Ever since I was a kid, I've wondered who the first human to ever do a given thing was and why only major breakthroughs are recorded in history. For example, the first airplane was built by the Wright brothers. But who was the first human to eat yogurt?
I remember seeing an episode of Bizarre Foods With Andrew Zimmern where he recounted a conversation with a man from some part of Africa. Zimmern was trying to explain cheese to the man and the man was grossed out by the thought of eating old, possibly moldy curds. Zimmern also made the point that culture (not a cheese joke) shapes what people view as food.
I imagine that a lot of people have died in the process of figuring out what is good to eat, or even early scientific principles.
Anyway, how do you imagine the first _____ to have gone down?
A Brief Essay on Food Every delicacy in every culture was borne of hardship, propagated through peer pressure and codified through interchange with other cultures. And, just as every culture has an intoxicant that is revered such that all other intoxicants are reviled, every culture has a fermented food that is revered while all other fermented foods are "exotic" or "disgusting." Rachel Herz wrote an interesting book called "That's Disgusting" that delves into this phenomenon more than you are likely to want to spend time on so lemme point you to the New York Times article that distills her work down to bite-sized. And, as this is my essay, here are the spoilers: 1) There are no foods, other than toxic ones, that are reviled by all peoples on the planet 2) That which is "disgusting" is cultural and used as a touchstone to separate your people from other people. Those who eat kimchee smell like those who eat kimchee; those who eat limburger smell like those who eat limburger. 3) Cultural affinity has, since the dawn of history, been about assimilating someone else's customs. That invariably starts with food, as we eat multiple times a day. The quickest way to be less of a barbarian is to eat "civilized" food in the eyes of the civilized. 4) Cultural identity has, since the dawn of history, been about eschewing someone else's customs. We are Vasque because we cook our sausage like this not like that. As with Tom Swift, the side of the egg you crack matters. Figuring out what's good to eat isn't that tough. Point to the medicine women. There are very few things in the world that will straight up KILL you, rather than make you sick (particularly if you eat tiny amounts of them). So when you find something new and unusual, you get your apprentice to eat a tiny bit of it. Then you wait a day, check stool, and eat a little more. Wait a day, check stool, eat a little more. Continue until you've found the lethal dose or psychotropic effects or until you've determined that this handy root is great in soup. This simple procedure is actually in army field manuals and has been for pushing 100 years. As far as cheese, allow me to link to one of my favorite articles in the late, lamented Gourmet Magazine, in which three of the top chefs in China visit Thomas Keller's French Laundry and hate on it. This article, and those like it, are why I view Bizarre Foods as a missed opportunity; the language of food is the language of international understanding yet Bizarre Foods is all about laughing and pointing at foreigners through the eyes of the funny fat man who will eat anything. It isn't the first _________ to have gone down that matters. It's the first party assembled to celebrate ______. TL; DR - Lobster fests, not lobsters
I too miss Gourmet and I think that Ruth Reichl was a terrific editor. I think that Zimmern tries to put the food experiences he has into a context that his target audience can learn from, but unfortunately his target audience seems to be . . . less worldly or open to other experiences than one might hope. I hadn't read that Gourmet article. It made me laugh, since I've seen some of that myself. I had a friend who majored in culinary anthropology, which at the time I thought of as a complete waste, but after many miles and stays in many places I admit it's something I find fascinating. There are some foods I refuse to try though. One of them is something made by members of my family who are duck farmers. One of their biggest sellers is fertilized duck eggs, which are a fairly typical snack in SE Asia. However, in the process of creating and sorting these fertilized eggs, they run into different issues, which are sorted out. For example, there is a special name for fertilized eggs where the fetus has died. That gets sorted into a bin and prepared another way. There is also a category of eggs that have begun to rot and various stages of rotten eggs are used for different things. One of them is a giant (3 ft diameter traditionally) torta, or spanish style omelette. I understand how the food arose, but absolutely refuse to eat it. The smell makes my eyes burn. That said, I agree with your views on cultural affinity. I think when people hold prejudices against others, some people criticizing them are quick to leap to racism without considering the cultural aspect.
