Consider the Fork summary

Long before pots and pans, we could at least heat our food. We can’t say exactly how we discovered that we could use fire to prepare food, but it was no doubt a hit-and-miss affair, with the fire needing to be lit and maintained at all times.

Anthropologists believe the first time we were able to cook with fire – approximately 1.8 million years ago – was the most significant moment in our evolution from apes into humans. Why? Because cooked food is more easily digested, enabling us to draw more nutritional value from it than raw food. This additional energy aided the development of the human brain. Essentially, cooked food made our ancestors smarter!

Fire is not the only element we’ve harnessed for our survival; utilizing ice also revolutionized our eating habits, making them safer and more convenient.

It’s hard to imagine life without it, but the refrigerator is actually a more recent invention than you might think.

As we pace up and down our modern supermarket aisles, particularly through the ready-made section boasting fancy sandwiches and fruit salads to go, it seems we could easily survive without knives.

But, of course, things were once very different. In fact, cutting, chopping and slicing are the oldest and most primitive ways of processing food. That said, the use of tools to cut is not limited to humans – apes and chimpanzees do it too.

So, cutlery and culture are more intertwined than one might have thought, and the way we use cutlery has indeed changed over time. But it's not just time that changes our habits; different cultures have formed their own rules at the dinner table, too.

Do you think there’s only one correct way to eat with the cutlery laid out in front of you? You would be wrong! Conceptions of correct and appropriate etiquette vary greatly across cultures.

Cooking requires observation and measurement: Heat, time and quantity are of the utmost importance. So how exactly can we measure these?

Before the luxury of modern measuring devices, people had very creative approaches to measurement. Prior to the invention of the modern clock, for instance, people would measure time by reciting prayers.

It’s common to speculate about how humans will eat and cook in the future. Remember those who predicted that, by the new millennium, we would be surviving on pills or liquids designed to provide us with the perfect scientific balance of carbohydrates, proteins, fat and vitamins? While this is technically possible – astronauts use these kinds of processed foods, after all – we mostly still eat and cook “normal” food using traditional methods.

In fact, we tend to be rather rigid and resistant to change when it comes to cooking and eating, and this is the case for three main reasons.