It’s not that much extra effort, and if I ate more meat at the time I would have discovered the (substantial) effect much sooner. Also, if I’d been taught to cook by a human being instead of teaching myself from cookbooks, I would never have made the faulty assumption about that step being skippable. The insight about browning meat fully is easy to discover, and once discovered is normally transmitted to other cooks as part of their training.
Respectfully, you seem to me to be clinging rather hard to an unevidenced theory.
Try cutting up the meat with a bone knife that you make and sharpen yourself, instead of your metal store-bought knife, and skewering it on a stick you find that is strong enough to skewer the meat, but small enough not tear apart the small pieces of meat, instead of browning in a metal pan or skewering on a metal skewer, and then tell our hunter-gatherer ancestors that it’s not that much extra effort.
if I ate more meat at the time I would have discovered the (substantial) effect much sooner.
That is speculation. What we know is that you didn’t discover it from the amount of meat you did in fact eat.
The insight about browning meat fully is easy to discover
Hindsight bias.
Respectfully, you seem to me to be clinging rather hard to an unevidenced theory.
I don’t accept your theory that humans have been cutting meat into small pieces and browning all the surface area since they invented cooking. Your theory has no evidence stronger than tenuous speculation based on modern cooking that doesn’t seem to take into account the differences of the ancestral environment.
Try cutting up the meat with a bone knife that you make and sharpen yourself
How do you imagine that the hunter-gatherers are skinning and butchering the animal? With their fingernails?
I don’t accept your theory that humans have been cutting meat into small pieces and browning all the surface area since they invented cooking.
Okay. I don’t claim to know that for certain or anything. You’ve already accepted that the technique is at least thousands of years old, which is as far as I can feel really sure—although I’ll admit that it seems to me much more likely that the technique of cutting meat into small pieces was discovered substantially earlier, given its utter simplicity.
Edit: quoted parent as when I responded, the 2nd part was added after
Try cutting up the meat with a bone knife that you make and sharpen yourself
How do you imagine that the hunter-gatherers are skinning and butchering the animal? With their fingernails?
Of course they skinned and butchered the animal with knives. That doesn’t change the fact that producing and maintaining those knives is a lot of work for them, and they are more difficult to use than our modern knives, and this does have impact on the marginal costs of additional preparation of the meat.
Seriously, I found your reply to be sarcastic and unsubstantial.
It’s not that much extra effort, and if I ate more meat at the time I would have discovered the (substantial) effect much sooner. Also, if I’d been taught to cook by a human being instead of teaching myself from cookbooks, I would never have made the faulty assumption about that step being skippable. The insight about browning meat fully is easy to discover, and once discovered is normally transmitted to other cooks as part of their training.
Respectfully, you seem to me to be clinging rather hard to an unevidenced theory.
Try cutting up the meat with a bone knife that you make and sharpen yourself, instead of your metal store-bought knife, and skewering it on a stick you find that is strong enough to skewer the meat, but small enough not tear apart the small pieces of meat, instead of browning in a metal pan or skewering on a metal skewer, and then tell our hunter-gatherer ancestors that it’s not that much extra effort.
That is speculation. What we know is that you didn’t discover it from the amount of meat you did in fact eat.
Hindsight bias.
I don’t accept your theory that humans have been cutting meat into small pieces and browning all the surface area since they invented cooking. Your theory has no evidence stronger than tenuous speculation based on modern cooking that doesn’t seem to take into account the differences of the ancestral environment.
How do you imagine that the hunter-gatherers are skinning and butchering the animal? With their fingernails?
Okay. I don’t claim to know that for certain or anything. You’ve already accepted that the technique is at least thousands of years old, which is as far as I can feel really sure—although I’ll admit that it seems to me much more likely that the technique of cutting meat into small pieces was discovered substantially earlier, given its utter simplicity.
Edit: quoted parent as when I responded, the 2nd part was added after
Of course they skinned and butchered the animal with knives. That doesn’t change the fact that producing and maintaining those knives is a lot of work for them, and they are more difficult to use than our modern knives, and this does have impact on the marginal costs of additional preparation of the meat.
Seriously, I found your reply to be sarcastic and unsubstantial.
Sorry. You may have seen it before I edited to add the less-sarcastic second half.
Would they be using bone knives or flint? How good are flint knives?