I wish Zimmern's show was less Fear Factor and more No Reservations. My parents watch his show and I'll catch snippets when I visit them. It's hard for me to watch, I just don't enjoy even looking at the guy. I've not run in to anything yet that has been too drastic for me to at least "try" but I would definitely think twice about Chicha if it's made by using peoples saliva. That's just gross. But if Dogfish Head makes it.... maybe.
Against all logic that says its fine, I don't think I could eat insects. My cousin has told me about eating ants in Mexico and Cicadas in Peru (apparently they are a lot like shrimp), and he says its fine. I can't get past it. So many cultures around the world revere different types of bugs, but they aren't for me.
Logic doesn't play a strong role in most of our food-fear. When I was in Peru I ate Guinea Pig and Alpaca. I didn't enjoy the guinea pig though because I had one as a pet as a kid. Just didn't seem right. No logic there, all emotion. We used to dare each other as kids to eat ants. I don't recall what they taste like.
Quoted at dinner tonight. Laughs ensued. Then came everyones stories of ant eating; it is more common than I thought.If they tasted good more people would eat them.
"Culinary anthropology" sounds like a cool thing to study. Not a degree's worth, but to round out my humanities credits? hell yeah! I'm not that experimental food-wise. I like what I like and what I like is predicated on what smells good. My best friend loves all things Korean but I just can't get behind the food. Ethiopian? Not a fan. Anything from the middle east? All over it. Thing is, if someone wants me to try it, I'll try it. They're usually happy just to see me try it - I don't have to like it. Which is good, because lutefisk is disgusting, yo. You can eat that shit four times and it doesn't get any better. I don't need to be a part of every culture. I just need to be able to interact with it. Gamely trying something you know to be vile and then making a show of trying to enjoy it is pretty much the culinary handshake. If cultural foods weren't reviled by other cultures, they'd be staples, not delicacies. Pretty much every culture subsists off of proteins, vegetables and starches that are universal. It's only when you get into the "delicacies" that the barriers come up. I don't have to like durian and they don't have to like roquefort. Lychees are delicious and almost anybody can get behind mozarella.
Delicacies borne of hardship is what started a lot of haute cuisine. The french had terrible famines during the revolution and I guess that's why they started to eat frogs and snails, the chinese dogs and rats, the scandinavians rotten shark, the scots haggis and I gues in the future the North Koreans tree bark and grass.
I can't generalize my views, but I definitely feel revulsion towards incredibly unhealthy foods that are destructive to one's body, such as chicken wrapped in bacon, drizzled in gravy. In my eyes, these foods almost crafted to drive a negative reaction. Perhaps I'm being close-minded, but I would definitely eat live bugs before food so closely stigmatized with obesity, gluttony, and heart disease.1) There are no foods, other than toxic ones, that are reviled by all peoples on the planet
Did someone say "failure pile in a sadness bowl?" I heard "failure pile in a sadness bowl." SOmething to keep in mind - bacon-wrapped chicken is more nutritionally accessible than live bugs simply because the proteins have been broken down by cooking. So while it definitely has more cholesterol, it also has better nutritional value.
Along similar lines, I'm sitting down having lunch right now. -Sushi. It wasn't so long ago that in the West, the idea of eating raw fish seemed strange, but in reality it's the origin of how we consumed food. I wonder who was the first hominid to think, "I bet this would taste better if I put it in the fire." Like many a great discovery, it was likely an accident. Now excuse me will I dig in to this raw eel. Great post btw.
Cooking food increases the available nutrients by a thousand percent in some cases. It has been argued by Richard Wrangham that without cooking we simply couldn't have evolved the brains we have and, in fact, eating raw burns more calories than it consumes without an extensive food system propagated by carnivores. In a chicken/egg dilemma, the argument is that we became human because we cooked. You may be interested to know that the "sushi" you know is a post-war invention, propagated by refrigeration distributed by the US Army in occupation. Its precursor, nigirizushi, erupted all over Edo in a couple decades about 1800-1820 and was a less-fermented version of a truly funky concoction that only the Japanese had been eating (and that sparingly) since the 6th Century. Basically, you're eating mozarella fresca; 200 years ago it was parmesan and prior to that it was camembert.
