I’m never eating cooked food again. Or, at least, not until 6:30pm tonight.

But I did read something at lunch that totally grossed me out and made me glad that my lunch was a salad and not a stir-fry. It was a story about how cooked food has more energy than raw food, and one of the reasons is that cooking breaks stuff down and makes it more accessible to our digestive system. So far, so good; nothing in there to make me regret reading it. Then comes a comment from one of the researchers behind the study, who described cooking in this way: "We can think of it as externalizing part of the digestive process.” To which I reply, “Ew.” And immediately think of that villain on X-Files who ate women by covering their bodies in digestive juices to make them easier to ingest. Call me old fashioned, but I want my digestion to take place in my stomach, the way Evolution intended.   

The article had a shocking number of comments. I thought the insane people who make insane comments on CBC.ca would be too busy writing inappropriate and/or offensive comments on the stories about child murders to bother commenting on a science story. I was wrong. I didn’t read many of them (not good for my health), but there was one (I assume) vegetarian who was endearingly excited about some new doc about how meat is bad for you and the environment. The [sic]-worthy bit that really grabbed me was how s/he promises: “This films explains all the sciences of it!”  They also claimed that the meat industry will never allow it to air on TV. I don’t know how true that is, given how big “TV” is nowadays and the fact that most cable channels will air pretty much anything. But anyway….what was my point?