How much of your food should be cooked? Proponents of the newly popular raw food diets claim that cooking ruins vitamins and enzymes, making food difficult to digest and therefore contributing to disease. But all traditional peoples cooked some or most of their food. Even in the tropics, where people did not have to build fires to keep warm, they built fires every day to cook. In addition to cooking grains, they usually cooked their vegetables, the very foods some recommend that people eat raw. Why cook? Cooking helps neutralize many naturally occurring anti-nutrients and irritants in food, also breaking down indigestible fiber, Many foods, such as beans and potatoes, are indigestible until cooked. While cooking-especially at very high temperatures- does destroy some nutrients, it makes mincrals more available.

Today, studies increasingly show that many non-human beings feel. Elephants appear to feel grief, while dolphins and whales express joy, or something much like it. Parrots can become unhappy, pigs and cows terrified, chickens saddened, monkeys seemingly embarrassed. Experiments have shown that rats become agitated when seeing surgery performed on other rats; when presented with a trapped lab-mate and a piece of chocolate, they will free their caged brethren before eating. There's even evidence that rats take pleasure in being tickled. None of this will come as a surprise to pet owners or anyone who has observed virtually any kind of animal for any length of time. Science is rediscovering what Charles Darwin, to in his book The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, concluded: that the variations between humans and other species in their capacity to feel and express emotion are differences in degree I rather than in kind.