Human life still relies on the basic elements it always has
IHAD eggs on toast for lunch. Eggs on toast is for the ages. Eggs on toast is us. Let’s start with the toast.
Toast is bread and bread is the base point of food. It’s the stuff of life, the staff of life. It’s the withoutwhichnothing. It’s biblical and then some. Give us this day our daily bread.
And what is bread? It’s the seeds of grasses ground into flour and baked. That’s all. We evolved on the plains of Africa where the herbivores still live on grass.
But such herbivorousness takes daylong cropping and grass is hard on the digestion. Our master stroke was to go for the seeds. Seeds are the compressed, embryonic form of grass. They’re readily digested.
They’re rich with energy.
They can be stored. Eat seeds and it frees up time for other stuff.
What else is in bread?
Nothing much. The French have decreed that by law a baguette must contain only flour and water, salt and yeast. And in many parts of the world they don’t even bother with yeast. In essence bread is just flour and water. Our diet is the grass of the prairie and the stream that runs through it, just as it always was, just as the antelope’s is.
So we remain as contingent as the antelope. Like them we depend completely on natural processes. Every year we need the seed to germinate in the earth, the grass to grow up into the air, the sun to shine and more seed to ripen if we are to make bread. If the weather falters and the harvest fails, we fail as well. Just one small war in the wheatgrowing land of Ukraine and already there are whispers of famine. We vaguely imagine we’re beyond all that, that our technology insulates us from actuality, but you can’t eat an iPhone.
I toasted my bread in a toaster but I could have got the same effect by opening the door of the log burner. To make my toast, then, I have needed earth, air, fire and water, the four elements of the ancient world, and still of our own.
On the toast, butter. An abundance of butter. A butter slather. Butter is another herbivore bested. A cow crops the grass to make milk for its offspring but we are evolutionarily close enough to the cow to enjoy its milk every bit as much as the calf would. So we steal it. Stealing milk is New Zealand’s biggest industry. And because milk goes off fast we have developed ways of preserving it, and one of those ways is extracting the fat and churning it, and adding a little salt — how vital salt has proved — and making butter. Butter is animal fat, which is derived from grass, which as before is derived from earth and air and water and will return to earth and air and water and thence to grass again. Nothing much changes. We’re all ‘‘rolled round in Earth’s diurnal course with rocks and stones and trees’’ like dear dead Dorothy Wordsworth.
Atop the toast and butter, eggs. Eggs are the seeds of birds. Like seeds they’re densely nutritious. Unlike birds they’re easy to catch and you don’t have to pluck them. No wonder we eat them.
The chook that laid the eggs belongs to the most populous species of bird on the planet by a factor of hundreds. And it’s due to our taste for its eggs and its meat. The chook would turn the tables if it could — chooks are omnivorous, and cheerfully cannibal — but it lacks the wit.
All life forms subsist by ingesting other life forms, alive, or dead, or embryonic. It seems pointless to distinguish between animal and vegetable. Matter is neither created nor destroyed.
But what a piece of work is man. To arrive at eggs on toast he has hijacked the reproductive processes of a grass, a beast and a bird. He’s taken seed from one, milk from the second and eggs from the third.
And with the bread toasted to a crispness, drenched in the melted fat, and topped with a pair of eggs — the white congealed by the heat of the pan with a hint of crunch to its under edge, but the yolk still nutrient runny to meld with the butter and toast, and everything sprinkled with salt, of course, and a screw of exotic pepper — well, life is good.
And contingent. Just as it’s always been.
Joe Bennett is a Lyttelton writer.
Eggs are the seeds of birds. Like seeds they’re densely nutritious.