by Carol Deppe, author of The Resilient Gardener: Food
Production and Self-Reliance in Uncertain Times Why is it that
when you are the person who prepares the Thanksgiving feast, it
doesn’t taste nearly as good as when someone else prepares
exactly the same thing? Whenever I spend all day preparing food,
I am just not very hungry when dinner comes, even if I have
eaten nothing all day. Then there are those times I find myself
heading into the kitchen with a strong drive for…well…nothing in
particular. And I’m not even hungry. I just want to prepare some
food. That’s all. I want to mess with food. And that can lead to
an extra unneeded meal. We humans do more and more complex food
manipulation and preparation than any other creature. I
speculate that the drive to play with our food — to handle,
shell, peel, pound, grind, cut, cook, and carry food — is now
built into our genes. A couple of decades ago, it would have
been thought that there has not been enough time since we began
complex manipulation of food for