Contemporary Caveman

Flickr/melystu

While food-shopping recently, I found myself rooting around in a bin of loose mushrooms and felt a primal stirring, as if I was being called back to a time I had lost. It occurred to me that I was getting about as close as I will ever get to foraging for food.

The modern-day hunter-gatherer is a strange creature. He roams the wide avenues of pre-packaged, processed prey – all of which is just begging to be eaten. Gone are the days when the Kellogg’s corn flakes chicken would run away screeching, now it clucks and winks provocatively at you.

Gone too is the worry that you will pick up a fistful of raw, delicious meat, only to have it snatched away by a wolf. The closest one will ever come to this happening is the rare occasion that an odd, starved fox may enter this paradise of easy prey in a last-ditch attempt to claw life out of the concrete it must adapt to.

Now even the vegetables appear before you in pristine condition, sterile, and uniformly beautiful. The parsnips are now a stunning example of Aryan superiority – blonde, tall and thoroughly proud of it. The lettuces never need to accuse one another of being too wrinkly, or the cabbages of not being wrinkly enough. All is well in the vegetable kingdom, and each culinary experience is just the same as the other.

The upper-classes of the vegetable kingdom are now the great-unwashed – affluent, filthy vegetables ready and waiting in Waitrose and the farmer’s market for the affluent, squeaky-clean modern-day Neanderthals to dismount their mammoth-like Range Rovers and scoop these filthy little gems up.

Back in the central-heated, double-glazed, completed-carpeted and charmingly arranged cave, the hunter-gatherer offers up today’s catch to the almighty ping-box. It’s white, brilliance too dazzling to look at directly while piercing the plastic film of one’s prey before the magic begins. Two minutes is all it takes to turn a tray of brown and beige stuff in to a symphony of tastes and smells.

Returning to the mouth of the cave, the hunter-gatherer huddles around the warm, inviting glow of the moving-lights box, and is entertained by hairy Geordies, or bald, mad-scientists proudly displaying their prey of the day. The moving-lights paint a picture of getting back to the core of food while also pushing out towards the end, but as he looks down at his plastic-bound mound of sustenance, the hunter-gatherer can’t help but wonder how he got here, and what he could be doing differently.