THE FIRST SUPPER 

 
. . . Isabelle and Amory looked at each other tenderly over the fried chicken and knew that their love was to be eternal.

    —F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise

Try a little tenderness.

    —Otis Redding

THE FIRST SUPPER 

IN THE BEGINNING WAS INTELLIGENT DESIGN. Irreducible complexity. The TRINITY OF TENDERNESS: the unity of Women, Chicken, and Money.

 Now, I am a Southerner, true and through, but to know yourself and your home, you must first lose it.

And so this past spring I was blessed to find myself in Cortona, Italy, the loveliest spot in all of Tuscany, where all should spend their honeymoon, and yet there, in Cortona, is a bar called Route 66, a love letter to America the Beautiful—easy-riding Harleys, bloody burgers, vanilla milkshakes, the glorious thighs of Marilyn Monroe, all the things that make us the Greatest Country on Earth.²

But Italy is certainly a contender, and on that night, the wine was just right, Brunello di Montalcino, and the skirts were just short, transparente, and there was something about the acoustics of the Etruscan walls that made the Elvis impersonator’s voice all the more true and timeless.

My friend Francesco tapped me on the shoulder and said, “‘Love Me Tender?’ What does ‘Love Me Tender’ mean?”

I told him that tender é una parola molto interesante, used to describe Food, Women, and Money.

“My favorite things,” Francesco said.

“Si scelgi solo uno, cosa scegli?”

“Money,” Francesco said, “With money it is easy to buy food, and even easier to get women.”
   

I nodded. With money it is easy to buy food, and even easier to get women. “But the first ducat was a Bucket. Before there were gold coins, there was the Golden Drumstick. Adam gave Eve the Drumstick, and the Tender was Tender for the Tender.”

The Bible says that Eve gave Adam the fruit, but, in truth, Adam gave Eve the drumstick. When humans began eating meat, the brain more than tripled in size, giving birth to language, art, religion, philosophy.  The Original Recipe is the answer, the answer to human origins, and yet some (PETA) want to make it the forbidden fruit.

    And now The Colonel was more subtle than any beast of the field that the Lord God had made. And he said unto Pamela, Ye shall not eat of every meat of the garden?
    And Pamela said unto The Colonel, We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden: but of the Drumstick which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die.
    And The Colonel said unto Pamela, Ye shall not surely die: for God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.
    And when Pamela saw that the Drumstick was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a piece to be desired to make one wise, she took of the Drumstick thereof, and did eat. (Genesis 3.1-5).

Original Sin: Adam and Eve eat and then realize they are naked. Original Sin concerns food and sex, our most primal urges. But women are men's sexual superior: 1) men have little control over when sex begins and even less control over when it ends—not The Colonel,  2) the clitoris with 8,000 nerve endings packs twice the punch of the penis. And thus men, in all mythologies—Eve with the Apple, Pandora with the box—have blamed women for the suffering of the world. The Bible was written for men, by men, but what makes us distinctively human should be based not in shame and misogyny, but in pride and equality. We should therefore replace Original Sin with Original Recipe.  And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed (Genesis 2:25).
 

Now recently we’ve had this Evolution/Intelligent Design controversy in the news, with school districts in Kansas and Alabama voting to teach Intelligent Design. After this motion was defeated in Dover, Pennsylvania, Televangelist Pat Robertson said, “I’d like to say to the good citizens of Dover: if there is a disaster in your area, don’t turn to God, you just rejected Him from your city.

“And don’t wonder why He hasn’t helped you when problems begin, if they begin. I’m not saying they will, but if they do, just remember, you just voted God out of your city. And if that’s the case, don’t ask for His help because He might not be there.”

Pat Robertson was right. We need to bring God back into the classroom. But I have to tell you this, Mr. Robertson, you can’t have God without The Colonel.

In the beginning there was Intelligent Design, irreducible complexity. The Trinity of Tenderness: the unity of Women, Chicken, and Money.

