Fire makes us human.

No other force of nature so starkly represents the difference between humans and animals as fire. To the beasts, and to our earliest ancestors, fire is only something to fear. Fire was the greatest test of our flowering ability to shape the environment around us - and we passed. We tamed fire. We turned it from something to run away from into something to gather around.

And fire, in turn, may have made us smarter. Only a small fraction of the calories in raw food can be absorbed by the body. In both plant and animal matter, heat breaks down the structures of proteins and starches to make them much easier to digest. When people learned to cook, so one theory goes, our daily “calorie budget” suddenly had enough surplus for the growth and maintenance of our huge brains.

It’s only a theory at this point, but the universality of cooking is pretty persuasive. There’s not a single known human society, including the most primitive hunter-gatherers, that doesn’t cook some of its food. People in the developed world who eat “raw food” diets have significantly lower weights, and women routinely miss menstrual periods from lack of energy. It’s almost impossible to eat the amount of raw food you’d have to eat to absorb as much nutrition as you would from a routine diet of cooked food.

So if you’re wondering “Why in the hell is Meh selling lighters? I want tech stuff!” - well, fire is the one of the original techs, and this flameless plasma lighter is hotter, it’s more efficient, it’s more fun, it’s… purple. We’d like to see Rae Dawn Chong and her tribe bind pure plasma in a containment field. It won’t alter the course of humanity the way the original fire did, of course. But using a plasma lighter will put one more small step between you and the bonobos.