Let’s begin with a book by a British primatologist. Catching Fire isn’t a cookbook, it’s a new take on evolutionary history. Richard Wrangham argues that learning to cook food over fire made us human. Please explain.

People have deep emotions about grilling. The act of lighting a fire and creating a barbecue seems to bring a sense of comfort, satisfaction and community that you just don’t get with other cooking methods. Why? There is the pleasure of sitting around a fire, the incredible aromas and flavours you get with cooking over fire and then there’s the long human history of open-fire cooking.

About 1.8 million years ago homo erectus roasted an auroch, a prehistoric cow. A human ancestor tasted it and uttered the first grunt of gastronomic satisfaction. When you eat meat cooked, instead of raw, there’s several physiological, social and emotional things that happen. Prior to homo erectus and the application of fire to cooking, our ancestors were eating machines. Their skulls were characterised by giant teeth, giant jaws and very small crania because they spent all their time chewing raw food. After the discovery of cooking with fire, teeth get smaller and brains triple in size. Our ancestors develop a smaller jaw and a more agile tongue so we have the ability to speak. And because cooked food is much more easily metabolised, our ancestors were able to develop larger brains. With this new-found intelligence we evolved to become speaking and thinking animals, which is our evolutionary edge over all the other animals in the world.

Additionally, our ancestors developed different kinds of social behaviours. When you cook meat over fire you have a common focal point for a group and we become more social animals. While other primates eat on their own, so they keep their food to themselves, we sit around and share a fire and our food, and cooking becomes a communal activity. Simultaneously, for the first time, you get a division of labour. Female and male gorillas gather and eat food in pretty much the same way. Because human beings had a fire that had to be tended, we get a division of labour. One part of the community stays home to nourish the fire and do hearth-oriented work, while another part of the community goes out to hunt. One brings home the food while the other takes care of the household. So the human face, human intelligence, speech, social organisation and even division of labour – all of these potentially began with the act of cooking meat over fire. You could say that barbecue began human civilisation.

Wrangham argues that spending less time feeding freed up our time for more complex endeavours. But nowadays, many humans seem to devote as much energy to what they eat as any of our fellow mammals. What do you make of the modern focus on food?

Wrangham points out that primates in the wild spend about six hours a day chewing, while fire-using human beings do their chewing and eating in a half-an-hour to an hour a day. Our greater leisure time and better-developed brains gave rise to art. The fact that we shape our environment in creative and meaningful ways helps distinguish us from every other animal. The first art actually did have a fire and barbecue connection. The first carved animal bones are as many as 100,000 years old and the first cave art, portraying hunting scenes and using charcoal, a derivative of fire, was done at least 40,000 years ago. Now fast forward to the modern day, we have evolved art in many different ways. We have musical arts, visual arts, digital arts and we’ve turned cooking into an art.

The evolution of cooking into an art has been ongoing for thousands of years. Early humans began seasoning their food in a way that other animals don’t (man is the only animal who cooks). Ancient Greek and Romans had celebrity chefs and celebrity cookbooks. The way today’s human beings spend so much time preparing food, thinking about food, writing about food and relishing food, clearly has less to do with satisfying our nutritional needs than it does with our passion for art.