A very long time ago somebody decided it would be a good idea to plan for future meals. This person, this faceless, unnamed genius, had been going out everyday to find enough to eat for the day, just as every other man and woman around in the long ago time had been.
The idea of planning for future meals was no doubt closely related to finding a way of storing food, of keeping it somewhat fresh or at least edible for a few days.
The idea must have hit like a bag of canned hams: "Hey, what if it would be possible to store some of this delicious fruit (vegetables, roots, wildebeest - whatever) so that tomorrow we all won't have to hope that there will be more fruit (vegetables, roots, wildebeest - whatever) around for successful hunting and gathering?"
Maybe the idea occurred after a few days of hunger brought on by failed hunting and gathering, or maybe it was a long-term famine that triggered it.
Whatever it was, someone had to be sitting around with some serious hunger pangs and the thought sprung up: "Damn, If only there had been a way to save some of that wildebeest before it turned rancid and maggot-infested. There must be a way!"
It could have been an accidental discovery, I suppose. One hot day some Cro-Magnon was stripping away the flesh of a fresh kill and laying it out on a rock in order to divvy it up among the group. The strips of meat must of been thin enough and the combination of temperature and time must have been sufficient enough to prevent actual cooking of the meat but also prevent bacterial growth before it dried - the meat was tasted and found to be chewable, not brittle, and tasty.
And a little later in the day, it was found to be still good to eat. Somebody, the Harriet Fasenfest of the Paleolithic, figured out fast that removing moisture from food stuffs, be it fruit, vegetable, or meat, kept it from spoiling and thus food storage was born.
From there other food preservation methods developed, and it couldn't have been too much longer after that the idea of planning meals hit. "Hey," A cave dweller may have thought, "What if we have a good meal right when we get up, then another when the sun is directly overhead, then one last one for the day when the sun goes down. That way we won't all walk around grumbling about being hungry. Might see a lot less club violence if everybody has a full stomach."
That's a fairly credible hypothesis, eh? Food storage/preservation developed, then meal planning followed not far behind.
Meal planning, as in one person saying, "How about dinner at 8:30?" And the other person saying, "Sure, 8:30 is perfect. See you then."
Oh, I forgot to mention the invention of timepieces. Timepieces made meal planning even easier.
Easy, as in, when you plan dinner for 8:30, it should be a given that 8:30 is when the food is going to be ready for consumption, plus or minus 10, maybe 15 minutes.
Not an hour later, and certainly not an hour and a half later.
I'm just saying.
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