Monday, July 26, 2010

Minty Fresh Cows

I just had a milkshake that was mint and chocolate flavoured, on the surface this might not seem terribly weird. Mint choc chip is a well known and acceptable format for flavour to come in. But this mint was weird.

It tasted really real. Really real. I felt like I was the first cow ever to discover mint, just mosying around in my field when I came across a Wispa buried in a mint bush and naively took a bite of both of them togther. It wasn't that it was a bad taste - just a very strange experience for the mouth. But it whetted my appetite (not for milkshake that tasted like real mint and chocolate but for knowledge.)

It's a little known fact that cows actually discovered the mint was edible. Humans would have no gum, no toothpaste and no, other mint stuff if they hadn't tamed cows all those years ago and domesticated them as breath freshening assistants.

The first mint bush was discovered in Farmer Eric Bowes' field in 1723 at sometime between his dinner and his horlicks (not in a minty variety just yet although more about that next week). Eric Bowes was on pretty close terms with his herd, his wife had died over a decade ago and he'd struggled to find a new one because he didn't have teeth because he didn't have toothpaste because cows hadn't discovered it yet.

One day he was out milking them when he noticed a particularly large cow called Dave (female - names were different back then. This story is not a load of bullocks) didn't have the familiar musky smell that all the others did...he decided to investigate. He set up CCTV surveillance on the field Dave occupied with Martha (her sister) to see why Dave didn't smell like the rest of his ladies.

It seemed that Dave was a bit of an addict, standard grass wasn't good enough for her anymore. She needed something stronger for those 7 titanium stomachs. And she'd discovered mint. She ate it with everything. Well, she ate it with grass and more mint because that's all there was. But it still counted as a pretty big addiction.

Farmer Bowes knew he had to do something to wean Dave off before he started havign to choose new funky green packaging for his milk. So he started harvesting the mint, he thought long and hard for uses for the delectable plant and came up with the earliest form of toothpaste that we know of - 'Cowgate', followed by 'Arm and Udder'.

Dave was devastated at the lack of plant in her life and spiralled into a pit of depression. She was such a miserable bitch that she consequently also became the founder of the original beefburger.

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