But, take coffee. There are so many steps you have to go through before you've got a cup of piping hot coffee, that you'd pretty much have to know what your finished "goal" is before you start. It's not as though you'd be walking along some path in the woods, see a bright red berry, and think to yourself:
"Y'know...I wonder what would happen if I picked the seeds from that berry, roasted them, ground them up, added boiling water to it, then passed it through a filter? Might taste pretty good!"
Some pioneer of food preparation had to have done it. But where would the inspiration come from? It's not like that long process would apply to just any berry. When you're eating an apple, do you look at the seeds and think, "I wonder what would happen if I removed all these apple seeds, roasted them, ground them up, and added boiling water to them?" Of course not! It would never occur to anyone.
And then there's bread. I get the idea that people would pick the seed/grains from the wheat chaff and eat 'em, but what would inspire them to mash up the grain to powder, mix it up with water into dough, toss in some yeast/fungus, then put it into a kiln/oven? You'd have to have a lot of time on your hands to get that creative and experimental, and the Neolithic era didn't exactly scream "leisure time". Yet someone did it...
Ahh, well. I suppose when the entire focus of existence at that point in time centered on food, it would be easy to get obsessed with it and get creative.
There. I answered my own question.
Ultimately, you're forced to resort to using a scissors to cut a path to the product's "cavity" and free it that way. But then you've gotta watch out for cutting yourself on the edge of the cut plastic--yes, it's THAT sharp.