Doesn't the History of Our Favorite Foods Prove We Live Upon A Young Earth?
Food is a joy...we can't help ourselves. We like our foods, especially our favorite foods, so much! We are probably better off eating more for health and strength, but we love our scrumptious, decadent, rich, delicious foods. Of course, we also like the foods that are great fillers and easy to grow and passably tasty, especially if they store well.
All around the planet we enjoy finding out what the 'foreigners' are eating, as well. We love trying new foods, and tasty exotic ethnic dishes. Here in the United States we enjoy Mexican food, Chinese food, Indian food etc. The list is long. But...is this appreciation for delicious foods and foods from distant lands some sort of new trait in humanity? If the Earth is at all old, then it almost has to be some new development in our human thinking to want to try new foods. Otherwise, why would all of the delicious foods from foreign lands not have already been distributed among the Earth's peoples for many tens of thousands of years?
Chocolate is loved around the world. Why was chocolate not already being trafficked on every inhabited continent from ages immemorial? Yet once Europe discovered cocoa in the New World it was all the rage and spread quickly. Other parts of the world felt the same way about chocolate. Chocolate is at least somewhat popular all over the planet. There has always been good money to be made in selling people delicious foods. And doesn't every country have food markets, and traders, and bartering systems? So how could something so universally appreciated as delicious, rich chocolate stay essentially hidden from entire continents for so long? It defies explanation. Yet didn't the Spanish introduce chocolate to Europe only as recently as the 1500's. Even if some people group possessing some mostly unknown gourmet food happened to be the enemy of all the peoples around them, there is still the spoils of war to consider. The conquerors would have come into possession of the farm crops or seeds of their enemy for use in their own farming. They would have had opportunities to try and enemy culture's foods through a multitude of possible avenues.
How about peanuts? Peanuts store well, travel well, and taste OK. They are not so hard to grow. You can use them as food for man or beast. Pigs love them, for instance. You can eat peanuts in a variety of ways. Why weren't they traded from tribe to tribe and nation to nation for 50,000 years at the least?
What about maize or corn? People all over the world eat it now. Why haven't people from all over the world been eating it for many hundreds of centuries. You don't have to ship the corn. You can ship the dried seeds. They ship just fine.
Pumpkins and squash became very popular in Europe in a very short time. When would they ever not have been received with appreciation by a new people coming into contact with them? They are tasty and useful foods! They are easy to grow and profuse providers of calories. People in every continent should have been trying to pawn off their extra zucchini to neighbors since the most ancient of ages. Zucchini provides an embarrassment of riches. And...once again...their seeds travel well.
Why would all of the best cooking oils not have been shipped everywhere? Why were there not olive groves planted on every continent? It is a superior product with many benefits, and it ships well. But the other oils should have been widely available also because people all over the world appreciate variety in their cuisine.
Coffee and tea are two beverages that are widely embraced. They have their fans world-wide as we all know. Both of them store well and travel easily, as well. Yet...both have extended their geographical range of usage dramatically since only 1,000 years ago. How can enervating drinks with such wide appeal not have found their way from culture to culture a hundred centuries ago if the world is old. Yet they apparently did not. Examined seriously, this question casts serious doubt upon the idea of an ancient Earth, or at least upon humanity being ancient. We've had fire for a long time, we've had cups and heatable pots for a long time. We've had sacks and purses and other container types like baskets with which to transport such things as coffee and tea for a long time. Why haven't nearly all cultures been exposed to tea and coffee for dozens of thousands of years? Or if the ancients were exposed to coffee and tea and it just didn't catch on, then why is it so widely enjoyed today if it wasn't back then in the very ancient times of human existence, in this dreamed up 500,000 year old humanity? Couldn't they see that it was a pick-me-up as well as social pleasure to enjoy together?
African foods such as okra, watermelon and black eyed peas are pretty widely eaten and enjoyed. You don't even have to get on a ship to go from today's nation of South Africa to Egypt, the Middle East, the Arab nations, Russia, China, India, South East Asia, Mongolia, Europe, and...well, the list is long. All of those areas should have already known about the respective delicious foods growing in distant lands for 50,000 years. But for some reason they apparently didn't. They have been 'discovering' each other's new, exotic, and delicious foods and spices even during the last 6 centuries. Yet we are supposed to be this ancient planet, this ancient species? What changed that we should get excited about new foods in modern times, yet somehow did not in ancient times? Of course people have always been curious about new foods! Of course there have always been traders and explorers and travelers and conquerors and medicine men and medicine women that would have encountered new foods and plants and animals and said to themselves,"You know what, I think the folks back home would love to try this new food or medicine I have found."
What about the 'Devil's Weed'...tobacco? It wasn't quite as addictive centuries ago as it is now. We have purposely made it more habit forming without a doubt. But simple tobacco has always contained nicotine, it was habit forming. And it transports pretty easily. It was in recent centuries considered an excellent trading good to barter with. And traders always did understand that if you got a group of people hooked on something then you have created a market for yourself; selling customers substances that they are actually addicted to can be quite lucrative to a traveling merchant. How come tobacco use swept the world so much in recent centuries? Why was it not creating addicted smokers from one land to another for so long that every land knew of its existence, and already used it...if the world is so very, very ancient, that is to say? They had fire to light up with, right? They had containers to transport it with, right? They must have had addictive personality types back then like we do today, right? So how did tobacco not and tobacco use not make its way to everywhere if it had hundreds of thousands of years to do so? I think that either the hundreds of thousands of years must have never existed, or the people must have not existed during most of that time, or the people were of a different mind concerning their enjoyments for hundreds of thousands of years, or the tobacco was weak and its use was unpleasing. But what I really believe is that the Earth is young and so is tobacco and so is mankind.
