked than raw. Maybe lots
of you know, in this very person to person, but
probably most people would rather eat grain, tough vegetables, most meats,
(12:08):
and so forth in their cooked state. But it's possible
that's just a cultural preference. So, you know, we like
cooked food maybe because we're used to it. Is there
any way to test this out? And the authors here say, well,
obviously not with archaic commonens, but an interesting analog would
be to offer both cooked and raw versions of the
same food to great apes, our closest living relatives, and
(12:30):
see what their preferences are. So that's what this study
looked into. So experiment number one, they were like, hey,
let's try some tubers. Let's get together some carrots, some
sweet potatoes, and some white potatoes and offer them to
chimpanzees in a choice task that exposes them to both
and then allows them to pick between the cooked and
raw forms. And they found in the case of carrots
(12:54):
and sweet potatoes, the chimpanzees definitely liked the cooked version better.
On the other hand, it was interesting the white potato
was more of a toss up. The authors noted that
many chimps seemed kind of hesitant to take the initial
samples of both cooked and raw white potatoes, and it
was basically there was no difference in their preference between
(13:14):
the two, which seems surprising to me because like, I
love raw carrots, the cooked carrots are good too, but
I cannot imagine wanting to eat a raw potato now.
But the authors said, well, maybe the chimpanzees are just
kind of iffy on potatoes in general. Okay, well that
would make sense now. A second experiment they did had
trouble really getting much of an answer. But what they
(13:35):
looked into was to the extent that apes prefer cooked
food over raw food. Why do they like it better?
Is it the taste? Is it something about the texture.
And so they experimented with a number of different grade
apes they use chimp, spinobos, gorillas, and orangutans, and they
offered them choices between carrots in the following format, so
(13:55):
you could have whole pieces of carrot raw or cooked,
grated carrot raw or cooked, and mashed carrot raw or cooked.
And they found that when carrots were whole, apes definitely
preferred the cooked pieces to the raw pieces. Again, they
like cooked better, But after that things got more complicated
apes generally did not seem to like the graded carrot
(14:17):
in any format, and they preferred cooked whole carrots to
raw graded or cooked. Graded. Preferences were less clear in
the mashed condition, though. They explained that some difference in
results between the animal test groups for this experiment could
have been influenced by neophobia, meaning fear of food in
unfamiliar forms. Of course, you know, it's common among humans also,
(14:37):
is that we typically we like foods that we're familiar with,
and we're a little sometimes we're a little hesitant about
foods that are unfamiliar. Yeah, like, for instance, the mashed carrot.
How did he get mashed? Like? Yeah, but you know,
if you were to encounter a mashed carrot in the wild,
you know, the possibilities are not all that appetizing. Yeah, Okay.
(14:59):
Experiments three of four and this one, the authors write,
quote this experiment provided great apes with choices between raw
and cooked meat and raw and cooked apple malice domestica.
We controlled for neophobia in this experiment because one of
these items was familiar in its raw form apple and
the other was familiar in its cooked form meat. Thus,
(15:19):
this juxtaposed preference is determined by taste, slash, texture, and
those which would be determined by familiarity with the test items.
And in this test, the apes definitely preferred cooked beef
over raw beef, but they did not show a significant
preference one way or the other about the apple. Again,
it's funny thinking about how much this does or does
not overlap with our own preferences. Though again, you know,
(15:43):
human preferences you always have to wonder about being a
product of cultural familiarity. But they say this shows that
neophobia is not the only factor affecting preferences, because the
apes were previously familiar only with raw apple, not cooked,
and in this experiment, while they did not prefer the
cook apple, they basically showed no difference in preference between
the two. Now, I mean, in all of this, we
(16:06):
have the saying about comparing apples and oranges, and here
we're comparing apples and meat. Uh So, I don't know,
it feels, I mean, not that there's really a way
to improve on this. I'm not I don't mean to
criticize the study, but it's like they're there are certain
limitations in place with some of these comparisons. I feel,
what do you mean that in that they're they're documenting
different preferences by types of food like well like, for
(16:29):
for instance, to say, well, we control for neophobia because
the raw form apple will still looks like an apple,
and the and the cooked meat still looks like the meat. Um,
I don't know. I find that kind of a confusing rationale.
Oh no, no, I think you're misunderstanding what they were doing.
That they the neophobia thing was that they were familiar
(16:49):
with cooked meat and with raw apple, but not with
cooked apple or raw meat, and so they were trying
to see, um, does this make any like, does it
just conform to in both cases they prefer whatever they're
previously familiar with. Okay, in the case of meat they did.
In the case of apple not so much. But they
did another test. The fourth experiment was a test for novelty.
(17:12):
They said, quote, we tested chimpanzees that were not given
meat as a regular part of their diet and as
far as was known, had never eaten cooked meat. And
so they're offered raw and cooked beef. And again they
definitely preferred the cooked beef better than the raw. So
in the final discussion they say, yeah, on average, and
the foods they tested here, apes liked cooked food better
(17:32):
than raw food. With some exceptions. They definitely prefer cooked beef, carrots,
and sweet potatoes. They don't seem to have much of
a preference on average between the cooked and raw forms
of apple and white potato, And it seemed like in
general just didn't really love white potato. And so they
said neophobia might be a contributing factor to some of
these results, But in experiments that tried to control for it,
(17:56):
the ape still on average thought were pretty cool with
the cooked version of food. But finally, this experiment had
difficulty determining which characteristics of cooked foods the apes were
responding to, you know, was it taste, was a texture,
and so forth. And I do think that's an interesting question,
like if animals other than humans also prefer cooked food
(18:18):
in most cases, why is it like does it taste
better to them? Is it like because it's softer to chew?
I don't know. Maybe maybe we can come back to that,
but anyway, the authors, you know, I mean, it's difficult
too because we have to stop and realize, like when
they're talking about the difference between a cooked and a
raw white potato, the cooked white potato in this experiment
is also not buttered and salted and you know, and
(18:40):
prepared in these other ways. Like we're just stripping it
down to the basics of what cooking does to this
particular substance. So yeah, like if I were to you know,
trying to set aside as much a you know, human
complexity as possible, if I were presented with just a
plain white potato and a raw potato, I mean, I'd
(19:01):
like to think I would still prefer the pick potato
to the raw potato, but without anything added to it,
it's still not a very attractive offer. Like the potato
is is something that is best um consumed when there
are other things done to it, other seasonings, other styles
of preparation, etc. The human mind cannot comprehend the depths
(19:23):
of blandness of a of an unseasoned potato. Yeah. The
carrot is really the one that that throws me the most,
you know, like because it part of me would guess
that there's nothing quite like the raw crispness of the carrot.
Like the carrot is crisp, we identify that with with freshness.
The carrot is sweet. Um, Like what is changed in
(19:46):
cooking the carrot that that would that would make it
more preferable, like, is it just it's just softer? Is
it therefore seem riper in that sense? And then how
does that affect the sweetness of it? Would the sweetness
be in any way enhanced by the cooking? I think
in general, I can't speak to carrots in particular. But
the authors actually address this, They say so they talk
(20:07):
about hypothesizing reasons that non human animals would prefer cooked
food over raw food. And so one of the avenues
they talk about is that cooking tends to cause chemical
changes that increase the availability of flavor compounds that animals
of all kinds seem to like. And so the two
(20:28):
main examples they offer are available sugars and available glutamates.
Now sugars, that's I'm pretty clear to understand, and we
can know that from experience. I don't know about carrots.
