Lévi-Strauss recognized that the human brain is intrinsically wired to absorb enormous amounts of sensory information, raw data from the environment, dissect it and classify it into sets of relationships – conflicts, interchanges and harmonies – in order to identify messages and derive meanings that help man navigate his world and resolve cultural dilemmas. In his 1964 book, The Raw and the Cooked, Lévi-Strauss applied his theories on language and myth to illustrate how humans use language and cuisine to move from the state of nature to the state of culture. He believed that meaning in myth is grounded in a system of language that is structurally encoded with sets of relationships – patterns of binary opposites – raw and cooked foods – and transformative mediators – fire and heat. Lévi-Strauss concluded that the human mind creates infinite patterns of binary mediators, formulates new connections, and regenerates the meaning of language because “[myth] has no interest in definite beginnings or endings; mythological thought never develops any theme fully: there is always some...