siduri comments on Procedural Knowledge Gaps - Less Wrong

126 Post author: Alicorn 08 February 2011 03:17AM

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Comment author: [deleted] 12 February 2011 09:42:58PM 2 points [-]

Cutting meat into small pieces is hardly a modern invention. Shish kebabs go way back.

Comment author: JGWeissman 12 February 2011 10:11:18PM 0 points [-]

How way back? Ancient (thousands of years ago) civilizations may have had variants of kebabs, but did we have them pre-agriculture?

Comment author: [deleted] 12 February 2011 11:43:32PM *  1 point [-]

This is not high technology: all you need is a knife, a stick, a fire, and some meat. I'm pretty sure the technique is about as old as cooking. It just wasn't until Maillard that people understood what was happening.

Comment author: JGWeissman 13 February 2011 12:17:33AM 1 point [-]

You seem to be trying to convince pre-agricultural hunter gatherers who did not even eat meat all that often and had to work hard for every calorie of food they consumed to put a substantial extra effort into cooking their meat that you yourself, with your modern access to inexpensive raw ingredients and pre-manufactured metal cookware, often skipped when told to do so by a recipe because you didn't think it did anything more than cook the meat faster.

Comment author: gwern 13 February 2011 12:49:36AM 4 points [-]

You seem to be trying to convince pre-agricultural hunter gatherers who did not even eat meat all that often and had to work hard for every calorie of food they consumed to put a substantial extra effort into cooking their meat

They didn't have to work hard, and they ate meat more than most humans could eat. I just finished reading the part of Clark's A Farewell to Alms where he covers how hunter-gatherers where far better off than basically any farmer. Going through my notes, I see:

The surprise here is that while there is wild variation across forager and shifting cultivation societies, many of them had food production systems which yielded much larger numbers of calories per hour of labor than English agriculture in 1800, at a time when labor productivity in English agriculture was probably the highest in Europe. In 1800 the total value of output per man-hour in English agriculture was 6.6 pence, which would buy 3,600 kilocalories of flour but only 1,800 kilocalories of fats and 1,300 kilocalories of meat. Assuming English farm output was then half grains, onequarter fats, and one-quarter meat, this implies an output of 2,600 calories per worker-hour on average.32 Since the average person ate 2,300 kilocalories per day (table 3.6), each farm worker fed eleven people, so labor productivity was very high in England. Table 3.13 shows in comparison the energy yields of foraging and shifting cultivation societies per worker-hour. The range in labor productivities is huge, but the minimum average labor productivity, that for the Ache in Paraguay, is 1,985 kilocalories per hour, not much below England in 1800. The median yield per labor hour, 6,042 kilocalories, is more than double English labor productivity....Primitive man ate well compared with one of the richest societies in the world in 1800. Indeed British farm laborers by 1863 had just reached the median consumption of these forager and subsistence societies.

In contrast [to the monotonous English diet] hunter-gatherer and subsistence cultivation diets were widely varied. The diet of the Yanomamo, for example, included monkeys, wild pigs, tapirs, armadillos, anteaters, alligators, jaguar, deer, rodents, a large variety of birds, many types of insects, caterpillars, various fish, larvae, freshwater crabs, snakes, toads, frogs, various palm fruits, palm hearts, hardwood fruits, brazil nuts, tubers, mushrooms, plantains, manioc, maize, bananas, and honey.

Comment author: JGWeissman 13 February 2011 03:52:18AM 0 points [-]

Since Clark seems to know so much about hunter-gatherers eating habits, does he say how they cooked their meat?

Comment author: wedrifid 13 February 2011 04:08:01AM 0 points [-]

Since Clark seems to know so much about hunter-gatherers eating habits, does he say how they cooked their meat?

Just a guess... but probably not with enough precision that they could avoid getting the outer layer particularly hot if they hoped to cook at all.

Comment author: JGWeissman 13 February 2011 04:11:35AM 0 points [-]

I think we are all in agreement about that, the question is about how much surface area relative to volume the meat has.

Comment author: [deleted] 13 February 2011 05:01:31PM 1 point [-]

Well, look at the list: these people are eating (among other things) "...rodents, a large variety of birds, many types of insects, caterpillars, various fish, larvae, freshwater crabs, snakes, toads, frogs..." In other words, small animals.