It probably conforms to this and carrots, but I think
about like onions, like eating a raw onion versus eating
a cooked onion. The cooked onion is so much sweeter
like the you know, the amount of sugar you can
(20:50):
taste in it is I don't know, it feels like
it's exponential above a raw onion. And yeah, and that's
that's a case too, where by cooking the onion your
kind of blunting it's um it's effects like the chemical
weaponry if the onion is diluted. Yeah, the sulfur compounds
and stuff. Yeah, so that's sugars. Apparently lots of foods
(21:11):
have more available sugars when you cook them, so they
taste sweeter. Tons of different animals can differentiate the levels
of sugar and a food they're eating, and obviously prefer
the thing that tastes like it's got more sugar in
it because it is probably going to be more nutritionally dense,
it has more calories per same amount of food. The
other thing is the available glutamates. Glutamates are you know,
(21:35):
does that ring a bell? Maybe it's in the phrase
monosodium glutamate, the msg flavor, the umami flavor. Glutamates are
are largely responsible for savory flavors that we associate with
meat and h and also things like tomatoes and hard
cheeses like parmesan and soy sauce. Those those glutamates or
(21:56):
that delicious savory umami feeling and that's not just for
humans either. It turns out tons of animals. I think
even some invertebrates can detect umami flavor through the presence
of free glutamates, which are increased by cooking. And while
I was reading about this, I did get really amused
by the idea of like invert I don't know which
(22:16):
invertebrates exactly, but like with lobsters really love soy sauce,
would like there be centipedes who are going nuts for
parmesan cheese anyway. Okay, So cooking often increases the availability
of sugars and glutamates, So that's a favor increasing flavors
(22:37):
that broadly lots of animals seem to like. And cooking
tends to change the texture of food, usually by making
it softer and easier to chew, and of course that
appeals to the natural laziness present in all kinds of animals,
not just us. So I think you could possibly argue
that in a way, cooking, by massively increasing the presence
(22:58):
of taste and texture qualities that our bodies and brains
are already naturally on the look for, cooking could be
viewed as a sort of ancient form of supernormal stimuli,
like evolution shaped animal appetites to seek out nutritionally dense
things like sugar and glutamates, which we detect by taste.
Cooking causes chemical reactions that make more of those molecules available.
(23:21):
Cooking softens food, appealing to our natural laziness. We don't
like to spend an hour chewing on some tough bit
of something to get it down. Tender food is better
than tough food. So it's kind of like it's it's
taking all these things we naturally seek out in foods
we would find in our environment, but making them way
more dependably present in all kinds of foods. But anyway,
(23:43):
the authors of this study I was talking about, they
say that their findings conformed other bits of pre existing
evidence that many other non human animals on average prefer
cooked food over raw food. For instance, they cite a
book by Brewer in nineteen seventy eight alleging observation that
chimpanzees in the wild would preferred eat seeds that have
(24:05):
been naturally cooked or at least heated by wildfires. This
was in a book by Brewer called The Chimpanzees of
Mount Assyriek and well I thought that was interesting. Yeah, yeah,
like that it's kind of primordial cooking right there. And
they cite findings of preferences in other mammals. For example,
Bradshaw at All in two thousand found that once cats
(24:29):
have been exposed to both raw and cooked meat, they
tend to prefer the cooked version. And they point to
Ramirez in nineteen ninety two, which found that rats preferred
cooked starch over raw starch. But I was looking at
another study that actually asked a complimentary question. So if
the first question is do grade apes such as chimpanzees
(24:50):
prefer cooked food over raw food, it seems in the
majority of cases they do. The second question is do
they in fact possess the ability to understand and the
cooking process? Would they, in theory at least be able
to cook for themselves? And the study that looked into
this was by Felix Varniken and Alexandra g Rosati, published
(25:13):
in Proceedings of the Royal Society b Biological Sciences, called
Cognitive Capacities for Cooking in Chimpanzees. And this was twenty fifteen,
and so the author's right here quote the transition to
a cook to diet represents an important shift in human
ecology and evolution. Cooking requires a set of sophisticated cognitive abilities,
including causal reasoning, self control, and anticipatory planning. Do humans
(25:38):
uniquely possess the cognitive capacities needed to cook food? And?
Oh man, when I was reading that line about about
cooking requiring self control and anticipatory planning, I felt a
little bit cheapish because it immediately made me think about
the problem of rob I don't know if you do
this too, but you're like cooking something and you just
kind of keep snacking on it. Yeah, I mean you
(26:02):
encounter that definitely with your more complicated recipes where um,
I don't know, say you've, like a shepherd's pie comes
to mind. I've recently made a vegetarian shepherd's pie for
the weekend Saint Patty's Day, And uh, yeah, once you've
made like one part of it, like maybe you've made
them the mashed potatoes, or you've made the you know,
(26:24):
the the the meat and vegetable filling. Uh, you might
be tempted, especially if you're a little bit hungry, you
might be tempted do taste and keep tasting those portions
before everything comes together is one. However, we tend if
we're making shepherd's pie, we're usually not tempted to eat
the raw potatoes or right or something like that before
we begin cooking. But yeah, you know, like you've you've
(26:47):
gone past the point where you're testing it for seasoning
or whatever. Is just like okay, yeah, maybe have a
little another bite of this, right, We're like, we're not
going to go hog out eating a much of just
raw flour right out of the bag. But of course
once the cookie dough is prepared, that is where the
temptation may set in. Well, it turns out some chimpanzees
have the same problem, but they do better at these
(27:08):
kinds of anticipation and delay of gratification tasks than you
might expect. So this study address these questions by performing
some experiments with our closest living relatives, chimpanzees. The authors
conducted a total of nine studies on chimpanzees living in
a nature sanctuary in the Democratic Republic of Congo, with
the following results. They found. First of all, they replicated
(27:30):
the finding that chimpanzees in general prefer cooked foods over
the same foods in their raw form. Second finding is
that chimpanzees in some way do understand that food is
changed by the cooking process. They can tell the difference,
and they understand something is happening when a raw food
is exchanged for a cooked food. Third, they will delay
(27:51):
gratification in order to upgrade a raw piece of food
to a cooked version of that same food. Fourth, they
will give up possession of a raw piece of food
already in hand in order to transform it into a
cooked food. And then fifth they will transport or store
raw food in anticipation of later opportunities to exchange it
(28:12):
for its cooked form. And an interesting note on the method.
I was like, wait a minute, are they going to
be giving apes like an oven or something. They did
not do that, actually, because of course they didn't want
to run the risk of the animals burning or otherwise
injuring themselves. Instead, they used a plastic box with a
false bottom that would exchange a piece of raw food
(28:33):
for a piece of cooked food when shaken. Okay, I
mean there are some limitations there, obviously, but that's essentially
what an oven does, I guess, right, Well, obviously this
is not the exact same thing as the cooking process.
But they're trying to figure out, well, the chimpanzees at
least figure out that there is a process they can
put raw food through and get cooked food out. And
(28:54):
will they delay gratification to go through that process? Yeah,
and the answer is broadly. Yet the authors of the
study right quote together, our results indicate that several of
the fundamental psychological abilities necessary to engage in cooking may
have been shared with the last common ancestor of apes
and humans, predating the control of fire. And I was
(29:15):
reading a write up of this article in The Guardian
by Hannah Devlin that had some good supplemental details. One
thing I wanted to read this paragraph definitely made me
say all buddy out loud. It was quote the chimps
continued to opt for the cooked option sixty percent of
the time when they had to carry the food some
distance in order to place it in the quote oven,
(29:36):
although since they often carried it in their mouths, this
was a challenge, and they sometimes appeared to eat the
food on the way quote almost by accident. I sympathize
with that the best of intentions. You know, sometimes that
sweet potatoes in your mouth and you're just going to
start you in the other thing was that, in terms
of hoarding raw ingredients in the hopes that they could
(29:58):
later be exchanged for cooked food, chimps in some cases
hoarded up to twenty eight slices of sweet potato, and
Varniken said to the Guardian quote delayed gratification is a
problem for us as well. We also have a tendency
to nibble at food before we finished cooking. So that's
exactly what we were talking about. And they don't even
have excuses for it, like you know, they can't use
(30:19):
the Rationelle Well, I need to taste it to make
sure that the flavor profiles appropriate. They need to make
sure I don't need to add more salt or pepper. Right.
But while I think this is interesting and it's informative
to the question of when humans first started cooking their
food and what effects that may have had on our
ancestors one to two million years ago. Of course, the
(30:40):
fact remains that there are no widely observed natural instances
of animals in their natural habitat cooking foods by applying heat.
But as we said earlier, heating is not the only
form of cooking. Humans do all kinds of things to
food that fall under the umbrella of cooking or cuisine
that are unrelated to heat. So we take raw or
(31:01):
cooked food items and we wash them, or we age them,
or we ferment them, or we season them, we butcher
them in certain ways, we skewer them or cut them
up in special ways, we combine them together in interesting ways.
