How was wine invented? In my college anthropology class, the professor claimed that wine was discovered after a bunch of grain fell into a hole and then it rained. (Or maybe it was beer. It’s been thirty-seven years and I can’t find my notes.) In any case, fermentation occurred naturally when yeast that happened to be in the hole reacted with the sugar. The result was an alcoholic beverage of some kind. But how did the people who stumbled upon the scene know what had happened? When the sugar gets used up, the yeast dies. And how would they recognize yeast anyway? I can’t identify yeast unless it’s in a little yellow packet. How did they know it wasn’t the dirt in the hole that created the alcohol? This whole story seems questionable.
My wife and I have been making red wine from kits for the past four years, and the process is pretty precise. The first step is to sterilize everything. Wine has been around at least five thousand years (longer than writing, by the way). Did they know about sterilization five thousand years ago? They would have had to know about microbes, wouldn’t they? The next step is to add yeast to something sweet, such as ripe fruit. When fermentation stops (no more sugar), you separate the liquid from the sediment at the bottom, then let it sit for at least several weeks to clear. But it’s drinkable before that, and is probably what passed for wine in ancient China, India, and around the Mediterranean. People who make wine have been tinkering with all aspects of the process ever since and, presumably, perfecting the results.
Still, in order for gradual refinement to happen, some form of the finished product must have existed at the beginning. Otherwise, how did they know what they were trying to make? It would be like putting together a jigsaw puzzle with no picture on the box. Now that I think about it, this is really the classic chicken-and-egg riddle, just in liquid form.
What about bread? A variety of this basic food seems to exist all over the world. But different cultures have different kinds of bread, which suggests that they each invented it independently. This is amazing. I would never have come up with bread, even if you gave me all of the ingredients and a top-of-the-line Cuisinart professional bread machine with 680 watts of power and sixteen preprogrammed menu options. If you sat me down in a field of wheat next to a lake and you came back a thousand years later, you’d find me eating a bowl of wheat and washing it down with the water. In a flash of brilliance, I might have thought to combine the two; in that case, you’d find me eating a bowl of wet wheat. And if you’d slipped me some packets of yeast, there’s a slight chance I would have invented yeast-flavored wet wheat.
Again, unless you knew it was possible to create bread, what would cause you to combine the ingredients and cook them? And first you had to mill the wheat to separate out the chaff. How would you know to do that, or how? (And what is chaff, anyway?) Same with pasta, cheese, and many other foods.
Then there’s fabric. How did people figure out how to turn plants and animal fur into clothing? Cashmere is the wool of a goat. Silk comes from worms! I’m pretty sure that if you left me in a field of wheat next to a lake with cotton growing in the next field and a flock of goats grazing nearby and a truckload of silkworms and came back a thousand years later, you’d find me eating a bowl of wet wheat. Naked.
Mostly Bright Ideas 
Marie M
May 23, 2010
You make me laugh so much! Thank you!
LikeLike
Julia Harris
July 16, 2010
Wet wheat, naked. Hilarious. But what would make you live a thousand years? If you didn’t know about microbes or sterilization or how to get out of that field of wheat and seek shelter when the sky shoots down lightning to kill you?
This is sort of the conundrum posed by modern-day thinkers who wonder what we’d do in a situation like the one Mark Twain writes about in “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.” In that book, it was just a given that the transplanted Yankee would know all sorts of things, like the precise date of a solar (lunar?) eclipse and how to make/use gunpowder. I don’t know how to use gunpowder. I don’t know the precise date of my next meal. In other words, stripped of my technology and my smugness, I would be lost and worthless, sitting in a field of wheat, trying to brush my teeth with it.
LikeLike
bronxboy55
July 16, 2010
It’s interesting to think about what would happen if there were some catastrophe like Earth being hit by a gigantic asteroid that destroyed all of the technology. We’d be back to looking for wild berries and trying to stay dry. And brushing our teeth with wheat. Maybe the thousand years was a slight exaggeration.
LikeLike
Margaret Reyes Dempsey
February 20, 2011
Oh my God…this was hysterical. You crack me up. Your comedic timing is wonderful.
LikeLike
bronxboy55
February 20, 2011
Thanks, Margaret. It’s a little jarring to go back and see some of these older posts. I almost wish I could rewrite them.
LikeLike
Margaret Reyes Dempsey
February 20, 2011
I know what you mean because I feel the same about my older posts, but no need here.
LikeLike
Brown Sugar Britches
July 2, 2011
i seriously had this same thought just yesterday. i was thinking that i could understand the eating of fruit. fruit is delicious. it has an aroma that calls to you, that entices you and makes you drool. most fruits are beautiful and colorful, even if under some awful outside (my mind springs to kiwi. how awful looking are they? but the inside… lord love a duck, that’s good stuff). but yes! who figured out how to do this, that and the other??? geniuses? or flavorful beneficial accidents?
LikeLike
bronxboy55
July 5, 2011
I’ve asked these questions repeatedly, BSB, and everyone has the same answer: trial and error. But that doesn’t explain anything. Trial and error is useful if you already know something is possible and you want to duplicate it. Did people somehow imagine bread before it ever existed? If time travel were possible, this is the stuff I’d be looking into.
LikeLike
Val
December 11, 2011
Okay, here’s another late comment… I just had to come and look at some of your earlier posts, I don’t know how I’ve missed them as I usually go back and look at people’s first ones.
I’m not sure if I read this or someone told me or what, but I was under the impression that alcohol was discovered from watching animals eat fermented fruits!
As for the bread… could something similar have happened in nature? (Like, I dunno… a giraffe suddenly eats baked bread in the middle of the giraffe estate… um… no, maybe not….)
LikeLike
bronxboy55
October 23, 2012
Okay, fermented fruits — but how did anyone ever figure out what was causing the fermentation?
Late comment, and even later reply. Sorry about that, Val.
LikeLike
Wyrd Smythe
January 22, 2013
Among beer makers, the theory is usually that someones barrels of barley got wet, which allowed the barley to malt and then ferment. If you’re hungry enough, you’ll even eat wet grain that was messed up. And then you realize that stuff was wonderful!
And then, as you say, it’s trial and error. Same with the fruit. It’d start probably by trying to duplicate what they’d seen in nature. And then, being such clever, clever monkeys, they’d find ways to improve it.
Once you (perhaps accidentally) recognize that heat can have some really interesting effects on food, that opens doors to experimenting. Grains would have been pretty crude back then, so bread may have come from trying to find some way to make grain more tasty.
And then, of course, there were all those visits by various alien chefs…. The Intergalactic Iron Chef Tour, you know…
LikeLike