When Fred and I recently spent some time in the Ardennes on something that can only be described as a midweek of culinary frenzy (cooking away stews, curries, soups, etc.), we had ample time to discuss the topic closest at hand: food.
Indeed, food is quite strange when you think of it. For one, there is the massive variety of the stuff that we put in our mouth, qua taste, shape, colour, smell, feel, etcetera. But another thing that has always fascinated me, is the idea what it must have been like for a caveman to first encounter a certain vegetable, fruit, nut, and so on and trying to eat it.
There are, of course, the obvious examples. Stuff like potatoes, for instance. How long do you think it will have taken the ancient Indians to realise that you should boil them instead of eating them raw? And why didn’t they just throw them away after that first crunchy bite? Corn is another one. Indeed, what did primitive men do with corn before popcorn was invented? That’s right, they ground it up, sifted it, added water and salt to it, baked it in an oven and called it bread. But how on earth did they get that idea?
And if you’re a bit critical (as I sometimes tend to be), you can ask the same question about all sorts of things. An egg, for instance. Imagine a caveman stooping, picking up what a hen just dropped out of her ass and holding an egg in his hand. First of all, it seems to me that the chances of him considering to eat it would be pretty slim, seeing that the object just fell out of a cloaca. Secondly, nobody would have told him to boil it up or fry it, and especially remove its shell! Imagine biting into an egg as if it were an apple. Would you give it a second go next time your chicken started pushing frantically?
Come to think of it: even easy foods like fruit could have given problems. Take oranges for instance - a prototypical fruit, if ever there was any. However, can you imagine primitive man first getting acquainted with an orange? Chances are that he first simply picked the fruit from the tree and started eating it like an apple. Now try eating the peel of an orange sometime, you’ll probably be able to imagine said caveman’s face when he bit through the bitter white stuff under the skin. Still, our hungry ancestor would quickly have learned that only the inside of the orange was nice. That’s obvious and would work with stuff like bananas or lychees too, but in other cases it might have taken some time. The apple technique wouldn’t have been quite as successful in the case of coconuts, I’m afraid.
Indeed, with much fruit it seems quite a conundrum how and why someone first started to eat it. Lemons or limes, for instance, seem quite useless in a time before lemonade or mojito. But the biggest mystery to me is kiwi or passion fruit. Indeed, let’s be honest, an orange probably already looked quite strange to primitive man (after all, what else is bright orange in nature?), but the hairy brown kiwi looks plain suspicious. I mean, they do look disturbingly similar to a monkey’s testicles, don’t they? And passion fruit isn’t much better. The only difference is that in this case the monkey must have been a bit smaller, and possibly a lot older too…
Yummy!
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ReplyDeleteNice post, but a lot is quite easy to explain. For example: caveman ate a lot of berries, mushrooms, insects, etc. things you can pic up and eat raw from the ground(like our ape forefathers did and our ape cousins still do). You will discover very fast what things are poisonous because the people who eat it, die or get sick. Also the more bitter or sour the taste is, the more chance it is poisonous, so people didn't eat it.
ReplyDeleteOur taste-buds became less sensitive to these things over time out of uselessness for the controlled taste of processed food. That's why we enjoy these tastes now.
It's even easier to explain products like meat, fish and eggs, just copy predators(ravens eat eggs, it doesn't take a lot of time to figure out that the shell isn't that eatable but yolks are). Plus the discovery of fire was directly followed by cooked food(someone probably accidentally dropped a piece of meat in the fire, saw it change, took it out of the fire and tried to eat it because of hunger) and the fact that it's actually easier to eat, digest and reduces chance of illness, made it popular.
Things like corn, potatoes, etc. are things you have to grow and didn't come until the ingenious idea of agriculture and farming. Farming is also the reason why we began to grow things that aren't eatable, it's from the simple idea: "if your animal has a good diet, the animal will actually taste better" ;).
After this, it was only a matter of time before people became bored with the simple natural things and started experimenting like trying to make uneatable food, eatable. And inventing new foods and tastes in general, like: potatoes, bananas, milk, bread, butter, etc.
Sorry for making this comment so long, I'm sort of obsessed with thinking about stuff like you do and am doing this for a very long time. Actually since my 5th birthday, when I got convinced that the pink paper napkins were eatable paper and discovered after several napkins a tummy ace and screaming parents, that it was just poor judgement ;).
Have fun with your blog. I do, and have a lot of good ideas and laughs from it.
Greetings from a big fan of strange questions and thoughts.
PS: I would like to stay anonymous, if you guessed who I am(I've known 1 of the 2 Freds for a short period of time, so I doubt you would), I think you 2 would understand the feeling of wanting to remain anonymous.