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It's hard to imagine an existence where magical food fell from the sky and tasted like whatever you wanted (probably ice cream and pizza for me depending on my mood). But that was how Bnei Yisrael lived in the Midbar. However, the longer Bnei Yisrael traveled through the desert, the less magical the manna became in their eyes.
In this week's parsha, Bnei Yisrael craved "real" food and they let Moshe know it - they wanted meat! When we read this story in the Torah, we're always under the assumption that Bnei Yisrael didn't have access to meat in the desert. But is that even true? Toward the end of the Sefer, we learn that Bnei Gad and Bnei Reuven had so much mikneh, cattle, that they were allowed to settle on the eastern shore of the Jordan River. It seems then that Bnei Yisrael had access to meat! Why would they be complaining then? Additionally, in their complaint, they said that they "remember the fish asher nochal" - we usually translate those last two words as "that we ate." But the pasuk is using the future tense - asher nochal - "that we will eat." Wouldn't it make more sense grammatically to say asher achalnu instead?
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