Random thought of the day pt 2

I'm thinking I'll make this a daily thing and the only way to stop me is to get enough other discussion on this board that involve petitions against me....but that still means activity on here


So the thought of the day is as follows: Who came up with the idea for some of the foods we eat today. I mean really, who sat around looking at a field of wheat and went "i bet if i grind this up really good, add some water, a little yeast, maybe some salt, and then put it over a fire for several hours that its gonna be tasty. Equally who got the idea to drink cow milk? I mean were they staring at their baby nursing and got jealous and went "fine you are gonna steal two nipples...ill go take eight!" or did they simply look at a calf nursing and say hmm...room for one more? That then brings me to blue cheese. I mean most people see moldy food and throw it out...well first off you had someone that looked at moldy milk and decided to add a little something and call it cheese and pass it off as food (before really knowing how itd turn out)...then someone forgot to refrigerate that and said hey if moldy milk is good why not moldy cheese. Seriously who are these people. Last off i bring to you cake. You was like hmm bread isnt quite tasty enough for me, but i bet if i add some sugar and lets say....hmmm.maybe an egg...that it will taste fantastic...i mean seriously a raw egg...who looks at a raw egg and says lets mix it with a bunch of other random crap and i bet it will make my bread taste better?

End Rant....

personally, I have always wondered after the sanity of the person who saw an oyster and went 'aaaah - that looks like a pile of donkeys bogeys. I think I shall eat it raw, whilst still pulsating'

eeeeerrrrrgggggghhhhhhh.

Ahh very good point. On a related note I remember being in the college cafeteria once and having this really odd guy i knew ask "does it ever bother you when eating clam chowder that you dont know which are the boys and which are the girls."

A lot of this stuff happens as a means of preservation. You can't eat a lot of those hard grains, but if you smash them up, you can eat them. Notice how you get all thirsty eating peanuts? Well someone smashed it up, added water, and the process continued until someone eventually made a dough-ish mixture. A lot of things get cooked, maybe they thought to cook the mixture in a bowl and it baked up. The recipie is shared, improved on with time, with new ingredients added with time.
As for cow milk, that's not too hard to imagine, taking the milk that the calves drink. Started with earlier bovines, until we cultivated the cow into existance. Milk starts being collected for later consumption, and spoils. Still dealing with hunger, someone ate it, and didn't find it bad. They start to separate parts of it, and cheese is born. Techniques get modified, etc.
Most food recipies are born as a mistake that gets tested by someone and found to be good. A lot of them are ways to preserve foods for later consumption (jerky for instance).

I get that food was experimented with to come up with new ways to consume it. People randomly mix stuff in the kitchen all the time. I'm just saying why did they start doing it all. Look at animals in the wild. They don't make things out of food. They see things and then eat things. What made us decide that rather than that, we would go and grind things up, or put it over a fire, or combine them in ways that to an animal would seem bizarre to do.

That's where we diverged from animals. We cooked food, we used tools on food. Once we started to save things up, we tried to come up with new ways to store it, and most things come from that. Cheese lasts for a long time, a lot longer than other foods. Bread, once stale, can still be eaten WAY after it's been baked. So forth and so forth. It's part of our switching from a hunter gatherer style to cultivating the land. What do you do with surplus grain? You mess around with it. Once you get smarter and smarter, you see that happen. It's a complex interconnected process, but you'd need to study a LOT more anthropology to really understand it properly. I don't get it too well myself, but I understand it from self propagating theory. In order to understand the distant past, take the recent past and extrapolate backwards. When you pass into thresholds of "but how did they do it, cavemen were dumb" then just imagine it being knowledge that's collective being hoarded up over time. How did you learn how to cook? Someone taught you, same thing. Someone came up with it, it stuck around, and eventually those that did it prospered for it.

still does not explain oysters. death is preferable....

loll
not feeling smart enought today to comment on the other points... I recommend guns, germs and steel by Jared diamond - also his book collapse too...

anthrop rocks - did it first/second year at uni AGES ago!

I get that necessity is the mother of invention. I'm just wondering who's weird mind came up with the random combinations it takes to make something like bread. I mean i get mixing spices, but mixing and egg with wheat you decided to randomly grind up and sugar that you also ground up from a sugar cane plant...who randomly makes that mix and then cooks it. I see an egg and cook it before it can touch the rest of my food and make it all nasty! Once again i get why it happened, i just wonder who had the messed up ideas to try some of these specific combinations of food youd otherwise never put together.