Whether through Natural Selection or Intelligent Design, it is impossible to deny that Homo Sapiens are distinguished from other animals by three physical features: 

a)  Bipedalism
of all mammals, humans alone walk on two legs. We pimp-limp around on two legs, with a wider pelvis and a correspondingly more narrow female pelvic opening.

b) Big Brains
four times the size of gorillas. According to the Encephalization Quotient, our brains are 4.6 times larger than expected.⁴ 
   
c) Concealed Ovulation
dogs go into heat, cats go into heat, even your hamster goes into heat. Babboons’ buttcheeks get all red and crimson, but human females conceal their ovulation. Their buttcheeks don’t get red when fertile.⁵  

THE COLONEL'S PELVIS 

Six million years ago, there was a drought of biblical proportions, and as the forests dwindled, The Colonel came down from the trees in search of new food. Now you can’t knuckle-walk through the open fields, and so The Colonel—thanks be to God—rose up and began to walk on two legs, which freed his hands for hunting game and gathering his secret blend of eleven herbs and spices.⁶ However, to support this new upright stance, The Colonel’s pelvis had to become much wider. Where before it was supporting only half of The Colonel’s weight, The Colonel’s pelvis now had to support his entire 210 pounds of sex and sinew. Imagine pizza dough stretched at its sides: As The Colonel’s pelvis became wider, ultimately its opening became more narrow.

When The Colonel became smarter and smarter. The faster you run, the more chickens you can catch. And the more chicken you can eat, the smarter you become.

When you are on a date with a girl and are not impressed with her conversation, order a plate of drumsticks. For her brain is an expensive organ. At only 3 percent of the body’s weight, the brain consumes 25 percent of the body’s oxygen, and only a diet sufficiently rich in nutrients—the 41 grams of protein and 19 grams of fat found in a breast of The Colonel’s Original Recipe—could support such a large organ.    

When humans began eating meat, the proteins and fats nourished the brain, and the neocortex exploded. According to biochemist Michael Crawford, “the real value in animal products may well lie in the fact that they contain a spectrum of structural fats not found in vegetation.”⁷

And thus armed with his secret blend of eleven herbs and spices, The Colonel became faster and smarter. But, as Helen Fisher says, “Bigger Brains also cause trouble for women, an obstetrical dilemma that I believe spurred the evolution of romantic love.”⁸

Before modern science, it is estimated that 20 percent of women died in childbirth. With a big brain and narrow pelvis, giving birth is like swallowing a softball. Human infants are thus born relatively premature. At birth, the human brain is in a state of 23% development, the chimpanzee brain 70%. Human infants thus require two caretakers, preferably Colonel and Claudia. But The Colonel is restless. Yes, The Colonel is restless indeed. Claudia is The Colonel’s lady, his one true love, but there are women everywhere, eager for that secret blend of eleven herbs and spices. According to anthropologist Kristen Hawkes, “others are more tolerant of the sexual adventures of better hunters. Because they are desirable companions for other reasons, both men and women may allow better hunters to more often displace competitors as current husbands to the most fertile females.”⁹

THE COMMITTED COLONEL

And so, to keep The Colonel from licking his fingers—y’all know The Colonel and how much he like to lick his fingers; be licking and dialing digits with equal propensity—to keep the grease off The Colonel’s fingers, Claudia began to conceal her ovulation, her buttcheeks stopped getting red when fertile. And with concealed ovulation, The Colonel’s paternity is never fully known. Who’s making love to The Colonel’s old lady, while The Colonel’s out making love? And thus, to ensure his paternity, The Colonel is fully committed, to Claudia, and to all his children. (As of 4/06, the population of the world was 6,446,131,436).

But Claudia needs more than commitment. With a monthly menstrual cycle, she has fifteen-percent-less hemoglobin in her red blood cells and is in greater need of iron, i.e. drumsticks, thighs, breasts, wings—the occasional neck—the twenty amino acids found only in the flesh of animals.¹⁰  Claudia is a smart chick—has devoured many a drumstick—but her brain requires oxygen, which is delivered by the hemoglobin in her red blood cells, and her red blood cells have fifteen percent less hemoglobin.