This is more related to your post than maybe you meant, but I have always wondered who was the first person who saw an egg and was like "Hmm. That hard thing? Yeah, I'm going to break it open, and then I'm going to eat that." I'm pretty sure that humans probably weren't the first animal to eat eggs, though, so I guess we probably picked it up from other animals or early ancestors. But, in line with that, I also want to know who decided to take an egg and cook it in water with its shell on. I mean, you have already discovered eggs are already good to eat raw (although the thought grosses me out). So you are going to proceed to mess with them even more? And don't even get me started on the question of "Who decided to put eggs in baked goods?" because that really puzzles me. Why? Who figured out that eggs would make a baking product more rich? In fact, most of the things we know about baking puzzle me - or, how we figured them out and who decided to try it first. Generally I think about eggs most because raw eggs kind of disgust me and I'd never want to eat a raw egg, so I'm always like "Geez. Some human ate this and was like "YUM!" " when cooking, but even - who decided milk should go in cakes? How did they decide that? What about baking powder and soda?
So this is sort of tangential. But I think it is a lot harder to pinpoint firsts than people really imagine, because their is rarely a single cut-off between the world before X and the world after X, instead there is a slow translation as X gets built and you have X' which is close to X but not really X and X" which is even further but still close. We as a culture than create an artificial cut off to say when X really appeared and ignore all the X' that came before it. For example, the Wright brothers. I am not the most knowledgeable person on this subject but even using wikipedia's history of flight page you can see that it starts to get blurrier. Before them there was of course the history of lighter than air flight, and a history of gliders. To make them the first you have to narrow it down to "the first sustained, controlled, powered heavier-than-air manned flight" as the " first successful sustained flight of an unpiloted, engine-driven heavier-than-air craft of substantial size" had happened 7 years prior to them. I think the reason of this is so blurry is that a lot of these "firsts" are people standing on the shoulders of others so they are only making small leaps that then add up to bigger leaps. Because they are making small leaps other people are doing it at the exact same time and it becomes hard to define who did it first. This happens a lot in Math where multiple mathematicians will reach the same point at almost the same time. The best case of this is the question of who "invented" calculus. For decades there was a battle over who got credit and it seems now that everyone just agrees they developed it independently (although the professors I learned this from approved more of how Leibniz got there than Newton). TL;DR - I think this is an impossible question not only because of a lack of historical records but because "invention" or "firsts" is a lot more amorphous than most imagine.
And this just in apparently, The first sustained, controlled, powered heavier-than-air manned flight was performed by John Brown, two years before the Wright Brothers. I am no authority on the Wrights either, but I happened across this story last week. It shows the murkiness of firsts, maybe Bill Smith will be first next year as more information becomes available. Yogurt often makes me wonder how the hell it became a thing that you do. Pretty sure that a person who was close to starving scraped out the milk jug only to discover that there was a way to store milk for a bit longer if it was Yogurt. If there is any primitive technology that I'm totally in awe of it's the bag. The person who first realized they could take their possessions with them in the skin of an animal really changed the whole game. In video games like Civilization you always discover pottery or mineralogy, fuck all that, the bag was a way more fantastic invention. The post also reminded me of this Stevie Wonder song Black Man
My guess, and I literally have no evidence to back this up, is that tattooing began with scars. I would bet that people were self inflicting scars before they were tattooing. I would imagine people admired others peoples scars and that's how it began. Or perhaps it was birthmarks? I agree though, these are interesting things to ponder.
Similarly, on the topic of dairy, I wonder who was the first person to milk a cow? Why would that ever seem like a good idea?
Wright brothers, eh? Some say the first heavier than air powered flight was actually achieved by a Kiwi - Richard Pearse :
"World-famous in NZ" is actually a Kiwi in-joke (it's a local soft-drink slogan). I was a little surprised to see a Wikipedia entry on that, too : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_famous_in_New_Zealand BTW, L&P is good stuff.