How Other People Digest Your Food
In Sinhalese the word for hungry is bada gini. Tummy fire. The number calories comes from literally lighting food on fire and seeing how much heat it generates. Fire is an intrinsic part of human digestion. So is cutting, cleaning, and all the work that goes into a meal. We have indeed evolved in such a way that we can’t digest any other way.
As Adam Rutherford says in the Book Of Humans:
“We outsourced some of our digestive abilities by externalising them. By cooking foods, we break the bonds of complex molecules, and make them easier to digest in our stomachs. Meat is tenderised by heating. Softer foods are quicker to eat too, in that we spend less time chewing a boiled cabbage than a raw one, which means we get access to the essential nutrients more efficiently.”
It’s interesting thinking of digestion—the process of releasing energy from food—as happening outside of your body. It’s even more interesting to think of it as happening through other people. Because it does.
Digestion In The South
In Sri Lanka my in-laws employ a cook (shout-out பி்ரெமி்லா) and we outsource our digestion to her. She cuts up the brinjals to spare our teeth and stews the green drumsticks to make them…
