Jack Preston King
Jul 20, 2017 · 2 min read

writing is a prerequisite to both recipes and science

Not simply to be oppositional, because that’s not my goal, but actually no, I wouldn’t agree that writing is a prerequisite to recipes. Because cooking, and the passing down of methods of cooking (how close to the fire the meat should be, how long to leave it there, what plants to rub on it to make it taste good) I would think goes back waaay before the invention of writing. What about societies that passed down history for thousands of years before they got around to writing any of it down… I recently heard a priest tell this story: the oldest (or one of the oldest, anyway) written records in the world dates from around 4,000 BC, and it’s — wait for it — a recipe! For brewing beer. So, first off, they had to know how to do that, make beer (cooking) what ingredients to include and what steps to take (the recipe), before they wrote it down. So the recipe pre-existed the writing of it. There’s another layer to the story, though (remember, it’s a priest telling it, so there’s bound to be a religious angle). OK, The Pentateuch (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Deuteronomy, and Numbers, the first 5 books of the Old Testament), were written down for the first time around 1500 BC. But they record history that goes back to the beginning of time, and concretely for thousands of years before 1500 BC. The point being that the history was remembered and passed down orally for thousands of years before it was written down. The Pentateuch has lots of recipes in it. Not just for food, but for rituals, medicines (not very good ones, but…), law, all kinds of things that managed to exist and develop just fine without writing.

Science may depend on writing, I don’t know. If it does, that’s a problem for your ravens, I think.

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    Jack Preston King

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