I remembered some more memories...

Do you think food may have harmed us before it helped us?

A while ago my parents, during my childhood, asked me what I think the first food we ate was. I said it may have been eggs, after asking if there's hot water available on the earth elsewhere besides our stove. They told me about a hot springs afterwards. I asked if we could visit and spoke with a bulgarian person whom said to leave the egg at the hottest part of the spring... I replied that something bad might happen if we did that and he just said "How? It's in water?" so I took his advice and... the bad thing happened.

Anyway I think I know what happened with the egg. When you eat a lot of something you start to resemble it... aside from that, we learned that eggs have cholesterol which lead to heart problems. The reason we cooked the egg originally... I think was because we decided to see where chickens go. We couldn't tame them at first, so we took one of their eggs, and tried to incubate it in the hot springs. Unfortunately... it cooked. The first time it was overcooked, but smelled greatly like an egg, so we did it again.

Originally before this experiment... my mother cooked an egg similar to the way it would be placed at the least hot part of the spring, and it tasted amazing, including the texture.

It got me thinking... we tried milk... our bones became brittle.

Fruit and vegetables... there is no way these two could be screwed up except for diseases among plants which rarely appear.

Later on we introduced eggs and milk in our diets but less often than before, mixed in with other things as well.

I thought some more, and my father disagreed with me but... how could, for example, the aztecs cook for an entire city?

They would need a lot of wood chopped to make fire in order to cook that much corn, so I came to the conclusion that they used a hot spring originally to cook food instead of bathing. This was its primary use... to feed people with maize.

The final part to this conversation was that maybe based on what happened with the egg in the hot springs, after a bulgarian person said to leave it where the fountain is... we only invented popcorn because the same thing happened while cooking the maize at the hottest part of the spring.

We brought a cob of corn... and tried heating it in the microwave as an experiment, to see if it would turn into popcorn, simulating what I thought the hot springs would do. For a short while... nothing happened while it was vertically placed... so I lowered my head. A few more seconds after... dad said "Mitko... raise your head." I saw the popcorn kernels flying around during this time, and realized how meaningful our discussion that day was. (This all happened in one day in Bulgaria, you see.) The corn was raw, and not even hardened or covered with butter or oil, and science topped off our discussion, as me being right, and my father being stubborn.

If my memory serves me correctly... at first... the corn didn't even heat up. So we put a shallow bowl of water with the corn in the center, vertically... the hot steam is what made the popcorn happen during cooking, similar to the way you'd find hot steam at an onsen/hot spring, which is exactly how the aztecs originally made popcorn.

That popcorn, because it landed in water... was mostly wet, so it was dried after.

P.S. The Bulgarian guy said how we could cook them even faster afterwards... by putting salt in the water. :O