Have you ever thought about the ingenuity behind food? We often take food for granted, but in thinking back thousands of years to the beginnings of some of the things we eat now, I often wonder, “Who in heavens would ever have thought to eat that?”

Take lobster, for example.

When I was in my 20s, the parents of one of my friends told me they’d known singer/actor Burl Ives (the voice of Narrator Sam the Snowman in Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer) when he was still an unknown beachcomber.

“He lived in a little shack on the beach and ate lobster, long before anyone else did,” they laughed.

Burl Ives…a culinary innovator?  I remember this story well because, from the first time I ate it, lobster became one of my favorite foods,…seldom eaten, always relished.

But really, who would have looked at this spikey little critter and thought, “Why that looks like a tasty little morsel! I think I shall have that for dinner”?

Oh, I can understand how fruits, veggies, nuts and berries became part of our diets. You just wander around popping them in your mouth (and hoping none are poisonous). But I truly marvel at how far from source we’ve taken some other foods.

Think about bread. Who was the first to look at those waving fronds of wheat and think, “I think I’ll collect those, pound them into something I’ll call…flour! Yes, that’s a good word! Flour! Then I’ll try mixing it with a little liquid or something and plop it on the fire to see what happens!”

Or, who discovered that putting little grains of fungus (a.k.a. yeast) into said mixture of those pounded wheat fronds makes it rise to become what we know as bread? Or that boiling those fronds in liquid then adding grains of dried cereal (a.k.a. malt), a little of said same fungus and letting it sit undisturbed for a while ferments to become beer?

Thank goodness no one’s relying on me to invent food. It If it were up to me, we’d probably all still be sucking on wheat fronds…and not eating lobster.

Originally published in the March 25, 2021 issue of Beyond the Nest’s free weekly newsletter of arts, culture and activities for the Greater Rochester region.