Stop me if you've heard this one.

Cain raised crops. Abel was a shepherd.

God, no longer the chatty, come-stroll-with-me--in-the-garden Guy his parents still talked about, had gone all cranky and demanding. Bring Me offerings, he tells them, in a tone that leaves no room for doubt about what will happen should one of the lads  . . . disappoint Him.

No problem, thinks Cain. I've been waiting  to taste-test this fabulous tomato sauce flecked with basil leaves and whole bulbs of fresh garlic. Completely organic! And if I throw a batch of it onto a steaming pile of  spagetti squash, it's to die for.

Not only that, anything I can't use or can't chew, I just throw in that pile over there and it makes the best fertilizer in the known world. You should see my rose bushes!

Meanwhile, brother Abel, peering at his flocks of filthy, farting, mud-caked sheep, briefly considers  suicide. 

I'm cooked, he thinks, gnawing vengefully on a a greasy, half-cooked  leg of one of them. Near despair, thinking that maybe he'd offer up his best wool sweater (sheep were good for something, yeah, but in the desert? ) and maybe He won't curse me through the ages for not measuring up to my fancy-dancy brother.

With that, Abel flung his leg of lamb into his campfire brazzier, where  the smoke from its grizzled remains rose  up unto the very Nostrils of God.

And the smell was good and the heavens opened and God was well-pleased, suggesting to Abel in a dream that he should maybe slather some mint jelly all over the next offering.

When Cain, practically gagging at the stench from his brother's brazzier, found that he had placed second in a two-man competition, he raised his cast-iron sauce pot and struck his brother athwart the chops with it, thereby insuring that through the ages, Vegetarian Man would forever struggle, and fail, to meat his maker.