What exactly is cooking. Why does applying heat to any food make it better to eat, both taste and health wise
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It causes chemical reactions that change the compounds in the food. Heating up meat dissolves the collagen inside, making it easier to chew and digest. Heating up a starch slurry makes the starch more bioavailable. Heating up a slightly drier starch slurry turns some of the starch into sugar, making it yummy.
Heat causes a lot of different changes to different foods. Proteins are denatured, fats are melted, water is added (boiling) or removed (frying), sugars are caramelized (browning) and cells are ruptured. Our stomach does some of the same things, so cooking is sort of pre-digesting food, making our own digestive system’s job easier.
Eli5 version: heating/cooking food makes it “healthier” by killing most of the germs and parasites that can be in and on it – this benefit was huge before we had industries and safety protocols to minimize risk, or medicine to cure these ailments after.
Cooking also makes food healthier by allowing us to get more nutrition out of it; that was a huge boon to our species when we could derive more nutrition from the food we already had. Heat breaks food down and makes more nutrition accessible for us.
In terms of flavor. Well, we often cook with that in mind and add a bunch of things like salt and fat. So even before you get to any chemistry changes that make food taste good we’re adding in more stuff that makes it taste good as a basic part of the process.
Many things can be eaten raw. But this might be a relatively modern invention since many now enjoy modern hygienic food processing and sophisticated cleaning processes.
Heat kills germs. So it makes it much less likely one will get sick from eating cooked food. More important if you have to rely on stuff you pick from the ground etc.
Cooking also helps to make foods more digestible. Things like complex starches and protein break up a bit during cooking. This in turn means you need to gather/grow/hunt less stuff in order to maintain an adequate degree of nutrition. This might not be important if you live in a fairly developed economy but for ancient humans, obtaining nutrition was likely the biggest expenditure of energy for a human person so efficiency was a matter of life and death.
Cooking also allows for better food preservation. Things like smoking, curing, jams, preserves and pickles etc allow some some foods to be stored over longer periods. Probably pretty important if you live in cold climates.
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