A Bowl of Cereal

Stymied for a topic, I started out writing a short post about spoons when I finished my bowl of cereal.  My Gratitude blog post evolved into even more to be grateful.

Had a bowl of granola for breakfast this morning.  Like always, I used a spoon to eat my cereal.   There is an incredible amount of civilization and technology into making that statement true.  The spoon is one of the earliest tools dating back to the dawn of civilization.  Seashells used as spoons are among some of the first tools ever used by man.

The history of cereal grains also dates back to the beginning of civilization.  The plastic bowl I used is based on much more recent technology.  A brief history of polymers from Wikipedia:

Polystyrene has a long history of evolution behind it. In 1839, a German apothecary called Eduard Simon discovered polystyrene. Eduard Simon isolated the substance from natural resin, however, he did not know what he had discovered.

It took another German, organic chemist, Hermann Staudinger, to realize that Simon's discovery, comprised of long chains of styrene molecules, was a plastic polymer.

In 1922, Hermann Staudinger published his theories on polymers, stating that natural rubbers were made up of long repetitive chains of monomers that gave rubber its elasticity. He went on to write that the materials manufactured by the thermal processing of styrene were similar to rubber. They were the high polymers including polystyrene. In 1953, Hermann Staudinger won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for his research.

I am grateful for my matching flatware and all of the technology that went into my having a bowl of cereal with milk this morning.