Hey, Come over here and taste this.

There is a certain group of people who fascinate me. They are the people who do things for the first time. Not the first time for them, but the first time ever. The first person to fly. The first person to realize what radio waves were, and figure out a way to transmit them. The first person to break the sound barrier, or leave the atmosphere. Even the first person to figure out that if he breathed helium, he could talk like Donald Duck. (I'm just playing the odds with the "he" in that last sentence, but it's pretty much guaranteed that it was a guy.) You get the idea.

Sometimes, when I'm eating, I'll think about that. Who was the first person to eat some of the stuff we take for granted today? Mushrooms? Must have been a lot of stoned and/or dead cavemen before they finally figured out which ones to put on the salad.

Who was the first primitive fisherman who speared a lobster out of the ocean and thought to himself, "I wonder what this ugly-ass thing tastes like?" I mean, it seriously looks like it could kill you. I'm thinking that maybe in the beginning, eating something was the accepted way to get even, to show the others that you came out on top. I'm betting the guy probably pulled the lobster out of the water and got a little too close. The lobster got a major claw hold on something or other, a battle ensued, and the victor chowed down on the loser as a matter of principle. Still, without the butter and the whole cooking thing, I'm betting that lobster must have sucked ass.

I also wonder if way back when, if that first guy found something really good, he would try to keep the news to himself. Take something simple, like strawberries for instance. "Yeah, don't eat those red things. No, I'm not kidding. Those things are totally poisonous. Eating one will kill you, no shit. I'm talking foam-at-the-mouth, twitching-seizure, painful slow death. You see those little seeds on the outside? Just smelling them can make you impotent."

What about the first dude who intentionally cooked something? You gotta figure fire came first, and cooked meat shortly thereafter, unless some caveman got lucky and lightning struck a tree full of prehistoric chickens or something.

It's probably more likely that there was some sort of accident. One night in the cave, Atouk was trying to zug-zug Lana, and he kicked a rabbit carcass into the fire by mistake. Atouk, being a man, immediately assumed the rabbit was ruined, and started to toss it out of the cave entrance. Lana, being a smart and cunning lass (even though she had a major mono-brow and more chest hair than Antonio Banderas) thought she smelled something that didn't stink as bad as Atouk, took the rabbit from him, sniffed at it a couple of times, then tasted it.

The rest is history.

For a while though, I'll bet there was a whole group of jealous cavewomen who were going nuts trying to figure out why the hell Lana's rabbit always tasted a lot better than theirs. I can picture them all trying to get dinner invites to Atouk's cave to weasel out her secret. "I don't know what she does to that rabbit, but the meat just falls off the bone. Yeah, I know. Mine usually takes like two weeks in the sun for that to happen. That bitch."

Yeah, even back then you couldn't have more than one woman in a cave without some sort of cat fight happening.