FOOD GLORIOUS FOOD

FOOD GLORIOUS FOOD

I looked at my dinner last night and saw the various ingredients in my salad, including lettuce, sprouts, celery, radishes, and mushrooms. I looked upon the piece of medium-rare red meat, no longer mooing in front of me, served along with green beans and a baked potato, and I wondered. How did they know?

They are our forefathers — the humans who came thousands of years before us and discovered all the stuff we now take for granted. Forget electricity, computers, the automobile. I was thinking about the food guinea pigs.

I’m sure hundreds of thousands of years ago everything was tried. How many men came home to dinner and heard their wives say “We’re having something new tonight. I found this plant I’ve never seen before, I boiled some of these vines and I shot this bird. Try it. I think you’ll like it”, only to discover the man keels over dead or, if he is lucky, just wretches all evening.

Someone had to experiment and know what had to be served hot, and what had to be served cold. What to broil and what to bake. Somehow we learned that just because it had legs, wings, and a tail, it did not mean we could eat it. Through trial and error, I guess they learned that Sparky was cuter chasing a ball than being the main course, that horse legs are better for traveling than an appetizer. I don’t want to know the process that determined cow tongue was OK but ears were not.

Why aren’t salads filled with Ficus leaves and grass? Why don’t we eat great Danes? How come we eat potatoes? Who found celery? All these questions arose as I looked at my dinner. The more I thought about it the more questions I had. How did we learn you can eat fish? Who had the idea to catch it and cook it? Who found a lobster, at the bottom of the ocean, and even thought about eating it?

I can understand wanting to open an oyster to see what is inside, however, it takes a leap of faith to discover the inside contains what looks to be a fresh piece of snot. Gazing upon it someone decided to swallow it. Upon slurping it down they then smiled delightedly when finished. To me, those people qualify as the first superheroes. Oysters were the gateway food to clams, shrimp, and crabs.

Somebody, somewhere, looked at an artichoke and decided it was worth the effort. That alone should qualify as an act of extreme patience, if not outright delusion. You have to peel it, scrape it, dip it, and discard about ninety percent of it just to arrive at a heart the size of a poker chip. I picture the inventor of the artichoke as a man with a lot of time on his hands and nothing better to prove to his wife.

Then there’s cheese, which is, when you strip away the marketing, spoiled milk that somebody decided to age on purpose. Somewhere a person let milk sit around until it curdled and thought, rather than throw this away, let him put it in a cave for eight months and see what happens. That is not cooking. That is patience wearing the costume of cooking. And when it worked, when the mold turned out to be blue and delicious instead of merely blue, an entire industry was born on what amounts to a very confident guess.

Coffee has its own legend, something about goats dancing after eating berries off a bush, and a herder deciding if it’s good enough for the goats, it’s good enough for me. I don’t know if that story is true, but I know somebody had to be first, and I know that person did not have a barista, a menu, or any idea what a Frappuccino was going to become. They just chewed a berry and hoped for the best, which, as it turned out, was better than sleep.

What about herbal medicines? How many human experiments went into finding the right plant to put us to sleep — one that also guaranteed we’d wake up? (A key part of the experiment, I’d think.) Somebody had to figure out which plants made good shampoo, and somebody else had to figure out which plants made you need the shampoo in the first place.

But, I digress.

These and other random thoughts came to my troubled mind as I looked at the dinner I had ordered. It’s my job to think about these things for, if I didn’t, well, take today for example, I’d have nothing worthwhile to write about! Those people who lived in 845 BC (before cholesterol) had to be pretty damn scared when someone invited them over for dinner. Food could not have been an exact science in those days. As I stared at my dinner I realized if I thought about this stuff I’d never eat. How frightening to think that a long time ago the forests, rivers, plains, and mountains were littered with bodies that had failed Food 101?

I dove into my salad, savored my meat, and buttered my potato knowing with certainty that the eating would not kill me that moment. The cow I was chewing might decide to clog my arteries, the potatoes might make me fatter, the salad dressing might give me heartburn, but the meal would taste good. As I washed this all down with a glass of milk, I wondered what the person was doing when they discovered milk. They milked a cow before they ever thought to eat one — that’s the order it happened in, and nobody’s ever explained why. The questions are endless.

I now know that anything I enjoy eating is not good for me. As with our forefathers, what I eat today, could also kill me. We have come so far with food, we now have no “food” sold as food.

Take the potato chip as my example. It is not food. It serves no nutritional value, yet there’s almost half an aisle devoted to it. Actually, almost every aisle at the market contains hundreds of products sneakily sold as food that aren’t really food — they’re just chemicals we call processed food to make them sound more palatable. Somewhere a man in a lab coat looked at corn, sugar, and a list of ingredients he couldn’t pronounce, and called it a granola bar. Our forefathers foraged for berries. We forage for aisle seven.

I’ll bet a dollar to a donut our forefathers never hunted, gathered, or foraged for Doritos.

So, the next time you sit down to eat, remember that a lot of people died just so you could enjoy your dinner. I guess that’s why my mother always told me to say thank you for the meal as one never knows if it could be their last.

I could go on but I’m losing my appetite for this. I will close by saying,

Bon Appétit.

© 2026 Kenny Kates