Did you ever look a potato in the eye?

I've got some questions about food. I mean, did you ever look a potato in the eye?

Well I have and it’s not pretty. Your average potato is (1) dirty, (2) hard, (3) lumpy and (4) an unappealing shade of brown. Some of them look like an old baseball that's been batted around for three months, run over by a car a couple of times and then left out in the rain.

Sometimes a potato is covered with spots and bruises. People who have a complexion like that are major consumers of Benzoyl Peroxide and Salicylic Acid.

Sometimes potatoes have those little yellow twiggy things growing out of them. I guess that's when you either throw them away or concede that you’re willing to eat just about anything.

Potatoes grow underground in the dirt where worms and grubs and other little creatures live. A lot of people won't touch worms or grubs or even stick their hands down into dirt, but they’ll still eat potatoes that grow down there. Go figure.

So what I want to know is, who was the first person who pulled one of these disgusting little spud-lumps out of the ground, held it up to the light and decided, “Hey, I think this would be good to eat?”

Good, solid ammunition for a slingshot maybe, but food? I’m not feelin’ it.

And why do we eat meat? I've seen cows up close. They're dirty, they don't smell good and they're usually covered with flies, but somewhere back in time, somebody apparently decided to kill one and then dig inside to see if he could find a main course – something substantial to go with that yummy-looking brown rock he had just liberated from the grubs.

With his steak and potato firmly in hand, maybe the guy threw in some weeds he found growing nearby. Maybe he gave them names like “broccoli” or “asparagus,” or one of those attractive looking beets. Maybe he dug up a mess of spinach or a few turnips – not exactly the Cindy Crawford of vegetables.

Did the guy eat this stuff raw at first, or did he instantly know how to cook it? Did he even have fire? How long on each side for the meat? Did he mash the potato, fry it or just boil it in some water? I wonder about this stuff. I really do.

And then there's bacon and eggs. If you thought a cow was ugly, what about a pig? Or a chicken?

I realize there weren’t a lot of restaurants open right after we crawled out of the primordial ooze, and as predatory animals, humans had to figure out something to eat – and fast. Can't you just imagine the conversation that must have taken place the first time somebody decided to eat a pig?

"Listen up, Org, I've got an idea. Let's strip off a few layers of that fat, muddy little pink thing rolling around over yonder. We can fry it up with a couple of those smooth white stones that just rolled out the back end of that twitchy thing with the feathers..."

You've got to be kidding me.