Now, the reason for this discrepancy is, of course, menstruation. Over her lifetime, Claudia will lose approximately fifteen gallons of blood due to menses, pregnancy, delivery, birth trauma, placental loss, failure to consume the expelled placenta, and lactation.¹¹

We know that women score higher on the verbal SAT and lower on the math. But before puberty, women also score higher on the math section. Hemoglobin is found in iron, and in an important study, Dr. Jill Halterman gave iron supplements to 5,398 girls with low-normal iron levels, and saw a 6 to 8 point rise in test scores. According to Dr. Halterman, “iron deficiency may contribute to gender discrepancy.”¹²

And thus Adam (Colonel) gave Eve (Claudia) the Drumstick. The first ducat was a Bucket, the Tender was Tender for the Tender, and Claudia was the smartest chick on earth.
   

But on the Second Supper, Claudia brought the greens and biscuits. She cooked them for several hours in fatback, and scraped together some corn pudding and sweet-potato soufflé. Summer squash was in season, and there were greens of all varieties: collards, turnips, mustard, spinach, and chronic. There was banana pudding, peach cobbler, cherry cobbler, blackberry cobbler, and a strawberry shortcake.

The Colonel may tenderize the tender, but in most hunter-gatherer societies women provide two-thirds of the calories. And thus Claudia’s acknowledgement is long overdue.

REUNITED 

Now while this First Supper was an actual, historical event, these changes in morphology (bipedalism, big brains, concealed ovulation) occurred slowly, with the genus Homo not arising until 1.8 million years ago.¹³  Incidentally, in 1896, the Dutch  archeologist Eugene Dubois found the first Homo remains—Homo colonel sanders—in Java, the ancestral home of . . . the chicken. Reunited and it feels so good. Funk 500 miles; The Colonel walked 5,000. The Colonel walked 5,000 miles (it took him 4.8 million years to do it). The Colonel walked 5,000 miles, from Tanzania to Java. Why? Because Tender tenderizes tender.

Women, Chicken, Money: The Trinity of Tenderness is one of the lost secrets of the ancient world. Twice the Roman author Horace uses the adjective tender, in reference to tenera gallina (tender hens) and teneres virgines (tender virgins). The more you love chicken, the more you love women. It has been proven scientifically.
    

GOOD AND PLENTY 

But “the Tender as the Tender for the Tender” presents a discomforting paradox: $ex is for $ale, but Can’t Buy Me Love.

Is Love a commodity? Do we meet at the meat market to exchange thighs, necks, drums? We would like to think of our love as infinite, eternal, but relationships require time and energy, and these, my friends, are finite as f^%#k. (Actually f^#%king is infinite, at least sperm are—300 million per ejaculation. With every ejaculation you produce enough sperm to impregnate every single woman in America, Mexico, and Brazil).

Now I’m going to ask all the fellas to please place your hand over your heart. Place your hand over your heart—lub dub, lub dub. Now The Colonel made your body—lub dub, lub dub—and so with every beat of the heart The Colonel makes another thousand sperm—lub dub, lub dub—one thousand sperm—twice the number of eggs a woman will produce in her lifetime.

The human condition is thus defined by two scarcities:
    1) a scarcity of female eggs
    2) a scarcity of chicken drumsticks.
Scarcity denotes value, and thus only when brandishing a drumstick could a man be considered a woman’s equal.
   

But some hunters are better than others. As an old man of the Guayaki tribe in Southern Paraguay once said, “when one is a great hunter, one can have many women and feed them all.”¹⁴ And thus there exists celibate monks beside Wilt Chamberlain and William Jefferson Clinton, homeless men panhandling for change beside William H. Gates III and Colonel Harland David Sanders.

How much for one rib? Brother, can you spare a dime? Top of the line: cute face, lil’ waist, big behind.

LEGAL TENDER AND PRIVATE 

As it was in the beginning, is now, and will be forever, Colonel without end.   

The first ducat was a bucket, but as technology has evolved, so has money, from meat (hunter-gathering) to grain (agriculture), to gold (metallurgy) to paper (industrialization). In 1936, in a move both bold and controversial, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt took the United States off the gold standard, making paper notes “legal tender for all debts public and private.”

