Here's the thing, though. A bun is made from wheat. Wheat is cultivated because it keeps.

Cheese is made from milk. Cheese is made because it keeps.

Tomatoes don't keep. You can can them, though, and canning has been around since the Napoleonic Wars. Hell, sun-dry those suckers. Onions? Onions keep. Potatoes? Potatoes keep. Pickles? Pickles keep. Ketchup? Ketchup keeps.

Now we're down to the cow. The "oh, we only butcher animals in October" thing is bullshit. Yeah, once you butcher a cow you've got a lot of cow to eat, but...

...that's why the barter system has been around since before the Sumerians. If Manny is a rancher, Moe farms wheat and Jack has a dairy, Manny, Moe and Jack can come up with a system to have cheeseburgers available at the pub pretty much year round.

Do we have all sorts of impracticalities in our foodchain? Hell to the yes. But they started after the interstate freeway system was developed, which was after the cheeseburger appeared.

"If you want to make an apple pie from scratch - " fuck that. I want to make an apple pie that tastes good. Sagan's entire point was that "from scratch" is a null concept. That guy who failed to make a toaster by mining his own ore? Any sucker with a loaf of bread and a zippo can make toast. You wanna learn self-sufficiency, learn how to do without the fuckin' toaster, don't pretend you have to smelt fuckin' copper to plug into mains that you don't have the foggiest clue how they operate in order to be "self-sufficient."

This shit gives me gas.