I don’t know how you feel, but I think some foods are just silly.
Take whipped cream, for instance. Whose bright idea was that? Who looked at a bowl of cream and said, “Hey, let’s see what happens if we beat the hell out of this?” After the first three minutes, when nothing appeared to be happening, why did they keep going?
I guess real whipped cream isn’t anywhere near as silly as that spray foam stuff that comes out of a can. It looks like shaving cream and it tastes like — well, I can’t say it tastes like shaving cream, since I don’t make a habit of sucking down shaving cream — but it certainly doesn’t have much flavor. It tastes rather as if you had forgotten to put any flavoring into it, and at the last minute grabbed two drops of vanilla, which was all you had left in the bottle. And if you let canned whipped cream sit too long, it just melts down and dribbles off the sides of whatever it is you sprayed it on. I hate to think what sort of propellant was mixed into it to get it to explode out of the can that way. Probably napalm.
But as far as figuring out a creative process is concerned, I guess you could say the same about the first person who made butter. That took one heck of a lot more beating than whipped cream does, and they couldn’t be sure they would have created anything useful at the end of the experiment. Whoever it was should be beaten themselves for dooming centuries of farm women to carpal tunnel syndrome and a permanent premature stoop from hours spent pounding cream into submission in a wooden butter churn.
Just the idea of heating something up to make it more edible or even just more palatable had to have come from somewhere. Who was the first person who thought it was a good idea to kill an animal, cut all its fur off, chop it into bits, and toss it in a fire? (For that matter, who first thought of fire?)
And who first realized that putting together ground up wheat kernels (not to mention whoever thought of grinding up wheat kernels in the first place?) yeast, salt and fat and sticking them inside heat would create something edible — i.e., bread?
That one had to have taken a great deal of trial and error. What did the first 9,673,428 recipes look like? “Hmm … what do you say we try bark, river mud, mosquitos and powdered deer hooves? No? How about human hair, grass, coyote urine and crushed grasshoppers? Still no? Damn! I would have sworn we had it! OK, what do you say to ground up vulture feathers, cinnamon, buffalo tongue and spray foam whipped cream out of a can?”
Eureka …?
World’s worst job: Taste tester at the first neanderthal bakery.
There are some silly things we eat that didn’t initially require any processing to make them edible (or even marginally edible.) People just picked them up and ate them. But here again, there must have been a lot of trial-and-error failures in the beginning. The first guy to taste a poisonous mushroom probably regretted it, for a second or two …
The first person to try tofu is still regretting it.
I would have made a terrible food experimenter. There are certain things I can’t stomach just because of the way they look. I doubt very much that I would have been the first human to eat a mushroom, poisonous or otherwise, because it simply doesn’t look like a thing you should be putting in your mouth. The same is true of canned spinach, although that is an evolution — or should I say devolution — which took millenia and should never have happened at all.
Watching what animals eat to get a clue is not always felicitous, either. I am not an avid grass grazer. Nor does gnawing on acorns appeal to me. I actually love vegetables, but I’m not sure I would have originated the inclusion of carrots, potatoes and other underground edibles in the human diet. It probably would not have occurred to me to dig something filthy out of the dirt and nibble on it, regardless of the menu at the local Rabbit Restaurant. Of course, if you are really, really hungry, such considerations would not weigh with you. In that state, I have been known to scarf down dry, uncooked spaghetti noodles.
I might even consider tofu.