Ken Albala

There's a tonne of smoke already over here.

As you can see, I'm being smoked myself.

I've got flames that are, I don't know, two or three feet high now.

And I'm going to let this go on fire.

As you can see, I'm being smoked myself.

Probably somewhere between 2 million and 1 million years, we were cooking food.

And when you cook food, of course, you know, in an enclosed space often, and you have a hole in the roof or sometimes a chimney.

So smoke is a necessary kind of adjunct to whatever you're cooking.

And I think people would have realized that it lasts longer when you put it in the smoke intentionally and leave it there.

That's right.

And I think people would have been inhaling smoke all the time.

And it means that...

that we have this sort of hardwired taste to appreciate it because we've been doing it so long that we've come to love that flavor.

And I think people who did it habitually would have been less susceptible to catching parasites or pathogens or infectious bacteria, things like that.

And they would have reproduced at a greater rate and just done a better job at surviving because they smoke food.

If you are hunting an animal, it's hard to keep the whole thing

And smoking is one of the easiest technologically because you've got the wood all around you and you're really just hanging the thing in smoke.

And a simple, simple, you know, smoker is really just a box.

It's as simple as it can be.

That's right.