Primitive eating

This morning I burned a pan of potatoes on the stovetop. Yes, we occasionally eat fried potatoes at our house--but these are NOT your MacDonalds fried potatoes, they are garden-grown fresh-dug potatoes cooked in olive oil. They weren't all burned, just one side of some of them, but those were way too full of free radicals for a mid-life person who has used up much of his immune system's youthful resiliency to eat and besides the char tasted bad. However, being deeply steeped in waste-not-want-not I had to make the best of them and was not about to scrape them into the compost and start over. So I found myself picking through them with my fingers, taking the half-burned ones out, biting off the good part, tossing away the charred part, scrummaging around for more, nibbling little unburned pieces off large hunks of potato charcoal. The surprising thing was how SATISFYING that was! (Stop rolling your eyes about my sloppy male eating habits--there's more to this than that.) There has to be something anciently wired into our brains about eating with fingers, picking through a pile of stuff, putting this and that into our mouths. This is not the same as eating a bowl of popcorn where you grab big handfuls and stuff them into your maw, instead it is the picking through the pile, judging each piece, popping the good ones into your mouth, rejecting the bad ones, that is satisfying. Think ancient tribespeople sitting on the ground sorting through baskets of groundnuts. Or a raccoon, or a chimpanzee in a zoo; the nibbling and picking is as important as the eating. Maybe it uses a part of the brain that is underutilized in modern life (except for when you pick through the sale bin at the thrift store). Maybe it is an old style of human eating before grocery stores and before we could trust everything in front of us to be homogenous with no insects living in it. And the eating was way more satisfying than if I had just been able to put them in a bowl and munch away--I actually ate less and ate slower but felt more filled and felt I had accomplished something for my blood sugar level. When do we get to stop being animals?