And it's frankly surprising how many of these culinary manipulations
and modifications that humans do are mirrored at some level
(31:22):
throughout the animal world. And so I thought that's what
we could explore for the remainder of this series, all
the different ways that animals cook. And you had some
really interesting examples. I think that had to do with
maybe what could broadly be called some form of butchering
(31:44):
or skewering of food as a preparation method. Yeah, yeah,
I have a couple of good examples here, and one
of them I think is a pretty pretty obvious one.
Let's start with an amusing one, but perhaps the less
involved one, and that is the case of the lamber
guy or bearded vulture. So these birds are found in
(32:05):
parts of Africa and Eurasia, and these birds are known
for their amazing ability to eat and digest bones. And
I think that's that's one of the reasons this is
a great example bird to start with, because it already
has robust anatomical features and internal abilities when it comes
to the processing of of what is, you know, arguably
(32:26):
a very difficult food. They're they're eating bones, but they
have you know, they have these wonderful bites. They can
bite through brittle bones, they can swallow large chunks of bones,
and their digestive system can handle it. And yet there
are still going to be challenges that are too great
for them to handle without a little ingenuity. And so
(32:47):
basically they have a butchering challenge ahead of them. You know.
Butchering is what we do when we have a carcass
and we don't just want to eat from the carcass.
We can't cook the whole carcass. We have to take
things apart, remove things that are inedible, are not desired
or used for at another time or for another purpose,
you know, all the various reasons you have to take
a part of a carcass. Yeah, And in fact, external
(33:10):
processing of animal carcasses is Hypothi's not known for sure,
but it is hypothesized to be one of the earliest
drivers of tool use in humans. That yeah, why would
a human start using a flat rock as a cutting surface,
maybe to get meat and tough hide parts and stuff
off of an animal kill. Yeah, yeah, that We've talked
about that on the show in the past when when
(33:31):
talking about early tool use and evidence of how those
tools are being used, you know, we can look for
those signs on the bones of them having been scraped.
In some cases, it's also evidence of cannibalism taking place
in a given people versus you know, I'm just mere
you know, murder or warfare. Oh, because of the signs
(33:53):
of tool use on the brains. Yeah, yeah, so yeah,
this is a case where the lambur guyer is going
to occasionally find some chunks of bone that are too
big to handle. They need to butcher it, they need
to take it apart. But what tools are available to them. Well,
luckily they can. They can pick up a pretty big bone,
I think, I think they can basically take off with
(34:13):
something equal to their own weight. So they've developed the
practice of taking larger bones up high into the air
and then dropping them onto rocks in order to break
them open or shatter them. Sometimes it takes more than
one try, and it's it's also a learned tactic, so
generally it takes around seven years for one of these
(34:34):
birds to master it. And you'll find examples of immature
birds just dropping bones incorrectly, like they haven't really figured
out exactly where you're supposed to drop them or or
when you release them. But they'll get there. They'll eventually
learn it, and it will open up new possibilities to
them in terms of what they can eat. Oh that's
(34:54):
my second al buddy of the episode, imagining the vulture
is dropping the bones wrong. Yeah, nice job, Ted. Now
they sometimes prey on live creatures as well, it's not
just bones. And probably one of the more alarming and
interesting examples is that of the tortoise. They may fly
(35:15):
up with a tortoise that again has to be a
tortoise that can physically carry up, but then they can
drop that as well, treat it like an oversized bone
in attempt to bust through those bony defenses. And this
may ring a bell for for some of you out there,
because this is of course how the Greek father of tragedy, Escalus,
(35:36):
was said to have died in four fifty eight BCE.
This according to the two accounts by Valerius Maximus and
our old friend Plenty of the Elder. Now this may
well just be a story. We have to drive them,
but it basically goes like this. Yeah, Escalus goes to
an oracle. He receives a prophecy that he will he
(35:59):
will one day be killed by a falling object. So
he's a smart guy. He says, well, nothing can fall
on me if I'm outdoors. So he spends more and
more time outdoors because yeah, there's nothing's going to fall
from the roof. There no shelves. Sounds like a pretty
safe debt. Yeah, that makes sense. It's like, if there's
an earthquake, where do you want to be get away
from buildings? You're gonna be out in the middle of
(36:20):
a field, right. Unfortunately he is in the territory of
the Lambur guy or it's thought that this may may
be referring to Lambur guyers. Suddenly a great bird flies overhead.
That great bird has a tortoise in its clutches, and
it mistakes Escalus's head for a hard rock. A lot
(36:42):
of times he's depicted as being, you know, bald on top,
and so the bird drops the tortoise on him, killing
him instantly. Again, possibly just a misunderstanding or an entertaining tale,
But you'll find various accounts of deaths like this from
the ancient world where you have to stop and ask,
did they really die like this or is this just
(37:04):
a nice story? This is the story that developed about
their death. If true, he died by accidentally running a
foul of an avian butchery process. Yes, I'm seeing vague
connections to the Texas chainsaw masker. But now when it
comes to a van butchery. The best example, of course,
(37:25):
is the shrike. Now, if you've never seen a shrike,
look up pictures of them. But they're generally, I mean,
for me, they're an unimpressive looking bird. This is going
to be different for you depending on how into birds
you are and if you're a board birdwatcher, etc. But
you know, they when you compare what they look like
with what they do, they don't look quite as impressive
(37:48):
in my opinion, because what they do is very impressive.
They are thirty four species of shrike in four genera
in the family Lanta day And if you're yeah, if
you're not a bird enthusiast or a birdwatcher. You might
just look at a shrike and say, well, that looks
like a bird, but it's not what they look like.
It's what they do. And basically what they do is
(38:09):
they engage in a kind of a complex butchery situation.
That's why we call them butcher birds. Lanta day is
derived from the Latin lantius, which means butcher. So they
don't wear little aprons or wrap morsels of meat and
white butcher's paper. But what they do is they take
insects and even small vertebrates that they kill and they
(38:30):
impale them onto thorns like little lad draculas. Wow. And
by the way, their methods. You know, it's one thing
to get those various bugs and insects, but their method
of killing small rodents is actually quite brutal, as pointed
out by Hannah Waters in a twenty eighteen article for
the Audubon Society. Quote, they grasp mice by the neck
(38:51):
with their pointed beak, pinch the spinal cord to induce paralysis,
and then vigorously shake their prey with enough force to
break its neck. Oh that's interesting because it's like a
bird version of a common predatory tactic. I think he
used about like some big cats, right. I think we
talked about this with Mary Roach in her book, talking
about various kinds of big predatory cats that will attempt
(39:14):
to bite along the back of the neck, which is
how their characteristic attacks are identified in humans. Yeah. I
have noticed this when I watched all the Jurassic Park
movies with my son a year or so ago. Well,
I forget which one it was in, but there's one
in particular where you see the dinosaurs, the raptors in particular,
(39:34):
killing by by clamping onto the back of the neck,
which I thought was a nice touch. So anyway, but no, waits, no,
but I've got a question. Okay, so this seems gratuitous.
The bird just takes its prey, which normal bird would
would just capture and then kill and then eat. But
this bird impales it on a thorn on a plant.
(39:55):
Why do we have any idea like what the purpose
of this is? Yeah, and there seemed to be three
different reasons, um and and I do have to acknowledge that, yes,
this is exactly what you mentioned Texas Chainsaw, Maska earlier.
This is exactly what happens in one of the kills
in TCMU. He cracks a victim on the head, uh,
you know, and take takes her out, but then he
(40:16):
sticks her onto a meat hook. Uh. And that's that's
basically what the shrike is doing. So there are three
different reasons to do this that that researchers have identified.
One and this is pretty neat and this is this
is that it's about tearing the meat once. And let's
say an insect is impaled on that thorn. You can
(40:37):
then pull on the creature's body and you can rip it,
cut it into smaller pieces. So it's leverage. It allows
you to get better leverage on the for butchering the
insect body. Right. It's it's not something we really do
because we you know, we can use farm, you know,
all these other tools. But imagine if you didn't have tools,
if the thorn was the only tool. Um, because that's
(41:00):
particularly I mean, that's exactly the situation that the bird
is in. The Next reason it's for the shrike to
put something on the on the thorn is just as
a means of storing the meat. Uneaten portions of the
meat can be left on the thorns and the bird
can return later to eat some more m okay, as
opposed to like storing it on the ground where something
(41:21):
else is more likely to come along and take it. Right.
