I Believe I Can Fry

To hell with “paleo” fad-diet dogma! Except maybe as a participatory journalism stunt, why on the Great Glyptodont Spirit’s flat Earth would any modern human adopt the eating habits of our stone-age ancestors? For starters, it can’t be done. One presumes giant sloth meat was always pretty difficult to get, but it sure hasn’t gotten any more readily available in the intervening millennia.

Worse, our hominid forefolk of the Paleolithic didn’t know anything. Would you consent to a lifetime of paleo entertainments? (“Yeah, I hear Stranger Things is great, but we quit Netflix to spend more time telling each other uninformed stories about how the trees came to be.”) Would you see a specialist in paleo medicine? (“Sprained ankle, eh? Afraid it’s abandonment on a glacier for you, then.”)

Nah, man. From the clean water you drink to the comfy tight-woven textiles you wear to your dog who doesn’t want to devour you, modern science and culture have been steadily making things better for humans ever since the Paleolithic age rightfully ended 10,000ish years ago.

So we’re going the other way. We’re only eating super-futuristic foods of the sort that would have blown our Flintstonian forebears’ minds. We’re talking freeze-dried astronaut ice cream, those Israeli grapefruit-pomelo hybrids, bubble tea, and orange marshmallow circus peanuts.

Anything that needs cooking, we’re going to electrically air-fry, which is a super-modern oil-less (or reduced-oil) method for making anything from fries to wings at temps between 175 and 400°F. We pop foods into our GoWise Touch Screen Digital Air Fryer, and they come back out as marvels of modern food science! Operation couldn’t be easier: We can program the cooking time, or select from seven preëxisting programs for stuff like chips, chicken, shrimp, etc.

That’s how smart and sciencey this li’l contraption is. It has its own little digital brain. How would prehistoric man begin to understand that? He, who hadn’t even figured out what his own brain was? In fact, there’s no aspect of this thing a Homo erectus would find insufficiently wondrous to worship or flee from, right down to its synthetic petrochemical chassis. But to us it’s mundane enough to find cheap on a store called “Meh.”

So tell us again how much better those upright apes ate. OK with you if we munch some delicious air-fried frozen egg rolls while we listen? You probably never heard of them; they’re from the 20th century.