Based on a sample size of one (me), every person on earth has the dream of going on a national talk show under the influence of powerful psychoactive substances. It’s the kind of thing we all yearn for, and celebrity chef Heston Blumenthal seems to have left us all in the dust.
Blumenthal appeared on The Project with the ostensible goal of promoting the announcement of the world’s 50 best restaurants, but instead used it as an opportunity to wax poetic on the nature of reality, human existence and the beautiful symphony that is evolution.
“What is it that makes a great restaurant?” asked Waleed Aly, an extremely simple question that invites an extremely simple, straightforward answer.
Blumenthal did not give one.
This might seem a little tangential. Human beings became the most powerful species on the planet because through being able to imagine things that don’t exist we created shared beliefs. So all the things that happened after humans: religion, money, language, cultures, social media, fairy tales, they are very human being. The reason that happened was the brain trebled in size for lots of reasons but primarily through eating cooked food. It broke the food down and our gut changed and this [touches head] is on top of our body to protect, because this [touches neck] is where the next generation are prepared for life.
And so the thing, we should be called omnivores or herbivores, we’re coctivores … we are interdependent beings.We’ve been able to work collectively in numbers larger than any other creature and our efficiency in group learning has become quicker, quicker, quicker, quicker. We don’t have to climb a mountain to get water every day, we don’t have to kill an animal to the death to feed our children.
Cue this look from the panel:
Waleed pointed out that while Blumenthal had just given a poetic and scientifically questionable explanation of why people like restaurants and eating generally, it didn’t have much to do with the 50 best ones specifically. Blumenthal took this as a cue to embark deeper on his psychonautical journey.
“We have two universes,” he said, a phrase which often precedes a reasonable, clear-headed analysis of the material conditions of reality:
We have our internal universe, our human being and we have our human doing. We have our feelings and our emotions and then we have getting on in life … The problem that’s happening is we are confusing the two things. We are thinking that our happiness is going to be developed by a numerical system … thank god we have because that’s what’s got us to where we’ve got to. There’s a palliative care nurse that wrote a piece in The Guardian last year, the most common things, regrets people had while they were passing away and it was they wished they lived a life true to themselves. If every human being had an ambition not to have that feeling, and that’s because our new brain that came from eating cooked food … starts to fade and then our raw emotion comes through and we realise, actually, this is about emotion. Food is about emotion.
Right on, dude. We are all this guy:
@theprojecttv are you guys handing out acid in the greenroom??
— CouldbeTedStroker (@noknees_oz) April 3, 2017
Source: The Project.
