The Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster - Bobby Henderson [31]
Darwin entered Edinburgh University in 1825 and was immediately astonished to discover that the university did not offer courses in the culinary arts. Tricked by his father into studying medicine, the dejected young Darwin resorted to cooking sumptuous dinners for himself in his boardinghouse. In his second year he joined several student naturalist societies, and for a short time he was free to explore the shores of the Firth of Forth, collecting crustaceans for various culinary wonders, like linguini with clam sauce and penne with striped zebra mussels. Little did his fellow students realize that this “creepy little cook”10 would one day use these experiences as a springboard for one of the greatest revolutions in Western contemporary thought.
While still at Edinburgh, Darwin produced his first scientific paper. Presented to the Plinian Society, it explained that the black spores found in oyster shells were the eggs of the common skate leech. Darwin shrewdly concluded that these spores were left by the Flying Spaghetti Monster as a sign that even the lowliest of God’s creatures could band together for a common cause.11 He was soundly laughed out of the society’s chambers, and shortly thereafter his father arranged to have him transfer from Edinburgh to Cambridge.
Once he got to Cambridge, Darwin’s father threatened to remove young Charles’s colander and other kitchen utensils if he did not bear down and fully commit himself to his studies as a physician. But the young son was adamant that he would follow his dream of culinary excellence. When he finally threatened his father with the prospect of abandoning the family and moving to France, the two Darwins arranged a secretive meeting in Paris’s Saint-Sulpice Church,12 where it was determined that the young Darwin would pursue studies in theology. This seemed a sensible compromise, as clergymen were well paid and as most English naturalists were clergymen. Charles is widely believed to have told his father at the time, “If I cannot be allowed to explore the wonders of God’s cookery, then let me at least explore the wonders of His creation.” Charles Darwin applied himself at Cambridge but was a C minus student at best. In the summer after that first year at Cambridge he was embarrassed by his poor showing and sought any means possible to avoid going home during the break. He read a bunch of pamphlets and ultimately decided to take a Mediterranean cooking cruise, where he was promised the opportunity to explore and sample the various foods of Greece and southern Italy. But the voyage was ill-fated. Darwin suffered from food poisoning and sea sickness, and ultimately he went home early. The only record of these sad days exists in a poorly penned and unpublished journal that he titled The Voyage of the Meatball.
The Voyage of the Beagle
The Voyage of the Meatball nearly destroyed Darwin. He limped through his last year of studies and, following graduation, did what any man armed with a Cambridge degree would do: He took a five-year vacation to the Galápagos Islands. Suffering from nervous exhaustion—and having lost all faith in humanity—Darwin was now determined to befriend as many of the world’s animals as possible.
It was aboard the HMS Beagle that life began to turn around for him. In a freak gale off the coast of Tierra del Fuego, all of Darwin’s cookbooks were washed overboard; bored and suffering from severe skin rashes, young Charles picked up a book that would set his life on a new course. That book was Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology, which posited that geological features are the outcome of gradual processes that take place over eons of time. Something clicked in Darwin’s head, and in that moment of clarity he realized that a slow-cooked sauce would be exponentially more delicious than one that was merely heated from a can, something that had never before occurred to an Englishman. From this realization, he gleaned some other ideas related to Evolution, but he was really most excited about the sauce revelation. Within days, the Beagle’s cook was