And then finally, this is I think probably the most
interesting of the three and one that I wasn't really
familiar with that I was. I knew about the shrikes
and about the category one and two here. But the
third reason is to potentially detoxify the meat. And this
is where we get more specific with some of the
(41:44):
prey species that are targeted. Uh, it's a way of
processing the meat of a toxic prey animal so that
the bird can then eat it. So the bird will
leave a body on the spike for like a period
of one to two days, allowing the toxins in the
body to degrade to the point where it can be
safely eaten. Okay, So this might be the case in
(42:06):
like an insect that has a poison within its body
that has a fairly short chemical half life, and it's
if it's not replenished by the live animals body, it's
going to eventually degrade over time exactly. Yeah, and some
for some specific examples, the loggerhead shrike does this with
luber grasshoppers as well as with a species of beetle
(42:27):
and moth, and great gray shrikes have been observed to
do this with black cone headed grasshoppers. So so, yeah,
the shrike is fascinating, not only because there's something kind
of grizzly and wonderful about what it does, but yeah,
by doing these three things with its practice, it's engaging
in a in several different things that that we do
(42:47):
with our cooking process, you know, the butchery of the meat,
the butcher or they just the taking a part of
a given element, the storing of that element, and then
detoxifying that element. Now, we tend to we do this
in a number of different ways. It may be cooking
something and the cooking process, the heating process itself destroys
the toxins. It also maybe, and we've touched on this
(43:09):
before in our Dangerous Food series, it may also be
about removing parts of the body or parts of the
plant that would otherwise be toxic to us. But we
have just specific cases of the shrike carrying this out
just by leaving it on the thorn long enough. Well,
I'm impressed. Yes, they are impressive creatures. All right, Well,
(43:32):
we need to wrap up part one here, but we're
going to be back next time with more of the
quote cooking or otherwise, you know, meal prep, cuisine, behaviors
of non human animals. Definitely want to talk about some
interesting behaviors that have been called washing, but maybe more
obscure in nature than that. Yeah, in some cases at
(43:53):
least it's kind of mysterious. And we'll get into into
all of that, plus plus other examples in the meantime. Certainly,
right in, let us know what you think about what
we discussed here today, especially if you have any direct
experience with us. Have you observed the shrikes in the
wild have Lammergeyer's drop tortoises at you, and you've luckily
(44:15):
been able to get a less rocky looking hat over
your head just in time. Do you prefer raw potatoes
to cook? Oh? Yeah, yeah, I mean he's going to
have some insight on all of that, so yeah, right in,
let us know, we'd love to hear from you. In
the meantime, if you would like to check out other
episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind. Core episodes published
on two season Thursdays. On Monday, we do a listener mail.
(44:38):
On Wednesday, we do a short form monster fact or
artifact episode, and on Fridays we do Weird House Cinema.
That's our time to set aside most serious concerns and
just talk about a strange film, huge things. As always
to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you
would like to get in touch with us with feedback
on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic
for the future, or just to say hello, you can
(44:59):
email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind
dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio.
For more podcasts from my heart Radio, this is the
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening to your
favorite shows.
Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My
name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday.
Time for an episode from the Vault. This one originally
published March twenty second, twenty twenty two, and it's called
The Beast War in Apron Part one. This was the
first entry in a series on non human animals doing
things analogous to cooking or otherwise kind of doing a
(00:29):
meal prep in some way. Yeah, do animals cook? Well,
the answer is probably not no, because we talked about
it for two hours, So join in on the fun.
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey,
(00:52):
welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is
Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and today we're going
to be starting on as that has to do with
animal feeding behaviors, but specifically what comes before the feeding itself.
I got into this topic by wondering about a simple question,
and it was are there any animals other than humans
(01:15):
that cook their food? Because if you look at the
relationship that humans have with food versus the at least
obvious relationships that we can see on the surface level
between most wild animals and their food, there were some
pretty stark differences. So you know, you watch like a
grazing herbivore mammal that's eating grass or eating leaves, it
(01:37):
doesn't seem like they're putting the vegetation through any kind
of external processing. It's just there in the environment. They
bite it, they chew it, and they swallow it. Though
once they swallow it. Of course, if you're talking about
like you know, ruminant mammals or something, plenty of interesting
things happen to the food after it has been processed,
(01:57):
say by the teeth in the mouth, there might be
multiple different interesting stages of digestion. But in that first stage,
before the food reaches the mouth, there's not really anything
complex going on that There's just some material in the
environment that has nutritional value. The animal comes within reach
of that food, they bite it, they chew it up,
(02:18):
they swallow it, they just eat it. And if you
compared that to all of the sometimes mind bogglingly complex
stages of manipulation, combination, and alteration of raw plant and
animal materials that go into making a standard human meal,
even meals that we would perceive as kind of simple like,
if you think about all of the preprocessing and alteration
(02:41):
that goes into the foods that make a cheeseburger, the
difference is overwhelming. Oh yeah, I mean even if you're
I mean, you can go even simpler than that. I
guess if even if you just you don't even take
into accounts they meat, because meat processing, especially something like
a hamburger, there's a lot of the lot of grotesque
details that go into that. But so just like thinking
(03:03):
about yeah, like the bread, you know, the vegetables, even
you know, being prepared, the various sauces, I mean, all
the things that go into it. It's it's it's quite
a lot. And yeah, coming back to what you said
earlier that we think about animals, we think about purely
internal food processing and human cuisine. Human cooking is the
(03:25):
externalization of various processes things that that we tend to
imagine generally only take place within the bodies of animals.
We found ways to do them externally to give our
internal digestion a break, as well as to make things
that are otherwise inedible edible exactly right. And of course,
(03:46):
the central idea, the thing that most people think about
when you say the word cooking is the narrow sense
of cooking, meaning causing chemical and structural changes to food
by the application of heat, specifically heating. This is one
of the most common ways of processing food before we
eat it. And this does exactly the things you're talking about.
It takes foods that would not otherwise be edible to
(04:08):
humans and makes them edible, or makes them safe to eat,
or increases the availability of nutrition from the same starting
quantities of food. So you take a mass of raw food,
you cook it, you can usually increase its nutritional efficiency,
you can get more nutrition out of it. And so
to come back to the question of are there animals
that cook, I would say, based on my research, if
(04:31):
you're talking about on their own in the wild, it
appears that the answer is no. In that narrow sense
of cooking, meaning cooking by applying heat, it seems that
humans are the only animals that do that in a
consistent way. That we can talk about a few interesting
wrinkles to that generalization in a minute. But when it
comes to the broader sense of cooking, which is you
(04:52):
would imagine anything that people would do in a restaurant
kitchen or in a home kitchen any way, that people
manipulate food, food or prepare meals other than by applying heat.
It turns out non human animals do all kinds of
fascinating things to their food before consuming it along these lines,
And so that's what I wanted to talk about in
(05:14):
this series. What do animals do that could be construed
as cooking in one way or another, even accepting that
no animals in the wild cook their food with heat,
while with the exception of the ratitu, a phenomenon by
which a rat, once exposed to culinary traditions in an
urban environment, will then begin to cook itself, to actually
(05:38):
copy the various recipes that are around it, improve upon
those recipes, and sometimes crawl on type of a man's
head and pull his hair to use said human as
a puppet to move around the kitchen and prepare you know,
fine works of French cuisine or yes, I can't recall it. Okay, yeah, yes,
(05:59):
the ratitui itself. Yes, but it begs the question is
this is this do we see this only with French
cuisine or does the ratitui phenomenon repeat itself in various
other cultures. Animals can only be trained to make sauces
that are heavy and dairy. So yeah, it is a
French thing, okay, But no, that's a good point because actually,
(06:19):
by raising ratitui, you point out that I think you
could quite clearly find plenty of examples of animals that
have been trained in some sense to cook. Now, they're
probably never going to be as versatile as a human cook,
but I'm sure you can find tons of examples of
an animal that somebody trained to go turn on the
microwave or something like that, you know, to boop at
(06:42):
the oven knob with their nose until it comes on
or something along those lines. And then of course there's
the whole area of animals that are willing to benefit
from cooking without having done it themselves. Like I once
saw a seagull grab a hot dog half of off
of a grill at the beach. You know, the seagull
was not itself barbecuing, but it was more than happy
(07:05):
to benefit from the barbecuing. Well, that is a great point,
and that actually feeds right into the next thing that
I wanted to talk about. So before in this series
we get into examples of animals doing some kind of
cooking in the broader sense, meaning you know, preparing foods
before they eat them in some way that doesn't involve
the directed application of heat. I do want to talk
(07:26):
about cooked food in the narrower sense, food that has
been heated, and one interesting place I thought to start
there would be with the question in general, would non
human animals actually prefer cooked food over the raw food
stuffs that they would encounter in their natural environment. And
it turns out there have been some studies that looked
(07:46):
into this, and in some cases there is a clear answer.