Farmers also are always looking for a new crop, and improved crop yield, a hybrid crop or stock animal with an improvement or advantage. Wouldn't that always have been true? So that is another driving force for the distribution of advantageous or higher production plant and animal species. Farmers want to make more money off of their land. They try new things from time to time. Think about it: trade routes are known about, have existed, even in the earliest known civilizations, yet many wonderful trade goods, especially foods, have been appropriated by cultures throughout the world even in more modern times. Many of today's great roads or railways are laid on top of ancient trade routes. There would have been commodities commerce of various types from the earliest days of human existence. Trade and sharing of or stealing of or appropriation of knowledge about foods and weapons and tools and basically all other things...including food. Especially food. Tasty new plants and tasty new animals. We love our foods. Sorry PETA member readers, but you know that it is true!
And finally (concerning particular foods) consider John Mantagu, the 4th Earl of Sandwich, which was a peerage title for a minor nobleman, and Sandwich was an area in Kent, in England. In 1762 he became the credited inventor of the sandwich when he wanted to eat roast beef but was at a card table which he did not wish to leave and so he thought that placing the roast beef between slices of bread would keep his fingers from getting greasy. Please take note of that year. The sandwich was first noted as a food item in 1762? It was so unique and relatively unprecedented that it took on his name even unto our day? Almost every culture ate bread. Almost every culture ate things besides bread. Yet the sandwich was not invented until 1762...at least in England? How could no one have thought of wrapping meat in bread until 1762 A.D. if modern humans are a 300,000 or 600,000 year old species? This is not the building of the first internal combustion engine we're talking about. It is wrapping the commonly eaten item called meat in the commonly eaten item called bread. And consider this: every since the sandwich was 'invented' in 1762 its use has spread like wild fire. Somehow it appears that it really was a 'discovery' of sorts, rapidly adopted in many quarters of the world. I cannot see how, in even a 6,000 year old world, it would take about 5,760 years to have the insight of combining those two food types...but one thing that's for sure is that it becomes a whole lot more bizarre of a delayed emergence if we pretend that people had 300,000 years to decide to give it a try. Even the sandwich alone, all by its little bitty self, nearly debunks the idea of an ancient Earth.
The Earth is about 24,901 miles (40,074 Kilometers) in circumference at the equator. And most of that circumferal distance is ocean, not land. The Bible puts the age of the Earth at 6,000 years, or 60 centuries. If food sellers or food merchants or traders traveled at 415 miles (668 kilometers) per century on the average you would travel that 24,901 miles (40,074 Kilometers) in those 60 centuries. You would only have to advance awareness and possession of a delicious or useful new food 415 miles PER CENTURY, for goodness sake. We're not asking for miracles here! That's only 4.15 miles (6.7 Kilomegtrrs) per year! After all, you could leave your house and stroll that far, you could stroll those 4.15 miles (6.7 Kilometers) in 1.5 hours on the first day of the year and still be back home in time for lunch. That leaves you 364 days where you can just loaf around while the new seeds that were planted grow and become ready for harvest. Or do you want to break that 4.15 miles up and do a little bit of it every day for 365 days each year? Then you only have to make 60 feet (18.3 meters) of progress each day! Only 60 feet or 18.3 meters a day!! That is 20 human steps a day! In other words, a delicious new food ought to be able to make its way around the entire world in 6,000 years with no real problem, because for one thing we just talked about how far and how long it would take if the food only traveled from from let's say East to West. And when you come to an ocean, the food would make thousands of miles of progress in one hop, wouldn't it, whenever a ship ever did take it across the ocean? What if some other traders were taking it from its point of origin around the world in the West to East direction at the same time you were transporting it from East to West? Half the time, right? Or it could travel half the average distance each day and still take the same amount of time. The point is that 6,000 years almost seems like more time than you would expect for a widely embraced and delicious new food to make the rounds on our planet. So if modern humans are a 600,000 year old species, or even a 200,000 year old species then it is patently ridiculous that almost all of the world's great foods, even if perhaps in their more primitive and less optimized forms, should have taken that long to spread over the globe such that it is only in the last 6 centuries that many of them have made their way to our well inhabited continents (with their respective eager Foodies groups!)
The idea of a young Earth (such as the 6,000 years age that the Bible would have it be) fairly easily explains the rate at which new delicious or important foods have reached the various distant shores of this world. But believing in the idea of an ancient Earth presents problem after problem, one unlikelihood after another, in this and so many other ways. I honestly feel certain that we will one day find that there is a great fundamental error in the assumptions underlying the science of Carbon-14 dating, and radio isometric dating. There are just far too many problems with various common sense facets of imagining we inhabit an ancient Earth and that we anatomically modern humans are around half a million years old as a life form. There are not just a few puzzling problems with our being an ancient Earth...there are a great multitude of them.