Ba-ba-ba Ba-barbecue

Ba-ba-ba Ba-barbecue Hats off once more to Ray Cannon, this time for guiding us into new technology that takes our diet straight back to the palæolithic. We can now grill flesh, fowl and vegetable right outside the kitchen door using the biggest Camping Gaz accessory I’ve ever seen. (It turns out the distinctive barbecue flavour arises from sauce, fat and juices burning on the fuel, not from the charcoal itself — or in the case of our gas appliance, the lava rocks. Did we know? Thanks, Ray.) Vorsprung durch Technik.

Eight to ten millennia back, humans invented agriculture and adapted to a diet in which grain played a large part. With storable food began the accumulation of capital and greater opportunities for domination between humans. But while peasants supped porridge and haggis, the tables of the mighty bore the meat, fish, fruit and vegetables of the palæolithic diet, as centuries of paintings remind us. The very rich, wrote Scott Fitzgerald, are not like us. No, and perhaps to them we grain eaters always looked like smart cattle. Or perhaps not so smart, at that.