A Semi-Hunter-Gatherer Breakfast

Hunter-Gatherers didn’t have cheese or sausage, but it’s good stuff. The picture was taken with my cell phone, so the color is a bit washed out.

Chef Bruce Aidell’s mango and jalapeno chicken-and-turkey sausage; cantaloupe; blueberries; blackberries; white Stilton cheese with apricot pieces. And hot coffee. Yum. Wow…I just learned how to spell cantaloupe. It’s not cantelope. The folks at Dictionary.com say:

1730–40; < F, allegedly after Cantaluppi, a papal estate near Rome where cultivation of this melon is said to have begun in Europe, though a comparable It word is not attested until much later than the F word, and Cantaloup, a village in Languedoc, has also been proposed as the source.  From cantaloupe. Dictionary.com. Dictionary.com Unabridged (v 1.1). Random House, Inc. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/cantaloupe (accessed: January 24, 2009).

Interesting. The amazing thing about this breakfast is what it shows about economics, capitalism and technology. (N.B. We have only partial elements and remnants of capitalism today; we do not have capitalism proper in the world — capitalism goes part and parcel with property rights which go part and parcel with natural, individual human rights…which are routinely violated today, not respected and protected.) The sausage is, I think, from the US. Chef Aidell’s company is located in California, anyway. The white Stilton cheese came from England. The cantaloupe came from Honduras. The blueberries came from Chile. The blackberries came from Mexico. I don’t know where the coffee came from. Not to mention the plate on which I ate, the plastic containers and labeling for the cantaloupe, blackberries and blueberries, the packaging for the sausage, the pan I cooked the sausage in, the coffee pot, the coffee machine, my coffee mug, the stove top, the electricity, the wood and metal and glass for home… The magnitude of the production process — its scope in time and geography — is mind-boggling. It would take all day and more to trace the production process back in time to its beginnings and to include all of it. Actually, no one person probably has the time to do all that. We’d have to sketch out the process. But we don’t need to trace out every item in the production process to its first root. We can use induction. Thank goodness for the validity of induction, for the fact that we can validly generalize from some things to all things…as long as our reasoning process follows the rules and canons of induction. But a suggestion of a hint of a sketch backwards of part of the production process involved in my breakfast would be like this: 1.  I had to buy the blackberries at HEB. I had to work to earn the money to buy them, drive to the store to buy them, drive home to store them in my refrigerator. And how did my knowledge for work; my communication/advertising with people to get clients; my truck; my refrigerator; my bank get here? We’d have to trace back each of those things in the production process. 2.  HEB had to get the blackberries. They had to order them, have them delivered; they had to have their store built; they had to have refrigeration and electricity to pay for the refrigeration; they had to have employees which they had to plan for and hire. How did each of these things get there? What production process and thought process was responsible for them? 3.  The blackberries had to get from a farm to the HEB store. So the berries were grown on a farm, packaged, sent somewhere where they could then be sent to a shipping company. The berries would then need to be trucked by land or shipped by sea to the US. They go to some company that then sends the berries to a distribution center which then trucks the berries to my local HEB. Then we wonder. Farm. Soil. Manure. Seeds. Water. Knowledge of agriculture. Workers. Machinery. Ships. Trucks. Buildings. How did each of these things get there? What production process and thought process was responsible for them? Wow…mind-boggling…