How did food evolve?

Scientists can't explain how cheese evolved.It doesn't reproduce in any way, so how can it evolve?And look at its behaviour. It tastes good and herds in supermarkets. Are you telling me that that came about by chance?And look, on every packet of cheese it says "cheese". That's got to be the result of intelligent design.Cheese disproves evolution. I'm smarter than every biologist in the last hundred years. I win.

Er ... mockery?

I've not read The God Delusion, but it's about atheism v. religion --- it's not going to explain evolution in any depth.The Origin Of Species is simply out of date. Darwin, remember, didn't know any genetics. He knew that there was heritable variation, and that's all he knew about it. For the same reason, he didn't know about the evidence for evolution from the analysis of genomes. Also, we've found lots more interesting fossils since his day. He didn't know about continental drift, which is going to make any discussion of biogeography flawed. The book also contains some incidental factual mistakes --- for example, Darwin thought that lungs evolved from swimbladders: today we know that it's the other way round. It does have the merits of being well-written and available online.The Blind Watchmaker, if I recall, is good at explaining what the theory of evolution is, but won't tell you much about how we know that evolution has taken place. For that, you'd want something like Jones' book Darwin's Ghost.The appeal of evolution, after all, is that it gives an elegant concise explanation of the facts of nature. In order to appreciate this, you need a general knowledge of what those facts are.

You say that like it's a bad thing.

Well, here we have a problem.Evolution is cool because it explains nature, which would otherwise be just a magpie's nest of random information. In a saner world, people who weren't interested in nature wouldn't be interested in evolution either.You can't teach evolutionary biology without the biology. "There is no royal road," as the man said.