So I wanted to start by looking at a paper
published in the year two thousand and eight in the
Journal of Human Evolution by Victoria Wobber, Brian Hare, and
Richard Rangum called Great Apes Prefer Cooked Food. Now, part
of the background of this paper is based in the
(08:08):
exploration of an idea that's come up in passing on
the show a couple of times before. We've never actually
devoted a full episode or series to it. Maybe someday
we will, but it's what is known as the cooking hypothesis,
And to summarize it briefly, the cooking hypothesis is the
proposition that the advent of cooking was a major contributor
(08:29):
to the physiological evolution of the ancestors of Homo sapiens.
In other words, that a lot of things about the
bodies of modern human beings are the way they are
because our primate ancestors figured out how to control fire
and how to cook their food by applying heat to it.
Now you might wonder how could our bodies be changed
(08:52):
in an evolutionary sense by the invention of cooking. Well,
essentially it would happen by changing the pressures in our
nutritional regimes. So I think proponents of the cooking hypothesis
usually argue that because cooked food is more nutritionally efficient,
again meaning that if food is cooked, you take a
food item you eat it raw versus you eat it cooked.
(09:15):
In the cooked version, you can get more nutrition from
it with less chewing, less energy spent on digestion, and
so forth. So if suddenly eating and absorbing nutrition becomes
easier and more efficient, we have to spend less time chewing,
we have to spend less time gathering large quantities of food.
The types of food we can eat safely is expanded,
(09:38):
and we have to spend less energy developing large powerhouse
digestive tracts, and so forth. So perhaps other adaptive pressures
fill the void, including bigger brains and so forth. And
I think one proposed causal mechanism is that once cooking
is invented, we can get more nutrition from the same
amount of environmental material. Suddenly the carrying pacity of the
(10:01):
local environment than is larger. There can be more humans
per tribe, which requires bigger brains in order to maintain
relationships with that larger number of humans. The main figure
behind the cooking hypothesis is a British primatologist. I think
he either is now or it was at some recent point.
Was it Harvard named Richard Rangum, and he wrote a
(10:23):
book laying out this argument in two thousand and nine
called Catching Fire, How Cooking Made Us Human. Rangum is
also one of the authors of this paper about whether
apes prefer cooked food. And I'm not going to go
into all of the pros and cons the arguments foreign
against the cooking hypothesis. I would just say that my
personal evaluation at a cursory reading of it is that
(10:44):
it looks like it's kind of in the middle zone.
It's one of those arguments that seems to have a
lot of interesting things going for it, but it also
doesn't line up all that well with the best existing
evidence about the timeline for the control of fire by
human ancestors. So I don't know. I'd say it's interesting
but far from conclusive. But regardless of what we think
(11:06):
about the evolutionary effects of cooking on our direct ancestors,
pointing out the theoretical background helps us see why the
researchers performed the experiments described in this paper. So the
authors of this paper begin raising a relevant question, which
is that if you were to walk up to one
of our ancestors roughly two million years ago, maybe to
(11:26):
a member of the species Homo erectus, and you offered
them cooked food, are we sure that they would like
it or that they would prefer it to the same
food in its uncooked state. You mean, like like a
hot pocket. If you brought a hot pocket to one
of our ancestors, what would they make of it? And well,
let me react, I feel quite certain that somebody who
(11:47):
showed up with a hot pocket would be regarded as
a worker of evil magic. But anyway, I mean, I
think this is a worthwhile question to ask because we
know that there are lots of types of food that
we would probably rather eat cooked than raw. Maybe lots
of you know, in this very person to person, but
probably most people would rather eat grain, tough vegetables, most meats,
(12:08):
and so forth in their cooked state. But it's possible
that's just a cultural preference. So, you know, we like
cooked food maybe because we're used to it. Is there
any way to test this out? And the authors here say, well,
obviously not with archaic commonens, but an interesting analog would
be to offer both cooked and raw versions of the
same food to great apes, our closest living relatives, and
(12:30):
see what their preferences are. So that's what this study
looked into. So experiment number one, they were like, hey,
let's try some tubers. Let's get together some carrots, some
sweet potatoes, and some white potatoes and offer them to
chimpanzees in a choice task that exposes them to both
and then allows them to pick between the cooked and
raw forms. And they found in the case of carrots
(12:54):
and sweet potatoes, the chimpanzees definitely liked the cooked version better.
On the other hand, it was interesting the white potato
was more of a toss up. The authors noted that
many chimps seemed kind of hesitant to take the initial
samples of both cooked and raw white potatoes, and it
was basically there was no difference in their preference between
(13:14):
the two, which seems surprising to me because like, I
love raw carrots, the cooked carrots are good too, but
I cannot imagine wanting to eat a raw potato now.
But the authors said, well, maybe the chimpanzees are just
kind of iffy on potatoes in general. Okay, well that
would make sense now. A second experiment they did had
trouble really getting much of an answer. But what they
(13:35):
looked into was to the extent that apes prefer cooked
food over raw food. Why do they like it better?
Is it the taste? Is it something about the texture.
And so they experimented with a number of different grade
apes they use chimp, spinobos, gorillas, and orangutans, and they
offered them choices between carrots in the following format, so
(13:55):
you could have whole pieces of carrot raw or cooked,
grated carrot raw or cooked, and mashed carrot raw or cooked.
And they found that when carrots were whole, apes definitely
preferred the cooked pieces to the raw pieces. Again, they
like cooked better, But after that things got more complicated
apes generally did not seem to like the graded carrot
(14:17):
in any format, and they preferred cooked whole carrots to
raw graded or cooked. Graded. Preferences were less clear in
the mashed condition, though. They explained that some difference in
results between the animal test groups for this experiment could
have been influenced by neophobia, meaning fear of food in
unfamiliar forms. Of course, you know, it's common among humans also,
(14:37):
is that we typically we like foods that we're familiar with,
and we're a little sometimes we're a little hesitant about
foods that are unfamiliar. Yeah, like, for instance, the mashed carrot.
How did he get mashed? Like? Yeah, but you know,
if you were to encounter a mashed carrot in the wild,
you know, the possibilities are not all that appetizing. Yeah, Okay.
(14:59):
Experiments three of four and this one, the authors write,
quote this experiment provided great apes with choices between raw
and cooked meat and raw and cooked apple malice domestica.
We controlled for neophobia in this experiment because one of
these items was familiar in its raw form apple and
the other was familiar in its cooked form meat. Thus,
(15:19):
this juxtaposed preference is determined by taste, slash, texture, and
those which would be determined by familiarity with the test items.
And in this test, the apes definitely preferred cooked beef
over raw beef, but they did not show a significant
preference one way or the other about the apple. Again,
it's funny thinking about how much this does or does
not overlap with our own preferences. Though again, you know,
(15:43):
human preferences you always have to wonder about being a
product of cultural familiarity. But they say this shows that
neophobia is not the only factor affecting preferences, because the
apes were previously familiar only with raw apple, not cooked,
and in this experiment, while they did not prefer the
cook apple, they basically showed no difference in preference between
the two. Now, I mean, in all of this, we
(16:06):
have the saying about comparing apples and oranges, and here
we're comparing apples and meat. Uh So, I don't know,
it feels, I mean, not that there's really a way
to improve on this. I'm not I don't mean to
criticize the study, but it's like they're there are certain
limitations in place with some of these comparisons. I feel,
what do you mean that in that they're they're documenting
different preferences by types of food like well like, for
(16:29):
for instance, to say, well, we control for neophobia because
the raw form apple will still looks like an apple,
and the and the cooked meat still looks like the meat. Um,
I don't know. I find that kind of a confusing rationale.
