On the impracticality of roast mammoth

Blogger Waldo Jaquith has a popular blog post On the impracticality of a cheeseburger (h/t JD), detailing his thought experiment in attempting to make a cheeseburger from scratch, as in really from scratch--grow your own tomatoes, wheat for the buns, homemade cheese, home-ground beef, etc. His point is that the cheeseburger is so impractical as to be almost impossible except in a post-agrarian society.

The immediate question is, of course, what a simple alternative would entail. One answer would seem to be big game. If the cheeseburger with its multiple types of vegetable, meat, and grain ingredients, all viable at different times of year, is a complex food, then killing and roasting a mammoth (no BBQ sauce) must be much simpler. Let's examine that proposition in more detail.

We will use as our model this historical recreation from Dinosaur Collector:

As you can clearly see, the two fundamental items we will need are weapons and a mammoth.

First, obtain weapons for hunting. Obtaining weapons will require the following resources, skills, and regressions:

• get stones (Hint: "Garden centers can stock many varieties of granites and/or basalts.")


• get wood


• make spear
  
  • form spearhead from stones
    
    • learn folk wisdom of knapping from tribe

Second, obtain a mammoth:

• Track mammoth
  
  • Engineer mammoths
    
    • Hire Japanese and Russians
      
      • Uncover frozen DNA
        
        • Create climate change
          
          • Invent post-agrarian society

So, although it seems at first that roast mammoth is an alternative to the cheeseburger for economically simpler times, in fact that is not so!

Labels: humor, ~good