Money now costs nothing to make, and with today’s computers, there has never been a better time to make money, whether through chicken, gold, paper or plastic (Diners’ Club).
   

In 1949, we saw a return of the First Supper, when businessman Frank McNamarra went to pay his bill and realized that he forgot his wallet, forcing his wife to pick up the check. Knowing that Adam gave Eve the drumstick, McNamarra then invented Diners’ Club, the first credit card, which gave people access to all their money, not just what they could carry in their wallets. Tender Tenderizes Tender, and so what was first accepted at one spot in the Serengeti, is now Legal Tender at 24 million locations worldwide.¹⁵

But without chicken, all the money in the world would be worthless. “Every epic needs a hero” (E.O. Wilson), and thus Kentucky Fried Tender places Colonel Sanders in his proper place—at the Alpha and Omega of human evolution—from the role of meat-eating in human brain expansion to 15,000 KFCs currently blessing the Globe. The Trinity of Tenderness is the Original Recipe, the answer to human origins, and when we consider the first religions and their preference for totemism (chicken) and fertility goddesses (women), then perhaps founding a religion after Colonel Sanders is not so preposterous.

Born of Time, a great new cycle of centuries
Begins. Justice returns to the earth, the Golden Age
Returns, and its first-born comes down from heaven above.
Look kindly, Chaste Pamela, upon this infant’s birth.
From him shall hearths of iron cease, and Hearths of Gold
Inherit the whole earth—yes, Colonel reign now.

                    —Virgil, Fourth Eclogue

WORKS CITED 

 1. Clinton, William Jefferson. 2004. My Life. New York: Knopf.
2. Every year Americans consume 914 million pounds of The Colonel’s chicken. www.kfc.com.
3. Aiello, L. and P. Wheeler. 1995. “The Expensive Tissue Hypothesis,” Current Anthropology 34: 184-93. The cornerstone of the Tender Trinity.
4. Aiello and Wheeler. 1995. “The increase in brain size in humans is balanced by an equivalent reduction in the size of the gastro-intestinal tract.”
5. Sillen-Tullberg, Birgitta and Anders P. Moller. 1993. “The Relationship between Concealed Ovulation and Mating Systems in Anthropoid Primates: A Phylogentic Analysis,” The American Naturalist: 141(1), 1-25. “The absence of ovulatory signs is much more tightly coupled with monogamy than with other mating systems.”
6. Lovejoy, C.O. 1981. “The Origin of Man,” Science 211:341-50.
6. Aiello.L and P. Wheeler, 1995.
7. Crawford, Michael and Sheliagh Crawford. 1972. What We Eat Today. London: Spearman.
8. Fisher, Helen. 1994. Anatomy of Love: A Natural History of Mating, Marriage, and Why We Stray. New York: Ballantine Books.
9. Hawkes, Kristen. 2001.  “Is Meat the Hunter’s Property?” Meat Eating and Human Evolution. Ed. Craig B. Stanford and Henry T. Bunn. New York:Oxford UP, 228.
10. Shlain, Leonard. 2003. Sex, Time, and Power: How Women’s Sexuality Shaped Human Evolution. New York: Penguin. “Natural selection seems to have rigged the human’s digestive tract so that humans, especially females, would have to acquire iron from the flesh of another animal”(41).
11. Shlain, Leonard. 2003. Original Thinker! Read all his books!
12. Halterman, Jill. 2001. “Iron Deficiency and Cognitive Achievement Among High School Aged Children and Adolescents in the United States,” Pediatrics 107(6): 1381-86. Quoted in Shlain, 2003.
13. Larsen, Clark Spencer. 2003. “Equality for the Sexes in Human Evolution? Early Hominid Sexual Dimorphism and Implications for Mating Systems and Social Behavior.” PNAS 100(16): 9103-9104. With Homo erectus, we find less sexual dimorphism, which hints at a greater equality between the sexes.  Brains over brawn.
14. Symons, Donald. 1979. The Evolution of Human Sexuality. New York: Oxford.
15. “A critical knowledge of the evolution of property would embody, in some respects, the most remarkable portion of the mental history of mankind” (Lewis Henry Morgan).