Sanji 👨‍🍳

Let's look at Sanji, the third person to join the Strawhats. And there is something that I find very enlightening about Sanji. As a character, he is representing a very deep scientific truth that scientist did not discover until quite recently. And I really can't tell how deliberate this was. In other words: I don't know if Oda knew about these discoveries when he created Sanji, or wether it was his intuition who created such an impressive representation.

Sanji is all about three things: cooking 🍜, fire 🔥 and humanity 🫀.

Keep these three things in mind because I will share with you some scientific discoveries that are so aligned with Sanji's features that it's almost crazy.

Remember: he's the most humane, he's the cook and he can manage fire. That's his personality, his occupation and his power. He has no devil fruit ability, he doesn't wield a weapon... none of that. His features are being a cook, who uses fire and is a very good person.

Let's look at them one by one.

Sanji is a cook 🍜

The first thing we know about Sanji is that he is a cook. That's his main role in the crew. He cooks.

Him being a cook is so primordial to his character that, whenever he fights, he only uses his legs because his hands are exclusively reserved for cooking. And cooking is at the basis of everything he does: he spends the whole story cooking for his crew and even participating in some cooking competitions.

In fact, the reason he joins the crew is that Luffy sets out to find a good cook:

Sanji uses fire 🔥

Sanji uses fire, in every possible way.

One of the most obvious way in which he uses fire is during his attacks. He spins his legs so fast that they catch fire, and then uses the fire to empower his kicks.

Another funny thing in this regard is that he is somehow impervious to fire. In one episode he fights an enemy that uses fire as a weapon, but he's not affected; and the reason he offers is that cooks are comfortable around fire, so much so, that they don't get burned. In other words: we are supposed to believe that cooks become so used to cooking in the stove that they become immune to fire.

Fire is embeded in his character so much that Oda made him a smoker. Sanji is constantly seen lighting cigarrettes with a lighter and smoking them. I don't like the use of tabacco here, but it's true that if you want to represent a guy as using fire as much as possible, making him a smoker is a very clever resource.

Sanji is the most humane 🫀

One last thing that's clear about Sanji is that, in many ways, he's the most humane of all.

For instance, Sanji has a strong commitment with feeding anyone who is hungry. Even the enemy. In the following clip, from very early in the story, you will see a villain that attacked the restaurant and tried to steal from them:

Sanji is extremely kind to others. This is shown specially in opposition to his brothers, who are depicted as inhuman: evil, indifferent, cruel... They lack humanity in every possible way, as we will talk about later. And Sanji is precisely the opposite: he is the most humane, he cries, he cares about people.

You should know that being the most humane and kindest of the crew is no small feat, because most of the Strawhats are very kind. And yet, Sanji is portrayed as the kindest. He has a really big heart; which is a funny sentence, because everyone understands what that means, although it's obviously not anatomically correct.

He is also stupidly chivalrous, which is a good way of representing humanity. When Sanji fights an enemy, if the enemy is a woman, he refuses to harm her even if that means dying. And he is very coherent about this: if someone makes a woman suffer, he gets extremely angry.

He is also very human in the sense that he is obsessed with girls, specially the pretty ones. He falls in love at first sight all the time. He gets so excited at the sight of a beautiful woman that he gets nosebleeds.

Now listed what I'm about to tell you, because if Oda came up with this simply thought intuition, I would have to reconsider the power of human intuition.

The scientific revelation that Sanji embodies

Cooking food, with heat, is the key factor that caused chimps to become humans.

You possibly didn't know this, because for some reason we are not taught this in school when we lean about evolution and so on. So the importance of cooking is not well understood by people. It's actually very underestimated. But this is a well-established fact among anthropologist. Cooking, which requires the controlled use of fire, was the key to us becoming humans.

There are two books tracing the biological importance of fire in hominization:

1. Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human, by Richard Wrangham (2010).
2. Fire: The Spark That Ignited Human Evolution, by Frances Burton (2009).

The thesis is simple: what made humans human was the cooking of food in controlled fire,somewhere around 2 million years.

The book Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Hu­man, is my favorite. The writer, Richard Wrangham, compiles impressive evidence of this. Some of the evidence comes from our anatomy: the digestive tract, the teeth, general body size, and lack of dimorphism (a singular difference in the evolution of hominins) all suggest an adaptation for cooked food. And there have also been many experiments that show that chimps prefer cooked food. Actually all animals prefer cooked food, for the following reasons.

The core of Wrangham's argument is based on the differences between eating raw food versus cooked food. Due to changes in chemical properties, cooked food consistently provides more energy because it is easier to digest. The extra energy can be utilized to increase development in other parts of the body.

In the case of hominids, extra energy was used to fuel the brain, thus increasing brain size and the level of intelligence over time.

The increased level of intelligence coincides with behavioral adaptations such as social structure and the beginnings of culture, essentially distinguishing humans from other species.

Wrangham uses data from studies of people eating only raw food in order to compare the effects of a raw diet versus a cooked diet on the human body (Koebnick et al., 1999).

Unsurprisingly, cooking food is essential. It's vital. So having a cook in your pirate crew makes a lot of sense. If you are curious, experiments where people only eat raw food show a decrease in body mass and chronic energy deficiency. Although some may attribute this to a lack of meat, vegetarians prove it must be something else since they show no differences in body weight with meat eaters. The study also shows that a rate of fifty percent infertility in people who only eat uncooked food.

It is very clear that sufficient energy cannot be obtained from raw food, at least for an extended period of time. It's not optional.

So the transformations that lead to modern humans occurred due to the shift to a diet of cooked food and a reliance on the controlled use of fire.

In other words, by controlling the fire, we became cooks, which in turn gave us our human brain.

This is literally represented in Sanji, with a level of clarity that is surprising. Use of fire, cooking and being humane are Sanji's core attributes, and also a literal description of the scientific phenomena.

Is this a coincidence or was Oda aware of the studies?

I don't know. I don't think so.

Sanji first appears on One Piece on episode 43, that was published on 1998.

And the book Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human was published by Richard Wrangham on 2009, more than ten years later.

So it doesn't look like Oda knew, scientifically speaking, about the factual evidence linking the domain over fire, the act of cooking and humanity itself.

That leaves us with two options:

1. He had an intuition by which linking cooking, fire and humanity made sense
2. Its just a coincidence, there is no such connection and Taig Mac Carthy is the genious for being able to draw such meaningful ties from a random set of fact.

I invite you to draw you own conclusions. I do think that Eiichiiro Oda's unconscious figured it out even before scientists could explain it. Oda possibly had a vision that wanted to display through Sanji. So he create a character with the attributes that simply made sense to him. Which make extreme sense, once you know the science.

The other option if that Eichiiro Oda had scientific knowledge, before the leading scientists themselves. This would require either a crazyly advanced dominion over primatology and evolutionary psychology, and I don't think that's the case.