Oh no, no, I think you're misunderstanding what they were doing.
That they the neophobia thing was that they were familiar
(16:49):
with cooked meat and with raw apple, but not with
cooked apple or raw meat, and so they were trying
to see, um, does this make any like, does it
just conform to in both cases they prefer whatever they're
previously familiar with. Okay, in the case of meat they did.
In the case of apple not so much. But they
did another test. The fourth experiment was a test for novelty.
(17:12):
They said, quote, we tested chimpanzees that were not given
meat as a regular part of their diet and as
far as was known, had never eaten cooked meat. And
so they're offered raw and cooked beef. And again they
definitely preferred the cooked beef better than the raw. So
in the final discussion they say, yeah, on average, and
the foods they tested here, apes liked cooked food better
(17:32):
than raw food. With some exceptions. They definitely prefer cooked beef, carrots,
and sweet potatoes. They don't seem to have much of
a preference on average between the cooked and raw forms
of apple and white potato, And it seemed like in
general just didn't really love white potato. And so they
said neophobia might be a contributing factor to some of
these results, But in experiments that tried to control for it,
(17:56):
the ape still on average thought were pretty cool with
the cooked version of food. But finally, this experiment had
difficulty determining which characteristics of cooked foods the apes were
responding to, you know, was it taste, was a texture,
and so forth. And I do think that's an interesting question,
like if animals other than humans also prefer cooked food
(18:18):
in most cases, why is it like does it taste
better to them? Is it like because it's softer to chew?
I don't know. Maybe maybe we can come back to that,
but anyway, the authors, you know, I mean, it's difficult
too because we have to stop and realize, like when
they're talking about the difference between a cooked and a
raw white potato, the cooked white potato in this experiment
is also not buttered and salted and you know, and
(18:40):
prepared in these other ways. Like we're just stripping it
down to the basics of what cooking does to this
particular substance. So yeah, like if I were to you know,
trying to set aside as much a you know, human
complexity as possible, if I were presented with just a
plain white potato and a raw potato, I mean, I'd
(19:01):
like to think I would still prefer the pick potato
to the raw potato, but without anything added to it,
it's still not a very attractive offer. Like the potato
is is something that is best um consumed when there
are other things done to it, other seasonings, other styles
of preparation, etc. The human mind cannot comprehend the depths
(19:23):
of blandness of a of an unseasoned potato. Yeah. The
carrot is really the one that that throws me the most,
you know, like because it part of me would guess
that there's nothing quite like the raw crispness of the carrot.
Like the carrot is crisp, we identify that with with freshness.
The carrot is sweet. Um, Like what is changed in
(19:46):
cooking the carrot that that would that would make it
more preferable, like, is it just it's just softer? Is
it therefore seem riper in that sense? And then how
does that affect the sweetness of it? Would the sweetness
be in any way enhanced by the cooking? I think
in general, I can't speak to carrots in particular. But
the authors actually address this, They say so they talk
(20:07):
about hypothesizing reasons that non human animals would prefer cooked
food over raw food. And so one of the avenues
they talk about is that cooking tends to cause chemical
changes that increase the availability of flavor compounds that animals
of all kinds seem to like. And so the two
(20:28):
main examples they offer are available sugars and available glutamates.
Now sugars, that's I'm pretty clear to understand, and we
can know that from experience. I don't know about carrots.
It probably conforms to this and carrots, but I think
about like onions, like eating a raw onion versus eating
a cooked onion. The cooked onion is so much sweeter
like the you know, the amount of sugar you can
(20:50):
taste in it is I don't know, it feels like
it's exponential above a raw onion. And yeah, and that's
that's a case too, where by cooking the onion your
kind of blunting it's um it's effects like the chemical
weaponry if the onion is diluted. Yeah, the sulfur compounds
and stuff. Yeah, so that's sugars. Apparently lots of foods
(21:11):
have more available sugars when you cook them, so they
taste sweeter. Tons of different animals can differentiate the levels
of sugar and a food they're eating, and obviously prefer
the thing that tastes like it's got more sugar in
it because it is probably going to be more nutritionally dense,
it has more calories per same amount of food. The
other thing is the available glutamates. Glutamates are you know,
(21:35):
does that ring a bell? Maybe it's in the phrase
monosodium glutamate, the msg flavor, the umami flavor. Glutamates are
are largely responsible for savory flavors that we associate with
meat and h and also things like tomatoes and hard
cheeses like parmesan and soy sauce. Those those glutamates or
(21:56):
that delicious savory umami feeling and that's not just for
humans either. It turns out tons of animals. I think
even some invertebrates can detect umami flavor through the presence
of free glutamates, which are increased by cooking. And while
I was reading about this, I did get really amused
by the idea of like invert I don't know which
(22:16):
invertebrates exactly, but like with lobsters really love soy sauce,
would like there be centipedes who are going nuts for
parmesan cheese anyway. Okay, So cooking often increases the availability
of sugars and glutamates, So that's a favor increasing flavors
(22:37):
that broadly lots of animals seem to like. And cooking
tends to change the texture of food, usually by making
it softer and easier to chew, and of course that
appeals to the natural laziness present in all kinds of animals,
not just us. So I think you could possibly argue
that in a way, cooking, by massively increasing the presence
(22:58):
of taste and texture qualities that our bodies and brains
are already naturally on the look for, cooking could be
viewed as a sort of ancient form of supernormal stimuli,
like evolution shaped animal appetites to seek out nutritionally dense
things like sugar and glutamates, which we detect by taste.
Cooking causes chemical reactions that make more of those molecules available.
(23:21):
Cooking softens food, appealing to our natural laziness. We don't
like to spend an hour chewing on some tough bit
of something to get it down. Tender food is better
than tough food. So it's kind of like it's it's
taking all these things we naturally seek out in foods
we would find in our environment, but making them way
more dependably present in all kinds of foods. But anyway,
(23:43):
the authors of this study I was talking about, they
say that their findings conformed other bits of pre existing
evidence that many other non human animals on average prefer
cooked food over raw food. For instance, they cite a
book by Brewer in nineteen seventy eight alleging observation that
chimpanzees in the wild would preferred eat seeds that have
(24:05):
been naturally cooked or at least heated by wildfires. This
was in a book by Brewer called The Chimpanzees of
Mount Assyriek and well I thought that was interesting. Yeah, yeah,
like that it's kind of primordial cooking right there. And
they cite findings of preferences in other mammals. For example,
Bradshaw at All in two thousand found that once cats
(24:29):
have been exposed to both raw and cooked meat, they
tend to prefer the cooked version. And they point to
Ramirez in nineteen ninety two, which found that rats preferred
cooked starch over raw starch. But I was looking at
another study that actually asked a complimentary question. So if
the first question is do grade apes such as chimpanzees
(24:50):
prefer cooked food over raw food, it seems in the
majority of cases they do. The second question is do
they in fact possess the ability to understand and the
cooking process? Would they, in theory at least be able
to cook for themselves? And the study that looked into
this was by Felix Varniken and Alexandra g Rosati, published
(25:13):
in Proceedings of the Royal Society b Biological Sciences, called
Cognitive Capacities for Cooking in Chimpanzees. And this was twenty fifteen,
and so the author's right here quote the transition to
a cook to diet represents an important shift in human
ecology and evolution. Cooking requires a set of sophisticated cognitive abilities,
including causal reasoning, self control, and anticipatory planning. Do humans
(25:38):
uniquely possess the cognitive capacities needed to cook food? And?
