Effective cooking techniques resist discovery through individual trial and error

Evidence

Cooking is also difficult to learn through individual trial-and-error experience. For cooking to provide a digestive aid, it has to be done right. Bad cooking can actually make food harder to digest and increase its toxins. And what constitutes effective cooking depends on the type of food. With meat, doing the most obvious thing (to me) of placing pieces right in the flames can lead to a hard, charred outside and a raw interior—exactly what you don’t want. Consequently, small-scale societies have complex repertoires of food-processing techniques that are specific to the food in question. — Joseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success, 229

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Every human society processes food using generations-old accumulated techniques — Joseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success: How Culture…, 223; Rare events resist prediction because their causes interact uniquely; Rhetorical challenge preceding evidence that nixtamalization was not individually discoverable — Joseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success: How Culture…, 337 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Rhetorical challenge preceding evidence that nixtamalization was not individually discoverable #corroborates (0.95) — Joseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success, 337
• Successful craft choices can be nonintuitive, favoring blind copying over reasoning #corroborates (0.88) — Joseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success, 351
• Rare events resist prediction because their causes interact uniquely #expands (0.72)