Hot Food
Hot food is important because it changes the food we consume. It has both current and historical significance.
The heat created from cooking starts a chemical process called denaturation which alters the proteins in food, undoing the molecules and changing their chemical and physical properties. Depending on the proteins heated, the effect is to decrease solubility or to cause hydrophobic proteins to bond together to reduce the total area exposed to water. Denaturation affects what food tastes like, feels like, looks like and smells like. A fried egg quite clearly shows denaturation and is a good example – the liquid, clear egg white (albumen) reaches a solid state and turns opaque white when heated. As with many denatured proteins, the process cannot be reversed – i.e. you can’t go back to raw egg just because it has cooled down.
The process of denaturation can be a good thing because food can look, smell and taste better when cooked and the chemical changes can allow for the creation of new foods like meringue. To make meringue, the chemical bonds holding the egg molecules need to be broken so that they can recombine with sugar molecules.
Cooking has another function because it also kills parasites, bacteria and viruses, making the food we eat safer. Bacteria such as Salmonella and E. Coli can cause serious illness in humans and at the very least cause an unpleasant stomach upset. In the worst cases it can cause death. Children, the elderly, pregnant women and immuno-compromised people are at a greater health risk from serious illness from food-borne illness and thorough cooking helps make food safer for them.
The process of heating also makes food less hard and therefore makes it easier to digest. Cooked food contains the same amount of calories as uncooked food, but needs less energy to digest. Cooking makes starches more digestible. Starches aren’t soluble in water so they need to be heated to break them down (a process called gelatinisation). When they are broken down, they are easier for the stomach acids to get to. Raw starch foods are also generally not pleasant to eat and hard (think raw potato) and cooking makes them palatable.
Hot food also helps warm us up and it is comforting. It’s much more pleasant getting home in the winter to a hot stew than coming home to a plate of raw vegetables.
We love it so much we have even now automated it with hot food vending. These vending machines give us hot food on demand, at any time of day or night.
We prefer to have hot food as part of the diet. That’s not to say that raw food doesn’t play an important part too – it’s simply that humans like a mix of both and it benefits us to do this.
The ability to cook food was one of the things that helped mankind to evolve into the dominant species that we are today. Cooking allowed us to digest some food types more easily and we were able to kill off parasites and bacteria, giving us safer food. Without the discovery of fire and the ability to cook food, mankind would not be in the position we are now, and this means that the addition of hot food to the human diet was a very important step forward in our evolution.
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