Oh man, when I was reading that line about about
cooking requiring self control and anticipatory planning, I felt a
little bit cheapish because it immediately made me think about
the problem of rob I don't know if you do
this too, but you're like cooking something and you just
kind of keep snacking on it. Yeah, I mean you
(26:02):
encounter that definitely with your more complicated recipes where um,
I don't know, say you've, like a shepherd's pie comes
to mind. I've recently made a vegetarian shepherd's pie for
the weekend Saint Patty's Day, And uh, yeah, once you've
made like one part of it, like maybe you've made
them the mashed potatoes, or you've made the you know,
(26:24):
the the the meat and vegetable filling. Uh, you might
be tempted, especially if you're a little bit hungry, you
might be tempted do taste and keep tasting those portions
before everything comes together is one. However, we tend if
we're making shepherd's pie, we're usually not tempted to eat
the raw potatoes or right or something like that before
we begin cooking. But yeah, you know, like you've you've
(26:47):
gone past the point where you're testing it for seasoning
or whatever. Is just like okay, yeah, maybe have a
little another bite of this, right, We're like, we're not
going to go hog out eating a much of just
raw flour right out of the bag. But of course
once the cookie dough is prepared, that is where the
temptation may set in. Well, it turns out some chimpanzees
have the same problem, but they do better at these
(27:08):
kinds of anticipation and delay of gratification tasks than you
might expect. So this study address these questions by performing
some experiments with our closest living relatives, chimpanzees. The authors
conducted a total of nine studies on chimpanzees living in
a nature sanctuary in the Democratic Republic of Congo, with
the following results. They found. First of all, they replicated
(27:30):
the finding that chimpanzees in general prefer cooked foods over
the same foods in their raw form. Second finding is
that chimpanzees in some way do understand that food is
changed by the cooking process. They can tell the difference,
and they understand something is happening when a raw food
is exchanged for a cooked food. Third, they will delay
(27:51):
gratification in order to upgrade a raw piece of food
to a cooked version of that same food. Fourth, they
will give up possession of a raw piece of food
already in hand in order to transform it into a
cooked food. And then fifth they will transport or store
raw food in anticipation of later opportunities to exchange it
(28:12):
for its cooked form. And an interesting note on the method.
I was like, wait a minute, are they going to
be giving apes like an oven or something. They did
not do that, actually, because of course they didn't want
to run the risk of the animals burning or otherwise
injuring themselves. Instead, they used a plastic box with a
false bottom that would exchange a piece of raw food
(28:33):
for a piece of cooked food when shaken. Okay, I
mean there are some limitations there, obviously, but that's essentially
what an oven does, I guess, right, Well, obviously this
is not the exact same thing as the cooking process.
But they're trying to figure out, well, the chimpanzees at
least figure out that there is a process they can
put raw food through and get cooked food out. And
(28:54):
will they delay gratification to go through that process? Yeah,
and the answer is broadly. Yet the authors of the
study right quote together, our results indicate that several of
the fundamental psychological abilities necessary to engage in cooking may
have been shared with the last common ancestor of apes
and humans, predating the control of fire. And I was
(29:15):
reading a write up of this article in The Guardian
by Hannah Devlin that had some good supplemental details. One
thing I wanted to read this paragraph definitely made me
say all buddy out loud. It was quote the chimps
continued to opt for the cooked option sixty percent of
the time when they had to carry the food some
distance in order to place it in the quote oven,
(29:36):
although since they often carried it in their mouths, this
was a challenge, and they sometimes appeared to eat the
food on the way quote almost by accident. I sympathize
with that the best of intentions. You know, sometimes that
sweet potatoes in your mouth and you're just going to
start you in the other thing was that, in terms
of hoarding raw ingredients in the hopes that they could
(29:58):
later be exchanged for cooked food, chimps in some cases
hoarded up to twenty eight slices of sweet potato, and
Varniken said to the Guardian quote delayed gratification is a
problem for us as well. We also have a tendency
to nibble at food before we finished cooking. So that's
exactly what we were talking about. And they don't even
have excuses for it, like you know, they can't use
(30:19):
the Rationelle Well, I need to taste it to make
sure that the flavor profiles appropriate. They need to make
sure I don't need to add more salt or pepper. Right.
But while I think this is interesting and it's informative
to the question of when humans first started cooking their
food and what effects that may have had on our
ancestors one to two million years ago. Of course, the
(30:40):
fact remains that there are no widely observed natural instances
of animals in their natural habitat cooking foods by applying heat.
But as we said earlier, heating is not the only
form of cooking. Humans do all kinds of things to
food that fall under the umbrella of cooking or cuisine
that are unrelated to heat. So we take raw or
(31:01):
cooked food items and we wash them, or we age them,
or we ferment them, or we season them, we butcher
them in certain ways, we skewer them or cut them
up in special ways, we combine them together in interesting ways.
And it's frankly surprising how many of these culinary manipulations
and modifications that humans do are mirrored at some level
(31:22):
throughout the animal world. And so I thought that's what
we could explore for the remainder of this series, all
the different ways that animals cook. And you had some
really interesting examples. I think that had to do with
maybe what could broadly be called some form of butchering
(31:44):
or skewering of food as a preparation method. Yeah, yeah,
I have a couple of good examples here, and one
of them I think is a pretty pretty obvious one.
Let's start with an amusing one, but perhaps the less
involved one, and that is the case of the lamber
guy or bearded vulture. So these birds are found in
(32:05):
parts of Africa and Eurasia, and these birds are known
for their amazing ability to eat and digest bones. And
I think that's that's one of the reasons this is
a great example bird to start with, because it already
has robust anatomical features and internal abilities when it comes
to the processing of of what is, you know, arguably
(32:26):
a very difficult food. They're they're eating bones, but they
have you know, they have these wonderful bites. They can
bite through brittle bones, they can swallow large chunks of bones,
and their digestive system can handle it. And yet there
are still going to be challenges that are too great
for them to handle without a little ingenuity. And so
(32:47):
basically they have a butchering challenge ahead of them. You know.
Butchering is what we do when we have a carcass
and we don't just want to eat from the carcass.
We can't cook the whole carcass. We have to take
things apart, remove things that are inedible, are not desired
or used for at another time or for another purpose,
you know, all the various reasons you have to take
a part of a carcass. Yeah, And in fact, external
(33:10):
processing of animal carcasses is Hypothi's not known for sure,
but it is hypothesized to be one of the earliest
drivers of tool use in humans. That yeah, why would
a human start using a flat rock as a cutting surface,
maybe to get meat and tough hide parts and stuff
off of an animal kill. Yeah, yeah, that We've talked
about that on the show in the past when when
(33:31):
talking about early tool use and evidence of how those
tools are being used, you know, we can look for
those signs on the bones of them having been scraped.
In some cases, it's also evidence of cannibalism taking place
in a given people versus you know, I'm just mere
you know, murder or warfare. Oh, because of the signs
(33:53):
of tool use on the brains. Yeah, yeah, so yeah,
this is a case where the lambur guyer is going
to occasionally find some chunks of bone that are too
big to handle. They need to butcher it, they need
to take it apart. But what tools are available to them. Well,
luckily they can. They can pick up a pretty big bone,
I think, I think they can basically take off with
(34:13):
something equal to their own weight. So they've developed the
practice of taking larger bones up high into the air
and then dropping them onto rocks in order to break
them open or shatter them. Sometimes it takes more than
one try, and it's it's also a learned tactic, so
generally it takes around seven years for one of these
(34:34):
birds to master it. And you'll find examples of immature
birds just dropping bones incorrectly, like they haven't really figured
out exactly where you're supposed to drop them or or
when you release them. But they'll get there. They'll eventually
learn it, and it will open up new possibilities to
them in terms of what they can eat. Oh that's
(34:54):
my second al buddy of the episode, imagining the vulture
is dropping the bones wrong. Yeah, nice job, Ted. Now
they sometimes prey on live creatures as well, it's not
just bones. And probably one of the more alarming and
interesting examples is that of the tortoise. They may fly
(35:15):
up with a tortoise that again has to be a
tortoise that can physically carry up, but then they can
drop that as well, treat it like an oversized bone
in attempt to bust through those bony defenses. And this
may ring a bell for for some of you out there,
because this is of course how the Greek father of tragedy, Escalus,
(35:36):
was said to have died in four fifty eight BCE.
