Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908-2009) was an anthropologist and ethnologist and is sometimes considered the “father of modern anthropology”. In his work The Raw and the Cooked, he points to culture as the transforming factor from the natural raw state to the cooked, or otherwise processed, state.

This connection between cooking food and human civilisation is also strongly argued in the book Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human by Richard Wrangham. Spoiler alert: cooking makes digesting food easier, so we can use the nutrients faster and can put more energy into our brains rather than our stomachs. That is the reason why I don’t support all-raw diets… that, and taste.