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Categories - Copywriting - Shopping - Free Online Business Help - Telecommunications Services Category: Food Besides sleeping, drinking fluids, and breathing, eating is the only pastime that every living creature shares. People have taken this necessity to new heights of pleasure and entertainment, not to mention the multi-billion dollar worldwide industry that helps you prepare your food the way you want it or cooks it for you. Shortly after mankind arrived on the planet, he was no longer happy with just finding a handful of berries that could be munched on. Food, or the lack thereof, has caused it's share of problems. There have been many famines like the one going on now in Ethiopia. The potato crop failure in Ireland, with British assistance, resulted in the Irish population being reduced from 8.5 million in the few short years between 1845 and 1853. An estimated 30 million Chinese died, with government assistance, during the Great Leap rice famine between 1958 and 1972. From geological evidence, it seems that some of our favorites, eggs, shellfish and fish have been enjoyed by humans since they appeared on the planet. Collections of empty shells and chewed on bones have been found as old as 200,000 years with the waste following the rising sea as the ice caps melted. It wasn't until about 20,000 years ago that nuts began to show up with agriculture beginning to take hold about 12,000 years ago. No one is sure when humans actually began to use fire to cook, but it is believed that cooked meat was first enjoyed by accident as a result of forest fires. From those humble beginnings, humans have developed a $3.2 trillion annual worldwide industry. People in the U.S. spend $1 trillion of that per year. Interestingly, this roughly correlates to our energy usage with 4% of the world's population using 28% of the world's oil supply. Knowing this, its easy to understand how the weight loss industry grew to be $35 billion per year in the U.S. As a result, it's hard to imagine a cuisine that is not available in the United States given the diversity of the population. You would have to visit a remote tribe in the Amazon or a remote village in the mountains in order to taste something that was not available here. Even then, it would most likely be a variation of something that you have already eaten. The other thing that you can surmise from the amount of food consumed in the U.S. is that, Americans love their food. If you have to do something, you might as well enjoy it.
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