AS THE nights grow colder, one of the pleasures of autumn is a warm evening meal. Cooking is unique to humans.

Unlike language, where other animals undeniably exhibit aspects of meaningful communication — chimpanzees, dolphins, and so on — cooking has no equivalent outside our species.
 
A series of experiments over the last few years led by researcher Dr Rachel Carmody at Harvard have investigated the effect of cooking on nutrition. The basic concept is to feed the same food to mice in both raw and cooked forms and look for any resulting differences in genetics.
 
Last month, Carmody and a team of other researchers published their most recent paper. They looked at the genomes of the bacteria in the mice guts, known as the “gut microbiome.” They showed that the abundances of some bacteria varied depending on the mouse’s diet of cooked or uncooked food.
 
They also experimented in humans. A professional chef designed a vegan, organic, gluten-free plant diet where the same ingredients could be eaten either raw or cooked (it included things such as chia pudding, sweet potato salad, and berry smoothies).
 
Eight volunteers ate what they would normally, then switched to either the raw or cooked diet for three days. The researchers saw consistent changes in the gut microbiome with the raw diet across volunteers, suggesting that the microbiome also evolved over time with the adoption of cooking.

Research into the evolutionary history of nutrition is valuable, yet it is also being carried out in a modern world where people still go hungry. A recent Unicef report found that worldwide, one-third of children under five “aren’t growing well because they aren’t eating well.”
 
This happens in Britain too. As winter approaches, fuel poverty and lack of money combine to make getting enough healthy food to eat a huge problem. For example, there has been a 73 per cent increase in Trussell Trust foodbank use in the last five years. On Teesside, a third of emergency food parcels provided in 2018 and 2019 were for children. Universal credit has been blamed for the recent increase.
 
A common tactic of the Conservatives is to sow doubt about the seriousness of the problem. The lack of a single national definition of “hunger” makes interpreting official statistics difficult. This problem is common in social science. Disingenuous pedants sometimes appeal to this lack of consistency as a way of undermining the facts.
 
But it should be obvious that there is no single objective “hunger number” that summarises all the subjective experience of hunger in its many forms — and those studying hunger in Britain are not attempting to approximate this ideal number. There are different ways of defining hunger quantitatively which capture different aspects of a multifaceted problem, each reasonable.
 
One can accept this without rejecting the abundant evidence of a worsening problem. The risk is that technical discussion of these distinctions can give the impression that there is disagreement over whether hunger exists, when the existence of foodbanks should make it clear that it does. A similar tactic is used by climate change deniers — by talking about the assumptions that go into defining it quantitatively, they aim to create a false impression that the existence of climate change itself is up for debate.
 
Dry language doesn’t help. For example, an important concept in reports on hunger in Britain is “food insecurity.” This technical phrase tries to emphasise the multifaceted nature of the problem of not getting enough nutritious food. Unfortunately, it also lacks any emotional heft; it’s jargon.
 
A common way of measuring food insecurity is the Food Insecurity Experience Scale (FIES), which rather than using a single question about hunger uses eight yes/no questions about the past year. People are asked whether a lack of money or other resources has led to certain things happening to them, from worrying about having enough food to literally going a whole day without eating. Higher scores on this are used to measure greater “food insecurity.”