Some people may argue that we eat to live while others say we live to eat. Only a few people (toling out stars to restaurants) eat for a living of course.
Of course we must eat to survive. Even more, we must eat often to remain alive and in good health. So we should better enjoy doing it.
Once upon a time ...
Man has never been an exclusive plant- or meat-eater. We have always been opportunists, eating whatever came handy and easy. (Yeah, how else would McDonnalds survive?). Chewing some leaves, stuffing our face with fruits, cracking a few nuts, stealing some hapless bird eggs, snatching a slow lizard, ...
Originally we started out as mainly plant eaters. But typical plants don't contain much in the way of proteines and enery. To subsist on raw leaves, fruits and shoots you need to eat large amounts of them. They don't digest easy. Man does not have extended, double or triple guts or other assists for internal processing of hefty fiberous foods indicating he subsuted mainly on tender shoots and fruit.
Moving from lush rainforest to more open country turned the early-human food inefficiency into a liability as there are far less fruits avaialble. Meat contains much more proteins and energy. So meat became more prelevant in our early diet. Also hunting and sharing of food became inportant resulting in bigger brains being more important than bigger teeth.
So we became predominantly carnivores. Untill fire was 'tamed'. You see, plants actually do contain proteins and energy but it's harder to extract. Everyone knows for example that soy beans contain lots of proteins, but by eating them raw the proteins just pass trough (be carefull if you try this, dried soy beans can break your teeth). Cooking will break up the long carbon molecules releasing all the good stuf.
So we swung back to more vegetarian diets.
Since the invention (discovery ed.) of fire food has become something special to us. Before that we just ate what we found where we found it and how we found it (McDonalds like). With fire we braught our food home to be 'prepared' and shared. This resulted in more and longer social contact and, because often the gathering/catching and the preparing were done by different people, more free time to think. So the brains got another inpuls for growth.
Yep, food has shaped our brains.
I did remove the old stuff to replace it gradually with new recipes. I hope to get to it soon enough.
Is 2007 soon enough?
Picking up the spoon again.
Food for thought.