Children of Ramen.

Have you ever thought about soup? It's fairly common to all cultures, it's tasty, and it's one of the most efficient ways to cook, since none of the nutrients that seep into the water get thrown away. Not only that, it's communal. If you divide a chicken eight ways, somebody's going to get a cut they don't like, or one person will pull at a drumstick, and tear off half the bird. Eight bowls of soup, though, are roughly identical. (Note to self: investigate ascendency of wontons in correlation with the development Chinese hierarchies.)

So who invented it? Once you've learned how to cook things in fire, at what point do you decide to suspend a pot of water above it? For that matter, early water supplies would be wells or rivers, and the chance of someone tossing in a few potatoes to make river water taste better seems slim. Tossing a cow down the well? An important discovery, but it's not soup.


Perhaps it was from sauces. Start with a simple mash of berries that you're intending to slather on the pig. Not enough berries? Try adding some water to thin it out... but that still seems like a bit of a stretch. Besides, if you're mixing sauces for your roast pig but still haven't progressed beyond campfire cooking, you might have skipped a few branches on your tech tree.

I think a more likely answer is that the original liquid in soup must not have been water. It was probably some other liquid that had to be contained separately, like milk. Then, the milk goes bad, and you throw in a few herbs to make it taste better. After that, it's only a matter of time before someone warms it up on the fire, and from there, simple curiousity can lead to adding a few tubers. Voila -- soup's on!

...

Sorry, but I've been spending the long weekend sick in bed, rustling through my shelves for as many liquid dinners as I can find. I haven't really had all that much else to entertain my stream of consciousness, and so, I concentrate on the cultural impact of soup.

Healthier posts to come later this week.

I hear the library's really nice.

Today, I sat in a conference room in an old City Hall with a group of civil servants, as a former prison warden explained the structure of Assistant Deputy Ministers, the Privy Council, and Cabinet Committees.

If I hadn't already said I was in Ottawa, you might have guessed.

It was an informational day, although it was particulary depressing moment when we were asked to put together a presentation describing our department's products, services, and programs. Apparently, that portion of the class was what they called "The Culture of the Public Service." What? Products and services are "culture"? You know, if they'd just asked me to describe the culture of the DRDC, I would have gladly obliged.

Afterwards, they'd scheduled an evening tour of Parliament -- to make up for the one that got cancelled tomorrow morning -- and after getting off the tour bus and going through security, the organisers were still nowhere to be seen. That being the case, the security guard told us we could go spectate in the House of Commons instead... and when we came out, the entire security department was apparently out covering a Christmas Party somewhere. Random groups of civil servants ran through the halls of the senator's offices. Some looked for an escape, others tried to see how far they could get before someone stopped them. I was in the latter group, but after I actually passed a senator in the hallway and said hello, I figured the challenge just wasn't there.

An odd evening, to be sure. But the oddest thing by far happened during the lunch hour. As we all filed into the catering service, some music was piped through the speakers. They'd obviously been asked to provide Canadian music, so what we heard was Sam Roberts' "The Canadian Dream."

Have you ever heard those lyrics? Here's the excerpt which they should have noticed:

"S-O-C-I-A-L-I-S-M is here to stay,
S-O-C-I-A-L-I-S-M is the only way."

Stephen Harper's Canada isn't what it used to be.