POETRY
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Consider all the Foods - Weebly.com
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Strange Food
by Thomas O. Davenport
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Let’s hear it for our ancestors, those early sapiens
Whose courage in food exploration pays us dividends Providing us with gourmet goodies we share with our friends At tony lunches let’s remember early human folk Who gifted us a vegetable both spiny and baroque That chewy, fibrous thistle that we call the artichoke We must give recognition and unstinting words of praise It cannot have been easy back in prehistoric days To gnaw through such a spiky thing without some mayonnaise And what about the first one who risked sickness, death and doom While foraging for fungi deep within the forest gloom And said “I’ll pass” to toadstools but “Let’s try some” to mushrooms Our maple syrup we adore for breakfast consecration We slurp that sweet extract in pints with little hesitation But who first licked the sap from bark and risked a tongue abrasion? Let‘s not forget the courage our progenitors displayed To find the hives and dodge the bees within the sylvan glade Without our honey we’d be stuck with plain old marmalade The lowly spud first excavated by the ancient tribes Has added many recipes to our cookbook archives And given us that pleasing phrase, “Would you like that with fries?” So take a pause when you next stroll around your garden bower Consider all the foods our forebears gave us to devour Without their contributions, spanning tastes from sweet to sour Our most exciting vegetable just might be cauliflower |
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