The bottom line is that the Maillard reaction is not a modern superstimulus. It's not in the same class of things as a candy bar. It's a reaction that occurs naturally when meat is seared, not something like a Snickers bar that can only be created through a tremendous amount of artificial processing using modern technology. This whole debate over whether cavepeople had the tools and insight to make toad shishkebobs is absurd. The basic question is settled: Humankind has unquestionably been exposed to the Maillard reaction ever since we started cooking, and has been deliberately exploiting it for a very, very long time.

Comment author: JGWeissman 13 February 2011 06:22:09PM 0 points [-]

The bottom line is that the Maillard reaction is not a modern superstimulus.

The bottom line is that the products of the Maillard reaction are unhealthy for humans and taste better to humans that healthy alternatives. Whether or not the Maillard reactions were less concentrated (note, this does not mean non-existent) in our evolutionary path has bearing on a possible explanation of this bottom line, which we can directly observe in modern times.

It's not in the same class of things as a candy bar.

A candy bar does involve more processing and is a greater superstimulus in absolute terms, though the Maillard reactions are in a way more insidious. Any adult human eating a candy bar will be aware that they are consuming an unhealthy desert, but most adults consuming browned meat will be under the false impression that they are eating something healthy.

Comment author: [deleted] 13 February 2011 01:48:39AM 0 points [-]

It's not that much extra effort, and if I ate more meat at the time I would have discovered the (substantial) effect much sooner. Also, if I'd been taught to cook by a human being instead of teaching myself from cookbooks, I would never have made the faulty assumption about that step being skippable. The insight about browning meat fully is easy to discover, and once discovered is normally transmitted to other cooks as part of their training.

Respectfully, you seem to me to be clinging rather hard to an unevidenced theory.

Comment author: JGWeissman 13 February 2011 03:50:55AM 0 points [-]

It's not that much extra effort

Try cutting up the meat with a bone knife that you make and sharpen yourself, instead of your metal store-bought knife, and skewering it on a stick you find that is strong enough to skewer the meat, but small enough not tear apart the small pieces of meat, instead of browning in a metal pan or skewering on a metal skewer, and then tell our hunter-gatherer ancestors that it's not that much extra effort.

if I ate more meat at the time I would have discovered the (substantial) effect much sooner.

That is speculation. What we know is that you didn't discover it from the amount of meat you did in fact eat.

The insight about browning meat fully is easy to discover

Hindsight bias.

Respectfully, you seem to me to be clinging rather hard to an unevidenced theory.

I don't accept your theory that humans have been cutting meat into small pieces and browning all the surface area since they invented cooking. Your theory has no evidence stronger than tenuous speculation based on modern cooking that doesn't seem to take into account the differences of the ancestral environment.

Comment author: [deleted] 13 February 2011 04:20:11AM *  1 point [-]

Try cutting up the meat with a bone knife that you make and sharpen yourself

How do you imagine that the hunter-gatherers are skinning and butchering the animal? With their fingernails?

I don't accept your theory that humans have been cutting meat into small pieces and browning all the surface area since they invented cooking.

Okay. I don't claim to know that for certain or anything. You've already accepted that the technique is at least thousands of years old, which is as far as I can feel really sure--although I'll admit that it seems to me much more likely that the technique of cutting meat into small pieces was discovered substantially earlier, given its utter simplicity.

Comment author: JGWeissman 13 February 2011 04:33:57AM *  0 points [-]

Edit: quoted parent as when I responded, the 2nd part was added after

Try cutting up the meat with a bone knife that you make and sharpen yourself

How do you imagine that the hunter-gatherers are skinning and butchering the animal? With their fingernails?

Of course they skinned and butchered the animal with knives. That doesn't change the fact that producing and maintaining those knives is a lot of work for them, and they are more difficult to use than our modern knives, and this does have impact on the marginal costs of additional preparation of the meat.

Seriously, I found your reply to be sarcastic and unsubstantial.

Comment author: [deleted] 13 February 2011 04:44:27AM 0 points [-]

Sorry. You may have seen it before I edited to add the less-sarcastic second half.

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 13 February 2011 04:35:36AM 0 points [-]

Would they be using bone knives or flint? How good are flint knives?

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 11 February 2012 04:42:16PM 0 points [-]

How early did people have knives that were good enough to make cutting meat into small chunks reasonably easy?

Comment author: MixedNuts 11 February 2012 05:13:06PM 0 points [-]

I couldn't find it, but I would guess when we moved from bronze to iron.