Too Many F#(%!+& Apples
Just as we discussed shortage as a driving force of creativity, abundance has a way of making people innovative, too. And, also as discussed before, my motivation for writing this cookbook was to point out that we, those of us who are lucky enough to have been born privileged, are weirdly in awe of most foods that are considered peasantry in much of the world (especially in Italy - see section on Pizza). The historical scarcity and difficulty of growing or raising our food made stretching meats, fish, and vegetables with the miracle of starches caused the explosion of humankind. Fruit is kind of an oddball exception from the perspective of scarcity. Fruits generally grow in wild abundance on a single plant but their delicacy and far faster tendency to spoil makes. In order to preserve fruits we tend to add tons of sugar to them and store them in jars - once again, a processing procedure that adds a MASSIVE amount of calories and seems wildly inefficient and unnecessary in today