Heston Blumenthal's response to a simple question on The Project has baffled everyone.

When Heston Blumenthal appeared on The Project on Monday night, host Waleed Aly asked him a relatively simple question:

“What makes a great restaurant?”

‘Delicious food,’ you might be thinking. ‘Excellent service.’

‘Those free individually wrapped chocolates they sometimes bring with the bill.’

Well, according to the highly respected and highly eccentric chef, it’s actually a very intricate product of human evolution, psychology and the universe… or something.

See, we’re not really sure, and – according to social media – nor are plenty of other viewers.

Because this was his answer:

“This might seem a little tangential,” the 50-year-old began, in what you’ll soon appreciate may be the understatement of the year.

“Human beings became the most powerful species on the planet because through being able to imagine things that don’t exist we created shared beliefs. So, all the things that happened after humans: religion, money, language, cultures, social media, fairy tales, they are very human being.

“The reason that happened was the brain trebled in size for lots of reasons but primarily through eating cooked food. It broke the food down and our gut changed and this [touches his head] is on top of our body to protect, because this [touches his neck neck] is where the next generation are prepared for life.

“And so the thing, we should be called omnivores or herbivores, we’re coctivores… we are interdependent beings. We’ve been able to work collectively in numbers larger than any other creature and our efficiency in group learning has become quicker, quicker, quicker, quicker. We don’t have to climb a mountain to get water every day, we don’t have to kill an animal to the death to feed our children.”

Carrie Bickmore had no idea what was going on. Nor did Peter Helliar. Even The Project's resident intellectual Waleed Aly seemed a tad puzzled.

But he understood enough to point out that while The Fat Duck founder may have explained the reason we enjoy restaurants (wait, he did?), he hadn't explained how we can tell the good from the bad.

And so Blumenthal was off...

“We have two universes. We have our internal universe, our human being and we have our human doing. We have our feelings and our emotions and then we have getting on in life... The problem that’s happening is we are confusing the two things. We are thinking that our happiness is going to be developed by a numerical system. We have mathematics and physics and thank God we have, because that’s what’s got us to where we’ve got to.

"There’s a palliative care nurse that wrote a piece in The Guardian last year, the most common things - regrets - people had while they were passing away and it was they wished they lived a life true to themselves. If every human being had an ambition not to have that feeling, and that’s because our new brain that came from eating cooked food... starts to fade and then our raw emotion comes through and we realise, actually, this is about emotion. Food is about emotion."

https://media.giphy.com/media/JSueytO5O29yM/giphy.gif

I think it's important at this point that we remember this guy is a creative genius.

I mean, c'mon - this is the brain that concocted bacon and egg ice-cream, ejaculating cake and meat fruit (yes, that's meat disguised as fruit).

Maybe we just need to give the clip another watch...