BEST FOOD INVENTIONS BEFORE SLICED BREAD

Wasn't expecting to find a blip today but an article in the newspaper caught my attention. The eggheads at the Royal Society got their kitchen people to make up a long list of 60 food-related inventions. The eggheads themselves came up with a final list of twenty and I've made an attempt to assemble some of them here. I can't help feeling that the kitchen staff themselves may have done a completely different list. Top rank was given to a fridge but I had to miss that out as I couldn't see a way of arranging the other things on it (the top's too high). And I make no apologies for not including a combine harvester (number 6).So here are the RS's rankings:
2: Pasteurization discovered in China in 1117 for wine and several centuries passed before Louis Pasteur caught up and applied it to milk. In a side comment Giles Coren says that pasteurized milk besides being an inferior product, put milk production out of the hands of farmers and into large concerns and quangos. I remember in the 1970s there was some sort of strike of milk tanker drivers and we went up a few hundred yards to a nearby farm in our small village. He gave us a big jugful of milk but refused to take payment saying he wasn't allowed to sell it - hundreds of gallons from his herd would go down the drain.
3: Canning - tin cans from 1810 although the basic idea using glass was invented in France a year earlier.
4: Oven. A 30,000 year old oven has been found with mammoth remains still inside.
9: Milling - Strabo, a Greek geographer, mentions a water-powered mill that was built before 71BC. But there would have been hand-grinding long before that.
11: Fermentation
15: Knife - a bit amazed this comes so far down the list. Flints were used a knives from earliest times.
16: Eating utensils
17: Corks. Once the closure of choice for wine bottles, large areas of Portugal are devoted to it's production although much reduced in recent years. Several years ago a rather nasty woman was showing me a bottle of wine she was taking to a neighbour of hers and made a point of showing me it had a cork and rather snootily told me she couldn't stand ignorant people who bought wine with metal caps. I suspect that even in those days metal caps were a more reliable closure for keeping most wines in good condition. And we'd probably see them used more often if manufacturers weren't aware of people like her. No axe to grind here as I buy almost all my wine in boxes.
20: Frying - food has been cooked this way for a very long time and the RS thinks frying food has saved millions of people from food poisoning.
As for sliced bread it didn't make the list. One of the learned professors expressed the view that most people prefer bread unsliced and cut it themselves. A lot of people may claim to agree with him but a glance through any supermarket shows that they don't back that up by actually buying unsliced. And for myself I put forward the coffee cup. Mrs P is a tea drinker so the coffee is just for me. And I'm not really tempted by one those shiny machines that help you to pretend you're a barista in some fancy coffee place I've never been in.

Added as an afterthought the others on the list were:-
5 irrigation
6 combine harvester
7 baking
8 selective breeding
10 the plough
12 the fishing net
13 crop rotation
14 the pot (reusable cast iron pots invented 1707)
18 the barrel
19 microwave oven