Neil Gaiman's Stardust
I finished reading Neil Gaiman's Stardust last night. It took me less than four days to complete it. It was an excellent fairy tale. Check out the link about for the short back cover blurb, and an excerpt from the novel. Gaiman has been a favourite of mine since the Miracleman comics - my love for his writing really took off with the Sandman comics however. I actually met him at a signing at the Beguiling many years ago. Now I need his other novels.
The first chef
First came fire ... and then, as the camera shifts to the soon to be late-village idiot, you're left wondering -- just what was going through that mind -- and food is put on the fire, for the first time, and cooking is accidentally discovered by humanity. The first chef is ridiculed by grunts, then the local thug tries a sample of the burnt carcass, and soon, everybody gets queued at the McDonalds drive-thru. What happened? Richard Wrangham of Harvard believes there's more to cooking than evolutionary history would have you believe. Wrangham points out that there is no way homo sapiens could survive on just raw food. Raw food just doesn't give up calories as easily as cooked food -- and raw food makes the digestive system expend more energy to get at those calories. Cooking on the other hand breaks complex molecules down, allowing the digestive system to make easy work of them -- and cooking also softens food, allowing the body to get to the calories with less effort...
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