THE FLAME ON

If you take a step back, cooking food seems a pretty random thing to come up with. I know there are benefits to cooking - killing bacteria, etc. - but even so, it just seems such an odd thing to think of in the first place, doesn't it?

Y'see, someone must have started with something edible (or, if they were Japanese, something exceptionally fatal to human beings) and then figured "I'll stick it in the fire for a while and see what that does." It's already edible, you're a caveman, why would you decide to cook it? Because it's going to keep you warm, perhaps? No, that doesn't make sense, you have a fire right there - the one you're using to cook the food with. To get any hotter, you're retiring to Florida... there are few other options left once you have the fire going.

No matter what way you look at it, it seems like it was your honest-to-gosh "moment of madness" that spawned the whole industry of cooking, without which we wouldn't have such great inventions as the oven (great!), the toaster (okay) and celebrity chefs (Eurgh! move on, people, nothing to see here).

The inevitable conclusion is cooking stuff was all down to inventing fire. Because fire's a seductive mistress, my friend, once you've got a fire burning you really have to fight to resist that primal urge to burn something just to see what happens. So, it seems to me that we eat cooked meals today because some distant ancestor was basically a pyromaniac who got lucky.

THE OBESITY CATHEDRAL

In today's Metro, collector doyen Dave Valentine tells us how he has amassed 500 empty crisp packets over the years, dating back all the way to his first packet in 1984. That means he's collected over 19 empty crisp packets a year - that's about one every three weeks! Quite a feat.

But alarm bells ring when Dave explains that "the designs are so retro and cool". Waitaminute! Designs from 1984 are "retro"? Aren't they just "old"? "Retro" would be something that is intentionally harking back to another era, not something actually from it.

See, this kind of misuse of terminology is helping no one, even the crisp guys find it tasteless.