This according to the two accounts by Valerius Maximus and
our old friend Plenty of the Elder. Now this may
well just be a story. We have to drive them,
but it basically goes like this. Yeah, Escalus goes to
an oracle. He receives a prophecy that he will he
(35:59):
will one day be killed by a falling object. So
he's a smart guy. He says, well, nothing can fall
on me if I'm outdoors. So he spends more and
more time outdoors because yeah, there's nothing's going to fall
from the roof. There no shelves. Sounds like a pretty
safe debt. Yeah, that makes sense. It's like, if there's
an earthquake, where do you want to be get away
from buildings? You're gonna be out in the middle of
(36:20):
a field, right. Unfortunately he is in the territory of
the Lambur guy or it's thought that this may may
be referring to Lambur guyers. Suddenly a great bird flies overhead.
That great bird has a tortoise in its clutches, and
it mistakes Escalus's head for a hard rock. A lot
(36:42):
of times he's depicted as being, you know, bald on top,
and so the bird drops the tortoise on him, killing
him instantly. Again, possibly just a misunderstanding or an entertaining tale,
But you'll find various accounts of deaths like this from
the ancient world where you have to stop and ask,
did they really die like this or is this just
(37:04):
a nice story? This is the story that developed about
their death. If true, he died by accidentally running a
foul of an avian butchery process. Yes, I'm seeing vague
connections to the Texas chainsaw masker. But now when it
comes to a van butchery. The best example, of course,
(37:25):
is the shrike. Now, if you've never seen a shrike,
look up pictures of them. But they're generally, I mean,
for me, they're an unimpressive looking bird. This is going
to be different for you depending on how into birds
you are and if you're a board birdwatcher, etc. But
you know, they when you compare what they look like
with what they do, they don't look quite as impressive
(37:48):
in my opinion, because what they do is very impressive.
They are thirty four species of shrike in four genera
in the family Lanta day And if you're yeah, if
you're not a bird enthusiast or a birdwatcher. You might
just look at a shrike and say, well, that looks
like a bird, but it's not what they look like.
It's what they do. And basically what they do is
(38:09):
they engage in a kind of a complex butchery situation.
That's why we call them butcher birds. Lanta day is
derived from the Latin lantius, which means butcher. So they
don't wear little aprons or wrap morsels of meat and
white butcher's paper. But what they do is they take
insects and even small vertebrates that they kill and they
(38:30):
impale them onto thorns like little lad draculas. Wow. And
by the way, their methods. You know, it's one thing
to get those various bugs and insects, but their method
of killing small rodents is actually quite brutal, as pointed
out by Hannah Waters in a twenty eighteen article for
the Audubon Society. Quote, they grasp mice by the neck
(38:51):
with their pointed beak, pinch the spinal cord to induce paralysis,
and then vigorously shake their prey with enough force to
break its neck. Oh that's interesting because it's like a
bird version of a common predatory tactic. I think he
used about like some big cats, right. I think we
talked about this with Mary Roach in her book, talking
about various kinds of big predatory cats that will attempt
(39:14):
to bite along the back of the neck, which is
how their characteristic attacks are identified in humans. Yeah. I
have noticed this when I watched all the Jurassic Park
movies with my son a year or so ago. Well,
I forget which one it was in, but there's one
in particular where you see the dinosaurs, the raptors in particular,
(39:34):
killing by by clamping onto the back of the neck,
which I thought was a nice touch. So anyway, but no, waits, no,
but I've got a question. Okay, so this seems gratuitous.
The bird just takes its prey, which normal bird would
would just capture and then kill and then eat. But
this bird impales it on a thorn on a plant.
(39:55):
Why do we have any idea like what the purpose
of this is? Yeah, and there seemed to be three
different reasons, um and and I do have to acknowledge that, yes,
this is exactly what you mentioned Texas Chainsaw, Maska earlier.
This is exactly what happens in one of the kills
in TCMU. He cracks a victim on the head, uh,
you know, and take takes her out, but then he
(40:16):
sticks her onto a meat hook. Uh. And that's that's
basically what the shrike is doing. So there are three
different reasons to do this that that researchers have identified.
One and this is pretty neat and this is this
is that it's about tearing the meat once. And let's
say an insect is impaled on that thorn. You can
(40:37):
then pull on the creature's body and you can rip it,
cut it into smaller pieces. So it's leverage. It allows
you to get better leverage on the for butchering the
insect body. Right. It's it's not something we really do
because we you know, we can use farm, you know,
all these other tools. But imagine if you didn't have tools,
if the thorn was the only tool. Um, because that's
(41:00):
particularly I mean, that's exactly the situation that the bird
is in. The Next reason it's for the shrike to
put something on the on the thorn is just as
a means of storing the meat. Uneaten portions of the
meat can be left on the thorns and the bird
can return later to eat some more m okay, as
opposed to like storing it on the ground where something
(41:21):
else is more likely to come along and take it. Right.
And then finally, this is I think probably the most
interesting of the three and one that I wasn't really
familiar with that I was. I knew about the shrikes
and about the category one and two here. But the
third reason is to potentially detoxify the meat. And this
is where we get more specific with some of the
(41:44):
prey species that are targeted. Uh, it's a way of
processing the meat of a toxic prey animal so that
the bird can then eat it. So the bird will
leave a body on the spike for like a period
of one to two days, allowing the toxins in the
body to degrade to the point where it can be
safely eaten. Okay, So this might be the case in
(42:06):
like an insect that has a poison within its body
that has a fairly short chemical half life, and it's
if it's not replenished by the live animals body, it's
going to eventually degrade over time exactly. Yeah, and some
for some specific examples, the loggerhead shrike does this with
luber grasshoppers as well as with a species of beetle
(42:27):
and moth, and great gray shrikes have been observed to
do this with black cone headed grasshoppers. So so, yeah,
the shrike is fascinating, not only because there's something kind
of grizzly and wonderful about what it does, but yeah,
by doing these three things with its practice, it's engaging
in a in several different things that that we do
(42:47):
with our cooking process, you know, the butchery of the meat,
the butcher or they just the taking a part of
a given element, the storing of that element, and then
detoxifying that element. Now, we tend to we do this
in a number of different ways. It may be cooking
something and the cooking process, the heating process itself destroys
the toxins. It also maybe, and we've touched on this
(43:09):
before in our Dangerous Food series, it may also be
about removing parts of the body or parts of the
plant that would otherwise be toxic to us. But we
have just specific cases of the shrike carrying this out
just by leaving it on the thorn long enough. Well,
I'm impressed. Yes, they are impressive creatures. All right, Well,
(43:32):
we need to wrap up part one here, but we're
going to be back next time with more of the
quote cooking or otherwise, you know, meal prep, cuisine, behaviors
of non human animals. Definitely want to talk about some
interesting behaviors that have been called washing, but maybe more
obscure in nature than that. Yeah, in some cases at
(43:53):
least it's kind of mysterious. And we'll get into into
all of that, plus plus other examples in the meantime. Certainly,
right in, let us know what you think about what
we discussed here today, especially if you have any direct
experience with us. Have you observed the shrikes in the
wild have Lammergeyer's drop tortoises at you, and you've luckily
(44:15):
been able to get a less rocky looking hat over
your head just in time. Do you prefer raw potatoes
to cook? Oh? Yeah, yeah, I mean he's going to
have some insight on all of that, so yeah, right in,
let us know, we'd love to hear from you. In
the meantime, if you would like to check out other
episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind. Core episodes published
on two season Thursdays. On Monday, we do a listener mail.
(44:38):
On Wednesday, we do a short form monster fact or
artifact episode, and on Fridays we do Weird House Cinema.
That's our time to set aside most serious concerns and
just talk about a strange film, huge things. As always
to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you
would like to get in touch with us with feedback
on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic
for the future, or just to say hello, you can
(44:59):
email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind
dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio.
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Stuff To Blow Your Mind News
Hosts And Creators
Robert Lamb
Joe McCormick
Popular Podcasts
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.
Therapy Gecko
An unlicensed lizard psychologist travels the universe talking to strangers about absolutely nothing. TO CALL THE GECKO: follow me on https://www.twitch.tv/lyleforever to get a notification for when I am taking calls. I am usually live Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays but lately a lot of other times too. I am a gecko.
The Joe Rogan Experience
The official podcast of comedian Joe Rogan.