Who Brought Fire?

Bread is the most everyday and familiar of foods, the sturdy staff of life on which hundreds of generations have leaned for sustenance. It also represents a truly remarkable discovery, a lively pole on which the young human imagination may well have vaulted forward in insight and inspiration. For our prehistoric ancestors it would have been a startling sign of the natural world’s hidden potential for being transformed, and their own ability to shape natural materials to human desires. – Harold McGee On Food And Cooking

Only a food writer could sing a semi-religious paean to bread. “A lively pole on which the young human imagination may well have vaulted forward”, really?

But going meta, each profession perhaps is wont to overestimate its importance to humanity. Fact is, there had been so many turning points in the history of humanity. Fire. Language. Agriculture. Bread. Citystate. The Gutenberg press. Sanitation. The Internet. Paris Hilton.

These “turning points” are not revolutionary. It’s not like one day we don’t have the Internet, the next day we do. It took time. An idea needs to take root in society, and grow into it. It is not the idea itself, but the society accepting that idea, and reifying an almost ghostly abstraction to concrete things that affect real lives. Society is the soil into which ideas are sow.

Turning points are invented after the fact. The hero that brought fire to humanity was not Prometheus, but the moms that used it to make food.

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