I was having oatmeal with Elke this morning, or porridge, as it is known in the British Isles, and thinking about how simple it was to prepare, even though it wasn't 'instant'-- 'instant oatmeal' being popular back in the Old Country, where one has only to pour hot water on the oatmeal and it is ready to eat-- though it wasn't 'instant' oatmeal, I say, it was still relatively instant, in that it took about five minutes to prepare. The American, 'instant oatmeal' probably only takes 2 or 3 minutes to prepare, the preparation being the heating of water and fetching butter and sugar and whatnot, thus saving Americans 2 or 3 minutes in their day, which Europeans lose by cooking the stuff.
As I was saying, I was thinking about how simple this satisfying breakfast was to prepare, and how self-sufficient I was in preparing it, when I thought again. It may have seemed as though it had taken 5 minutes to prepare, but it had taken thousands of years, when one considers all that has gone into a bowl of oatmeal.
It was probably a woman who discovered the wild oat that was to become oatmeal, as she scavenged for berries and nuts, the menfolk having failed to kill that woolly mammoth the other day, and returned from the hunt bruised and with bruised egos. So as the menfolk sat around the camp that day, hungry, and blaming each other for the failed hunt-- "Why didn't you thrust your spear when you were under the mammoth, man?"-- "Yeah, right, and have it squash me so you can feed your face?"-- "The spearhead was loose on my spear, dude, I'm gonna have someone else do my spears from now on..."-- so as they sat around making excuses and pointing their fingers, a few women ventured from the camp despite having already picked all the berries and found all of the grubby worms in the vicinity.
And so it was that one woman said, "What about this plant? Maybe we can eat this one," and she took the wild oat and rolled it in her fingers and ate it.
"It's not very nice to eat, but better than nothing," she said.
"We can mash a bunch of them with a rock, so they're softer," said another woman.
"Or," said another, "remember how those plants got mushy in the water that was in that concave stone, and then especially when the guys built the fire next to it, and it got hot and bubbly, and we ate a little, and the plants weren't tasty but they were mushy?"
"Yeah?" said one woman, not following.
"Well, we put these hard things, what should we call them? Yotes? Oots?"
"How about oats?"
"Okay, so we put these oats in that concave stone..."
"We can call that concave stone a 'bool'."
"I think 'bowl' sounds nicer than 'bool'."
"Okay, then, a bowl... so we put these oats in a bowl and next to the fire, and they'll get mashy and soft, then we can eat the stuff to see if it's tasty."
"If it's tasty we can call it oat something... oat melee, or oat melange..."
"Or oatmeal..."
"Okay."
"Or porridge!"
"What? Why?"
Etc etc.
And so oatmeal was invented.
But then the wild oats had to be cultivated, which probably would have been a woman's idea as well.
"Let's get movin', man, nothing to kill around here," one of the boys might have said, hungry and cranky.
"I think we should stay," a very brave woman may have said. "You guys don't get much food for us, but there happen to be a lot of oats growing around here, and we noticed that if you give some of the oats back to the ground, even more grow back, so we can stay and always have something to eat."
"Friggin' boring idea," one of the lads may have said.
"You wanna eat or starve?"
And some would have decided to stay and become farmers.
And then the story goes on, as oats became mass produced, and there was surplus, and the surplus sold to others, and each step of the way more stories, how money came to be invented, and the plow, and transport to get the oats from the farm to the consumer, and over thousands of years of development, after years of tears and toil and strife, and due to thousands, hundreds of thousands, nay, millions of people-- when you combine those people and their stories with those thousands of years, the oatmeal would have finally arrived to your cupboard or mine, and then to the bowl-- and though it would seem to have taken only 5 spare minutes to prepare-- or 3 minutes with the instant variety-- in fact, it has taken all of civilization and its history to prepare.
So, nothing instant or self-sufficient about it.
Meanwhile, for a bit of news:
Simeon is reading, having cycled for about an hour. He's reading, 'Confessions of an Opium Eater.' I don't know where he gets these books, probably from that mysterious friend of his, Niemand Keiner. Also, it seems I've really got a job now, or two even, both teaching English, one via Skype, and the other in a school in Jülich, which was 97% destroyed in the War some 69 years ago.
It had taken a very long time for Jülich to come into existence, if you consider the time from that ape-like ancestor of ours, australopithecus-- ah, I see I have caught Simeon's attention now-- if you consider the time, I say, from that ape-like ancestor to the time of the city's foundation as Juliacum in Roman times, some 4 million years later. Then it was gone in a flash-- reduced to rubble with a city's name-- after a bit of saturation bombing in 1944. Then it sprouted up again rather quickly, but its rebuilding was not done in the 20 years after the war, no, it was done before it was even destroyed, as it is the collective knowledge of civilization that makes a city, or reduces it to rubble in a few saturation bombing raids, or rebuilds it. This computer, that bowl of oatmeal, the city of Jülich, all so taken for granted.
We are all just little points of expertise at the end of a very long line of those who made us the experts.
We're like an offensive end on a football team, called in to replace the man who's been injured. There are 3 seconds on the clock. We're playing in this game for the first time, after having sat on the sidelines sipping Gatorade for a few hours. Our team has battled 80 yards to get to the goal line. They've been battling for hours. They're exhausted, bruised, dirty, sweaty, bleeding, and here we come, this guy with a clean uniform, our body still smelling like last night's Uomo, trotting on to the field and into the huddle. The play is called. The linemen battle against the defense once more, blocking, grunting, clearing the way. The new man-- that is, us-- we see the ball float off the hands of the quarterback and right into our own. We make one step and we've crossed the goal line for a touchdown. We congratulate ourselves on our wonderful accomplishment. Instant oatmeal.
