This cooking lark was only monkey business all along

A Different View with Dave O’Connell

Among the many things I cannot do, close to the top of the list is cooking – while I may not be quite in the category of those who could burn water, anything that doesn’t go into a microwave or hasn’t a set of instructions for idiots is beyond me.

A pizza is fine because the box tells you to open the wrapping, put the thing in the oven and take it out twenty minutes later; ditto a ready meal where it’s hard to go wrong in the course of four and a half minutes.

But if this process involves a recipe or looking for sauces or pesto or ragu, then the takeaway or the humble ham sandwich are infinitely better options.

None of this culinary cluelessness causes me any great concern because I know so many others in the same boat. And yes, they’re all the male of the species.

But now there’s a slight embarrassment at this lack of culinary ability – because biologists at Yale University have proved you can even train a chimp to cook.

Okay, so the reality is slightly different in that it would probably be bordering on animal cruelty to let a primate loose at a primus – therefore they let the chimps think they’re cooking but the principle is still the same.

For the purpose of proving the point, these bonobos – a furry fella who qualifies as cousin of the chimpanzee – were given a fake oven and some raw sweet potato.

The food was ‘cooked’ by teaching them to shake the container – effectively a prehistoric microwave – and the bonobos picked up this ‘cooking’ task, with extremely positive results.

The secret was that the researchers had already put pre-cooked food in a hidden compartment that opened when the device was shaken.

But to the chimps, the effect was as if their raw food had been cooked.

And over time, the chimps – who apparently grew to prefer cooked sweet potatoes – learned to save their raw food for the chance to ‘cook’ it.

Now it may not exactly qualify as Neven Maguire or Michelin star dining, but in effect these primates, supposedly further down the food chain, were better at cooking than me.

The research was conducted by an evolutionary biologist at Yale and a psychologist at Harvard University, at a chimpanzee sanctuary in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Fair play to them for convincing their respective bastions of education of the merits of an extended period in the wild teaching monkeys how to make hot dinners.

But despite the benefits of the nice weather, this was no straightforward task.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.