When I think of the basics of food, it is something I put in my mouth, usually to bite, chew and swallow. Much of my food is room temperature or colder, like a box of cookies or ice cream. But, most of my food is either warm from being cooked or has cooled from a higher cooking temperature. Even the milk I drink has been heated to kill pathogens. So, heat in one form or another is related to food. Most days, I eat two or three times a day and the food is highly related to fire and other heat sources such as the microwave.
The very interesting book Catching Fire by Richard Wrangham is basically about the effect on humans using fire to cook food. We don't normally think of our stoves, toaster ovens and microwaves as time-saving devices. Maybe thinking of the mechanics of having a fire or heat without those appliances gives a picture of one sort of saving time and getting heat of a desired level efficiently.
But Prof. Wrangham and others make a much stronger and more basic point when they direct our attention to cooking. The other animals don't have much of a language and their concerts and plays are skimpy or non-existent. We are advanced in many ways but few people emphasize cooking as such. Turning raw food into cooked turns out to be a super giant saving of time and an enrichment of our human lives. How so? As Wrangham, Suzanne Herculano Houzel in her TED talk and the University of New South Wales in Australia explain, we couldn't have our society or even our brains as we do without cooking. It is cooking that allows our digestion systems to get the calories we need without devoting all our time to chewing.
Prof. Wrangham goes through the time constraints that box in the great apes and humans. They can't hunt in the dark very well so they only have the daylight hours. Pre-agriculture people didn't get much protein without hunting and hunting requires time and energy. So, it turns out that cooking is the answer. With cooking, humans could prepare food and eat enough calories and get them digested into the body in a short enough time to feed giant brains and supply enough energy for long hunts. Wrangham figures that without cooking to grow brains and supply energy, we would not have been able to be as developed as we are. We would not have had enough time.
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