Ooh...Floor Pie!

Every once in a while, I'll stop to contemplate things that we eat, and I have to wonder what made us decide to eat this things in the first place. Look around your kitchen pantry, the refrigerator or the grocery store the next time you're there. Start asking yourself "Who thought this was a good idea?" I'm not just talking about odd foods here, though they certainly fit in (and there might be some on my list). Some of the things we eat and drink everyday are really kind of odd when you stop to think about it. These are just the things that I thought of while sitting down to write this post.

Coffee: Sure, I've talked about it before, but that was mostly to discuss one specific (disgusting) type. Think about it this way, when you eat cherries, what do you do with the pits? You spit them out and throw them away. Have you ever stopped to think, "Maybe I should cook these for a bit, grind them up and throw them in hot water?" No? Yet, that's almost exactly what you're drinking every morning, so someone had that thought.

Nutmeg: I'm not talking about the ground nutmeg you find at every grocery store, but whole nutmeg. Look at it. It's like a stone, yet someone decided that it would be good to start grinding it and using it in food.

Eggs: This one is a little disturbing for a couple of reasons. One, simply because it is an egg. And the second, because of where it comes from. It's like the old joke about the man who sees beef tongue on a menu and is disgusted saying, "I won't eat anything that came out of a cow's mouth. I'll just have some eggs."

Milk: Here's a question for you. It is not acceptable for adults to drink breast milk, right? Why? Because it's for the baby humans. Now go open your fridge and look at that container of 2%. Why is that less weird?

Cheese: This is just taking the issues with milk a little further. It was weird to begin with, but now it has been contaminated and gone bad...but it tastes so good.

Blue veined cheeses: Again, we're just taking the last food one step further, because now the milk that has gone bad has gone bad again and is full of mold.

Pretty much any dairy product: After the last few entries, I decided that maybe we should just leave it at this.

Oysters, clams, other bivalves: Who was the first person to wonder whether there was something useful inside what was basically a rock? What made him think that the snot inside would actually be good to eat? I'm guessing desperation was involved.

Olives: I like olives. I like olive oil. However, I know that I would never eat an olive straight from the tree. They are essentially inedible like that. This means that someone had to (1) come up with the way to extract the useful oil from the olives and (2) come up with a way to turn them from disgusting, bitter things to the tasty ubiquitous fruit they are now.

Root vegetables: Potatoes? Carrots? Radishes? Garlic or onion? (ok, they are bulbs, but the principle is the same) Why would someone start wondering about the parts of the plant below ground when they are looking for dinner? How did we end up eating these things that we wouldn't even see most of the time?

Vanilla: There are tons of varieties of orchids in the world. They all produce a fruit of sorts around their seeds. How did we select this one type as the one whose fruit would flavor so many things, especially since becoming that flavor requires several steps before it is even recognizable to us.

Mushrooms: Mold and fungi are typically considered bad things, but on occasion we decide that they are in fact good things and sometimes even delicacies. Add to this that if you don't know what you are doing when you collect mushrooms in the wild you could end up poisoning yourself, and you might really start to wonder why we started eating these things.

Cuitlacoche (or huitlacoche): This is more of a subset of the last one than an entry all of it's own. This is a fungus that grows on corn. In reality it is a parasite feeding off the corn, but it has become a delicacy. Not only is the idea disgusting, and not only does it look disgusting, but even the name has a somewhat disgusting (though quite humorous) origin. The name comes from two Nauhtl words, cochi meaning black and cuitlatl meaning excrement. ^(source) Basically, this means that at some point in Pre-Colombian history, someone looked at the fungus growing on the corn and said, "Dude! What is that black crap growing all over my corn?" and the name stuck.