WE are not created equally weird.
If you have a social media account (and family!), you know this already. There are some very perplexing beliefs, activities, interests, statements and philosophies out there.
But some things are utterly bewildering.
Take, for instance, the once highly fashionable health fad of colonic irrigation (is this still a thing?). Imagine waking up and thinking about your day of work ahead and it’s “oh, goodie, I have five colonic irrigations booked”. No, man. That would be enough to send most workers diving back under the duvet.
Who dreamed up this process? What even made that person think about it?
Some others that baffle: who picked up the first civet pooh and decided to make coffee from it? Why? What did they do with that first pooh: chew on it? Civets, by all accounts, are very smelly. Civet coffee is beyond me - in understanding and price. It’s apparently extremely costly. How many scoops of pooh do you need to get a teaspoon of coffee? Who has the delightful job of going to collect the raw product? Are they paid per pile? And who scrapes the pooh from the pip to get at the product? Weird.
There are other stinky, horrid animal products used in the perfume world: ambergris (from sperm whale pooh); musk (deer); castoreum (for which beavers have to be killed); hyraceum (from rock hyrax pooh). Go figure.
And why would anyone want to make coffee out of elephant dung? That at least smells less repugnant, and makes aromatic fires, according to guides on some wildlife shows. If we could perhaps persuade people to believe elephant pooh was a miracle cure for all ailments and a trophy of note, we could save some of these precious pachyderms from poaching. Let’s add rhino dung to the list.
Who opened the first oyster and thought “ooooh yummy, I’m going to have a dozen of these”? Or snails? Or frogs’ legs? These menu items are slimy and squishy and oozy. Garlic and butter for snails, and lemon and pepper for oysters, and whatever goes with frogs’ legs make them delicacies now. But what tempted that first person to put them in his mouth? Had to be a he; no woman would do such a gross thing intentionally.
Who ate the first woolly mammoth? Why would a gang of humans make sharp sticks to kill something very much bigger and that could potentially kill them that first time? Did they watch and learn from other carnivores that this thing was edible and, for some, tasted terrific?
Taste-testing plants is less of a mystery. Original humans presumably ate “greens”, so any leaves or berries would have been fair game (pun intended). Of course, they would have learned quickly that not all greens are created equal either, and would end up very sick or dead. Which, of course, in our human world of possibilities, soon led to offing the opposition with a nice poisonous brew. How many people died before they figured out which mushrooms or leaves were safe?
Questioning is vital in life, in our world, and helps us grow and keep learning. Weird wonderings like these could be why the first civet pooh was chewed. Just goes to show, curiosity should never be pooh-poohed.
- Lindsay Slogrove is the news editor.
The Independent on Saturday