What was the first story ever like? Impossible to say with certainty, but we can make some safe assumptions about the location and the topic: around a shared meal, about how our most pressing biological imperative was met that day. For all animals, food is both the reason to wake up every day (or night) and the fuel for all metabolic processes needed to live. Early on for humanity, food must have become the focus of conversations, anxieties, joys and, finally, our imagination.

Nature did not come with an instruction manual or cookbook: it was not always possible to anticipate what was safe to consume to maintain energy and health, nor which fruits, leaves, seeds and mushrooms were dangerous to eat. There was a time, of course, when every meal carried a great risk of death, owing to a still very incipient understanding of natural space. How to pass on to future generations the importance of processes already established to ensure the safety of everyone, such as plants that were nutritious and animals that did not pose danger? With songs and cults, with drawings and paintings, with games and rituals—and, inevitably, with the stories passed down to each new generation. These stories teach the young ones to understand the world according to the knowledge socially constructed and organized creatively. Eating habits, determinant for everyone’s survival, are part of this collective construction.

Satisfying hunger has always required efforts of the imagination: selecting the soil, shaping the clay, building the utensil to cut the meat, defining the route of the hunt, setting a trap, lighting the fire, delegating tasks. Creative thinking may thus have been a catalyst for our ability to explore the potentials of food, both to multiply and modify it and to turn it into art in the form of illustrations or stories and thus perpetuate our affective, and intimate, relationship with food.

Artistic expression even predates agriculture by a lot: more than twenty thousand years separate the archaeological evidence for these evolutionary landmarks in our species. For oral storytelling, of course, there are no fossils or mortal remains, but adaptations have remained. Stories replicating similar elements, such as Gilgamesh’s immortality fruit and the theft of fire by Prometheus, abound around the world, helping tellers and listeners work out anxieties that have undoubtedly accompanied humanity since our dawn—such as understanding that food holds both life and death, health and disease, survival and extinction. Through art and the reproduction of stories, our species has been gradually mapping its place in the world and its relationship with it—from the start, it seems, with food as the source of inspiration.

It is possible, then, to suggest a reading of our relationship with food as closely linked to the history of fiction and artistic creation—the attempt to reproduce that which does not yet exist in physical form. Cassava, for example, was privileged in the territory of present-day South America thanks to the versatility of its applications, as we can eat it boiled, fried, in pão de queijo, farofa, tucupi, sagu, boba tea, tapioca—no such list can be comprehensive. Corn, similarly, can take the shape of breads, cakes, tortillas, pamonha, tamales, curau, polenta, porridge, farofa, among many others. The first tool used to grow cassava and corn was imagination: the ability to see it before nature actually made it tangible. And each of these foods, of course, carry stories of families, cities, nations, times—they carry the teachings that have allowed the people of today to eat roots and grains tamed for the first time over fifteen thousand years ago.

It is not by chance that cassava and corn are both sacred for several Indigenous peoples: as the first humans of the continent travelled along the coast from the now submerged region of Beringia, they got to know and enhance these plants along the way. The history of the land is inextricably connected to the people’s relationship with the crops consumed. Groups around the world have found in their staple foods, besides energy needed to fuel the neurological development of the Homo sapiens (whose large and heavy brain uses up many carbohydrates), the source of inspiration for myths, cults and symbolic representations of gratitude and admiration.

Across various religions and beliefs, there are gods, saints, spirits, forces of nature representing the ability to get food from working the soil, hunting, fishing or domesticating animals—such as the story of Persephone, the daughter of Demeter kidnapped by Hades and trapped in the underworld for six months every year. This myth mirrors the cycles in agriculture and contextualizes the scarcity during the winter; it shows that there will be abundance again, if you grow food when Persephone is out. In our point of view, so far removed, it could seem that the myth of the queen of the underworld is a poor substitute for systematized knowledge of nature; however, as Michael Austin argues in Useful Fictions, the evolutionary advantage of storytelling is due not to the richness of factual details in communicating truth, but rather to the possibilities the narrative proposes to guarantee our survival. Among the examples, the author imagines a human being from tens of thousands of years ago who, upon hearing a noise in a bush, decides to flee, afraid of being found by predator. For the surviving group, who will later explain why they moved, it doesn’t matter whether there really was something dangerous behind the bush—the story will have to account for the ominous possibilities of noise, the woods, the consequences of fear and dispersion. And it will undoubtedly teach valuable lessons about the land where these humans built their lives.

Scientific knowledge is, in this sense, an ingredient of culinary and cultural stories, as is the case of the Mayan creation myth in which the first human beings were made from maize paste: in fact, maize became a staple since Indigenous peoples in Central America developed nixtamalization (a process that makes corn more nutritious), and naturally the people associated the food with the source of human life. Similarly, although the Persephone myth does not go into specifics of the stages of growing food, it helps to understand the laws of nature as non-negotiable. Food is what it is—part of a cycle of fertility and death—and this is essential knowledge to peacefully exist in the natural space.

Thus, we can imagine that storytelling came about as a result of the human experience of producing our own food, either through the cooperation needed to feed everyone, whether during the act of sharing a meal together and wanting to complement the event with conversation. There must have been talks between the group that mastered local plants and cooked the ingredients to make them more flavourful and nutritionally dense; there must have been excited conversations between the people who walked back home with fresh game. The stories that came out of these encounters with food perpetuate recipes and cooking methods, too. Ancient agricultural techniques practiced by Indigenous nations around the world have been passed on orally for thousands of years. Similarly, items like cheese, tofu, extra virgin olive oil, palm oil, and fermented beverages have survived across millennia, and these complex chemical processes are passed down generation to generation, as part of family traditions.

The ability to modify food survives in our species thanks to the same creative machinery in our brain that allows us to play, invent, and build. Creative thinking allowed solving problems such as low durability, risk of food poisoning, and bad taste through the formulation and testing of hypotheses, such as placing the hunted animal on fire until its meat changed colour and texture and combining different herbs to flavour the food, in addition to keeping it edible for longer. Molding clay into the shape of a bowl allowed to cook a mixture of different ingredients at the same time, saving critical resources. Large bowls used for millennia to boil water suggest the timely invention of soup, the original one-pot dish that can feed a whole family at once. With the need to store and contain grains and dried fruits, the containers take on new forms: jars with lids, plates, and cups. Soon, they were all be decorated to indicate their content or use—the birth of design—and, perhaps above all, for pleasure. The containers express on the outside the fact that they carry the most beautiful thing we own on their inside: something that can stop hunger. Simple as that: food.

Around food, throughout our history on Earth, we have developed both science and music, singing, literature, religion, philosophy and architecture. In fact, cooking shares a certain contempt for pure utilitarianism with art. The distance between ingredients and a meal is the act of rearranging food with attention and affection. The pleasure and affects provoked by the act of eating make up our frame of reference early in life and inevitably influence our tastes, desires, dreams. A trip to another country necessarily involves a tour of local foods. All our main celebrations assume typical dishes, sometimes the same for impressive stretches of thousands of kilometers. All classic cuisines were born out of the act of members of each family coming together to produce food for everyone; all the scientific knowledge we currently have about production, handling and distribution of food is based on the lessons shared between nations and generations.

We are as much made up of corn as we are made up of the stories we tell about corn. The first story, I would have to guess, has got to have been about food.