For one reason or another, I don’t recall it being thirst or hunger, with calm collection I set to wonder at the categories of food and drink humanity has yet to discover. It may seem that the point of view implicit in such a statement is neglectfully dismissive of the plethora and variety of consumables available in a typical supermarket, or the countless recipes which together enable cookbooks to command enough market share that they are accustomed to receiving dedicated space in a bookstore, but rather than recant, I’ll simply emphasize that I’m concerned only with broad categories, and of these I find we have surprisingly few.
Far short of being familiar with all the cultures of the world, I can only claim knowledge of the cuisine of my own, nor am I a history buff learned in the categories of food and drink that were but are no more, and I’ll grant that, as a consequence, my list of discovered categories will not be without erroneous omission. Still, when one considers how long our species has existed and how fundamental to our existence is frequent ingestion, I think most will find the list brief, even allowing for its being not entirely complete.
Note that anything eaten or drunk in or near its natural state isn’t considered here, since the only categories of interest are those which involve significant manipulation of their ingredients. I neglect, for instance, salad, soup, rice, ground beef, juice, milk, honey, etc. What is deemed significant manipulation is clearly a subjective determination, and though I don’t claim the proposed list to be definitive, I do think that deviations from it by others would be minor enough to reinforce, rather than undermine, the conclusion.
To begin, consider drinks. We have coffee, beer, wine, liquor, soda. Incidentally, it speaks to our affinity for experiencing altered states of consciousness that 3/5 of the drink categories contain alcohol, and as for the remaining 2/5, caffeine’s decommissioning of adenosine A1 receptors has measurable influence on one’s frame of mind.
Of food, there is cheese, yogurt, chocolate, cereal, complex preparations of sugar (candy), and dough.
When presented as above, two dominant approaches emerge as being responsible for nearly all the categories, and their history of accomplishment in this arena strongly supports the notion that they will be somehow involved in the future realization of new categories. These two approaches are the inveterate enlistment of microorganisms (yeast, bacteria) and the modern, highly technical development of food additives having novel properties.
The lamentation of there being so few categories culminates with the concession that an amelioration of the circumstance is not something that people are likely to affect through purposeful effort–simply consider how many of these categories were discovered by accident. And yet, I expect we’ve already picked the low hanging fruit of accident-based discoveries, so experimentation would seem the only option.