Hunger

10 sessions with the radiators down, 20 to go.

Up until this latest adventure "hunger" meant, for me, the feeling I get when I imagine I am going to sink my teeth into a delicious hamburger. So really it is more like foodlove. Now, 10 sessions in, hamburgers are yuck and pizza is yuck and the world's greatest coq au vin would be yuck, so no more hunger. Except that there is a physical sensation, largely new to me: pain in the stomach and light-headedness. That is now my signal to eat.

I wonder if foodlove is a relatively new development in our evolution. Did Mooga the Caveman really drool over sinking his teeth (or gums) into a raw mastodon shank? Did he look forward to the next handful of berries (or were those the ones that killed Booga last week?) Did he just have a growly stomach and a headache?

There's a professor at Harvard, Richard Wrangham, who evidently argues in "Catching Fire - How Cooking Made us Human" that cooking - not harnessing fire, or the domestication of agriculture - is what brought us up to the level of homo erectus. Better nutrition, more efficient use of diet, etc. But maybe it was more than that. Maybe it was taste, and the evolution of hunger. Maybe it was Shooga, back in the cave, grilling that mastodon shank, that introduced Mooga to foodlove - and brought him home from the hunt.