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Food Really Is Sex
Sperm Clouds and Power Ballads
If you think about it, all of our food comes from an absolutely massive amount of sex.
Animal sex gives us bacon and eggs. Plant sex gives us toast, juice, and jam. Or rather, we, as very advanced apes, have become amazingly brilliant at utilizing animal sex to cook a delicious breakfast.
In the spring we’re surrounded by a buzzing cacophony of sex: sperm clouds wafting through the fields, suggestive flowers unfolding in the dewy grass, birds peeping incessant love power ballads from the high branches.
Pollen, in particular, is an extremely important foodstuff for animals, as the last icicles of winter melt away and the beetle and bee become more and more active.
We didn’t know much of anything about the microscopic realm until about 1590 when somebody clever invented the microscope. It took us until the 1800s to begin to understand pollen and evolution.
Pollen are tiny grains located in sacs called anthers at the end of filaments (or from a male cone to the female cone of a coniferous plant). These male parts of a flower are called the stamen. The pollen grains are protected by a hard shell called the exine and a soft inner shell called the intine which protects the cells inside the pollen grain from deyhdration and solar radiation…
