Changing the food we eat

We truly are what we eat – and what our ancestors ate. Food has changed who we are and how we developed for hundreds of thousands of years. From processing to preserving to cooking, what humans did and continue to do to food played a big role in shaping our evolution.
人如其食，也如其祖先食。千百年来，食物改变了我们自己，也改变了我们的发展方式。从加工、保存到烹饪，人类曾经以及未来对待食物的方式在我们进化过程中发挥着重要作用。

“Processed food isn’t just a modern invention, created in factories from artificial ingredients. It is as old as humanity itself and may have helped create our species,” wrote Nicola Temple, author of Best Before: The Evolution and Future of Processed Food, for the BBC.
“工厂使用人工配料生产的加工食品并不仅仅是个现代发明。它与人文学科本身一样古老，或许还有助于创造了我们这一物种，”《最佳食用日期：加工食品的演变与未来》一书的作者妮古拉·坦普尔在为英国广播公司的撰文中如此写道。

Although processing is viewed negatively nowadays, it was important to our development as a species. Processing doesn’t necessarily mean adding chemicals – it also includes pounding or slicing or changing the food in any way before eating. Compared to our ancestors, modern human teeth, jaws and faces have gotten smaller relative to overall skull size because of making food easier to chew, especially from cooking.
尽管加工食品如今被认为并不健康，但对我们物种的发展至关重要。加工并不一定意味着添加化学物质 —— 还包括了捣碎、切片等食用之前处理改变食物的任何一种方式。和我们的祖先相比，现代人类的牙齿、颌部、面部相对于整个头盖骨尺寸而言变小了，因为我们令食物变得更易咀嚼，尤其是通过烹饪。

Cooking food was one of the biggest changes in human history. Researchers believe it could have occurred between 1.8 million and 400,000 years ago, Harvard professor Richard Wrangham said, according to National Geographic. Cooking increases the energy and nutrients we get from food.
烹饪食物是人类历史上的一大巨变。据《国家地理》杂志报道，哈佛大学教授理查德·兰厄姆表示，研究人员认为，距今180万至40万年前，烹饪食物开始出现。烹饪使我们能从食物中获得更多能量与营养物质。

Without cooking, according to the BBC, an average person would have to eat around 5 kilos of raw food to survive – and we’d have to spend most of the day chewing.
英国广播公司报道称，如果不进行烹饪的话，一个人平均（每天）要吃约5公斤的生食才能生存，而且我们还要花上大半天的时间咀嚼食物。

Also, up to 50 percent of women who only eat raw foods develop a condition that signals that the body cannot support a pregnancy – a major problem from an evolutionary angle, according to Scientific American.
此外，据《科学美国人》杂志报道，在只吃生食的女性中，高达50%的人身体无法生育 —— 从进化的角度来看，这是一大问题。

Processing food led to a huge gain in leisure time. The less time people spent chewing, the more time they had to develop complex oral language.
加工食品大大增加了人们的闲暇时间。人们在咀嚼食物上花的时间越少，就能有越多的时间发展复杂的口语。

Cooking food also breaks down its cells, so our stomachs need to work less to absorb the nutrients our bodies require. This, said Professor Peter Wheeler from Liverpool John Moores University, UK, “freed up energy which could then be used to power a larger brain. The increase in brain-size mirrors the reduction in the size of the gut.”
烹饪食物也分解了食物的细胞，我们的肠胃能更轻松地吸收身体所需的营养物质。英国利物浦约翰摩尔大学教授彼得·惠勒表示，这“腾出了能量，能够用于支持更大的脑容量。大脑增大，同时肠道也变小了。”

Processed food literally shaped us as a species and made us human – the only species on Earth who can cook.
加工食物的确塑造了我们这一物种，令我们成为了地球上唯一一个能够烹饪的物种 ——人类。

以上文章内容选自《21世纪学生英文报高中版》，详情请见《21世纪学生英文报高中版》高一837期