A Simplistic Story of Food!

"One mans food is another mans poison"
Firstly it is quite fascinating how making food and more recently eating food have been elevated to the status of art. From eating whatever one finds to being extremely specific in what one eats, we humans have come a long way.
Humans ate whatever they could eat, then came the realization that a few foods were harmful and few were not. With evolution came the idea of preserving food, for the times when it would be difficult to find food. Thus came the usage of spices and other additions to the raw fruits, vegetables and meat. Probably then evolved the idea of taste.With the availability of different kinds of these fruits, vegetables, animals and spices evolved the food culture of a particular place.
With an entire spiritual wave where people looked for a bigger purpose in life, food had lost its prime position. There was also an austerity drive where food was reduced to essential and just that. Then with the growing affluence, the stature of food also grew. More and more people wanted to eat different kinds of food. Then grew the various economic activities around food. While it all began with being able to eat when not at home, it grew to creating different culinary experiences. Then on started the glorious period of food, when food making, food eating, food photography, food writing, food blogging, food research and all such new disciplines evolved.
While some were obsessing about food,  hegemony of food also started silently and it seemed to have started quite early in the journey of food. If we take the context of Hindu religion, while in the rig vedic times every one was happily eating everything, with the advent of religions like Buddhism and Jainism, Vegetarianism grew to its pinnacle. While the discrimination based on caste was always ingrained in the religion, it was legitimized citing the reason of food. All those who ate meat were branded as impure and those who didn't became superior. Also started the discrimination even in the different forms of meat, cow meat is holy, pig meat is dirty, fish eggs are exotic. With such tags automatically came the discrimination, one who eats exotic stuff has a high taste, one who doesn't is a person of low stature.
Then followed the health wave, where certain foods gained popularity as the tastier of the lot but would harm one's health. Almost all the foods in today's world are categorized as healthy and unhealthy, boring and interesting. Also most often than not, the healthy and boring, unhealthy and interesting fall in the same basket. Probably it is the obsession of the human psyche with the forbidden fruit, anything which is not supposed to e eaten is considered to be tastier.
On a tangential note, I often wonder why certain things are considered healthy and some not. While we all began at eating anything and everything we could see. Probably the difference lies in the activity, while a cave man would eat and run around enough to digest it, while we eat and end it at that. Probably a nutritionist is a better person to comment on this bit.
Now we are at this juncture where each one of us is a part to the conversations "Oh you should try this, it is out of the world"
"How can you not like this, I think there is something wrong with your taste"
"She eats nothing, I can't understand how"
"That restaurant serves the best in the town"
"My passion in life is food. I'm such a huge foodie. I can't understand how people do not like food"
"Well, people eat all kinds of crap"
We surely have come a long way.