“You are what you eat,” you start your review of the research on the evolutionary rôle of cooking by Richard Wrangham of Harvard University, which has been reported at the last annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (“What’s Cooking?” February 14, 2009). As you point out, “cooking increases the share of food digested in the stomach and the small intestine.” Fair enough. But it is still difficult to accept your rendering of his claim that “pre-agricultural man confined to raw food would have starved.” The brunt of his argument, which relies on a “compelling chain of logic” rather than “direct evidence,” is the archeological ubiquity of controlled fire linking modern humans and Neanderthals for at least two-hundred thousand years. And fire “almost certainly” means cooking, as you put it. But does it? Fire is useful for warding off predators and for keeping warm in cold climes, for instance. Going as far as to claim that “cooking and humanity are coeval” surely goes too far. Returning to your proverb, cooking can evidently get into your research, too.