The Ape that Cooks

RI Lecture from 2005

• "As the 2005 audience are still recovering from their Christmas dinners, Sir John Krebs leads them on an exploration of what food has meant to humans throughout time in his first lecture. How did we end up eating fabulous Christmas meals when our early ancestors scrabbled around for nuts and seeds? In this lecture John explores the history of food, from our earliest predecessors, through the great ‘miracles’ which completely changed our diet and the way we lived, to today’s gourmet extravaganzas.
  This 3-million-year journey takes us through the prehistory of our early ancestors, the rise of civilisation, the spread of human beings across the planet and ends with the emergence of one of the greatest science labs of all: the domestic kitchen. There we can experiment with new ways to use food in our celebrations together. "