I’m watching TV Wednesday night and there was this great documentary about the iceman. This poor bastard falls asleep in the snow 5,200 years ago, gets covered up by a glacier only to be thawed out by scientists.

In case you are wondering, no, he wasn’t miraculously still alive.

Scientists from around the world picked apart everything from his bearskin hat to his colon to find out what he was like.

I gotta tell you, as far as documentaries go, this one was pretty cherry, yo. They had dramatic reenactments of life in 3200 B.C., and life back then wasn’t pretty and slick like life is today.

Fascinating stuff, this frozen guy had to show us. Lots to learn. He had a copper axe 1,000 years before those egghead scientists thought it was even possible. That’s like finding a TV in a pyramid.

He was decked out in his finest goin’-to-the-sacred-tree clothes as well. Before this, no one had a clue what Neolithic men wore. The answer to this question may shock and horrify you, but Neolithic man wore … animal skins!

OK, no surprise there, but to have a complete set is a coup, man.

This guy was 45 when he died, which is really old for a Neolithic man. Three times in the six months before he died, his fingernails had stopped growing, indicating that he had suffered three major illnesses in that time period and recovered. He had access to medicinal herbs. He also had tattoos from acupuncture. Primitive medicine, maybe, but it worked for him at least three times.

He had a lot of wear and tear on his teeth, but no cavities. The scientists attribute that to the fact that there were no processed foods in his day to help rot his teeth out. He could make his own break, though, and that wore his teeth down over a lifetime.

Then the commercial came on, and I see this new product called Chili and Scoops. It’s Frito Lay scoops with a little bowl of chili in a plastic serving container inside a brightly painted cardboard box. It’s brilliant. You microwave the chili and eat it with the cornchip scoops! I bet the iceman was pissed he missed this one!

What kind of nonsense is this? Why in the sweet name of that poor, frozen iceman would I want to pay money for a single serving of chili and handful of corn chips?

Our Neolithic ancestors used to kill bears for dinner and clothes, and I can’t get it together enough to buy my own chili and bag of chips?

When you think about it, you have to fit into a pretty narrow range of people who have enough money to spend on this crap but not so much money that they can eat better than this.

I’m thinking middle-class people who think they’re rich and buying nonsense is the way they prove to themselves and the world that they have money to burn.

Right after the chili and scoops commercial there was another one for Kraft cheese cubes. Just cubes of cheddar cheese in a bag. As if cheese weren’t expensive enough, I am going to buy a bag of pre-cubed cheese?

Here is the recipe for cubed cheese: Buy some cheese. Cube it! If you can’t do that on your own, you should starve to death.

If you have the extra money to spend on pre-cubed cheese and never give to charity, you should burn in hell for all eternity because it is people like you that make the world a miserable place for the poor.

Another product I can’t stand is Lunchables. When these things first came out they were pretty much crackers and cheese in a box. Tell you what, you send your kid to school with nothing to eat but crackers and cheese, I hope a teacher calls social services on you.

And they would, too, if the crackers and cheese were served in an economic plastic bag. But when they are served in a lovely yellow plastic frame that cradles the crackers and keeps them separate from the cheese, well, there’s nothing abusive about that.

If I had eaten crackers and cheese for lunch as a kid, I guarantee I would have been made fun of even more than I was.

Now it’s OK as a long as the good people at Kraft put their seal of approval on it? I don’t think so.

And the final act of pre-packaged lunacy are those single serving cereal packs with the milk.

They sell those things on the assumption that this way, your kids can do it themselves. Let’s see.

They can open a box of cereal that’s already been cracked and pour milk in a bowl, or they can try and crack three layers of cardboard and safety seals to get at a couple ounces of Frosted Flakes?

If your kids aren’t old enough to figure out a box of cereal and plastic jug of milk, lord knows he shouldn’t be permitted to BE awake by himself, let alone eating unattended. And who eats just those single servings? To this day, I’ve never seen a kid who couldn’t polish off at least three bowls of sugar-coated cereal while watching cartoons.

When did all of this get started, anyway? I have to think it goes back a long way. I think shredded cheese probably snuck under our radar. Honestly, it’s the same deal as the cubes, but granted, it’s a little messy. If you only want to make some tacos, the pack of shredded cheese might look like a good idea. Still, we should have known better.

Maybe it started with canned soup, sliced bread and TV dinners. Was that the beginning of the end?

Maybe once you accept a certain amount of convenience you are mentally required to accept every stupid innovation that comes down the pike.

But I tell you, if I ever buy Chili and Scoops and you find out about it, euthanize me.

What a waste these products are. Not only does your cost per unit go up dramatically, it is a waste of paper and plastic.

I’ve got to think there is some kind of psychological damage as well. Surely the sense of satisfaction one gets from consuming this kind of pre-packaged food item is a weird placebo.

I am better than lesser men. I can blow money on tasty morsels of crap. I waste, therefore I am.

I am not completely beyond this subject. I learned at a young age what crap was.

It’s probably a working-class thing. My momma would rather have cut her hands off than buy tiny bags of chips.

I remember well the tongue-lashing I would get trying to get her to buy “above” her station in life.

“Why the hell would I want to spend good money on little bags of chips when we got a whole bag in the cupboard?”

“God, Mom, that’s just so de classe.”

“Shut up before I pull your pants down and beat you right here in front of God and everybody.”

Good times … good times.

I couldn’t believe she didn’t get it, though. Didn’t she know that chips taste better when they come in designer bags for others to see you have enough money to waste on shiny things?

Maybe cheese tastes better when somebody else cubes it, too. Who am I to judge?

At the end of the iceman documentary, the calm, cool narrator comes on and tries to put all of this information into perspective for us — that’s what narrators do, after all. Believe it or not, I am a narrator.

The narrator wonders what the iceman would think about all this scientific investigation. “He wouldn’t know what to make of any of it.”

Oh, that poor, primitive iceman. I wonder what he would think if he knew his story was being paid for by people who make their living selling pre-cubed cheese and watched by the kind of doofuses who buy it.

I wonder what the iceman would have made of the fact that his descendants couldn’t kill their own bear, let alone cube their own cheese.

The iceman would probably be glad he lived 5,200 years ago, truly free and truly capable.

We sit and gaze in wide wonder at how far we have come over the last 5,000 years. I have to gaze at how far we have fallen.

If, God forbid, any one of us needed to survive in the wilderness for a few days, we’d up and die from shock. I can’t even be sure I could start a fire without my Zippo or a pack of dry matches from the Kum and Go.

Theoretically, I know I should be able to rub two sticks together and make fire, but I bet I’d mess it up somehow. There is probably more to it than I think.

Rest in peace, iceman, you were just as good as any of us.

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Greg Jerrett is a graduate student in English from Council Bluffs. He is opinion editor for the Daily. If anybody knows where I can buy pre-melted cheese, give me a holler.