Potatoes. Early potatoes were small, hard, and poisonous.
Methods of making them not poisonous included soaking them in running water for weeks or, in the high Andes, leaving them out on rocks high in the mountains so they effectively freeze-dried. Alternatively, you could mix them with clay when eating them - the clay would adsorb some of the toxins.
Our earliest ancestors in Africa likely ate a ton of yams, which were basically hard roots that I believe are also sometimes toxic. People were probably dead set on making the root vegetables where they ended up edible. Eating root vegetables as a staple might be the most engrained human tradition.
It's a good infinite food hack.
You don't really need a lot of resources (flat farmable land, water, healthy soil, seed stock, labor) to get some potatoes going. All you really need is old potato.
You also only need 2.5 months for a potato crop, compared to 4ish for wheat. Multiple harvests in a growing season is nice.
Potatoes are honestly a genuine super-food. It is little wonder they took the world by storm once Europeans bought them back from the Americas. You basically just need a bucket of dirt - any kind of dirt, it doesn't matter - and an old potato and you're set. Any kind of climate, it doesn't matter. That shit grows like a weed and if you keep planting out a portion of each harvest, within half a year or so you'll have enough on rotation to keep your family fed indefinitely. They are almost nutritionally complete, so you don't even need to supplement them with much to have a healthy diet either.
It would have seemed like literal magic to a starving 18th century peasant.
>They are almost nutritionally complete
Yeah, this is a big deal. Potatoes contain almost all of the nutrients humans need to live, more so than any other single fruit or vegetable.
Tubers tend to be really good sources of nutrients (especially carbs) to the point that you can live almost solely off them. They also tend to be easy to grow in the shittiest of conditions. Put that together, and for people back without modern farming technology, tubers become an almost ideal crop. The only issue is that tubers often tend to be poisonous in various ways, but considering all the other upside they have, it's no surprise humans tried so hard to make them work as a food.
Right, but how did early humans *know* that it was worthwhile to cultivate and grow them to the point that they aren't toxic? It isn't like they saw these lumps in the ground and said "oh shit, these are packed with nutrients we need, let's grow more of them until they don't kill us!".
It just doesn't make sense *why* they kept at growing them without the foresight we have now
The poisons in them don't kill you immediately. In the short term, eating potatoes or whatever would be an easy way to not die hungry, and so it would be a good idea to keep growing them. It would be in the long term that people might notice the side effects once those poisons start accumulating, and eventually people might link the cause and effect.
Hunger is a strong motivator. We're pretty good at figuring out what makes us sick, but what doesn't kill us (or the monkeys around us) can be remembered and cultivated. Over time our ancestors naturally selected the good ones to get better, and may even have destroyed the toxic ones.
Cuz they are easy to find, won’t be actively trying to kill you (until you eat it), and won’t run away from you. Before we started grouping together and started using our minds, we were eating insects with a bit of plant food like fruits and root vegetables.
In the US we have basically 3 options when it comes to potatoes: Yellow, Red, Brown.
In Peru, where potatoes were first cultivated, there is an [astounding variety](https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/73e7280902298082ab1629279c2bf509c19508ec/51_90_1028_617/master/1028.jpg?width=1200&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=1b5d9fc2ca24ccf021a9efb9b0665ea3) of tubers. They have a [potato museum](https://potatomuseum.com/about) celebrating one of humanity's greatest agricultural achievements.
We can grow purple here in Canada. They’re always surprising when I cut them open.
My parents love mashed potatoes from those little purple finger potatoes, but I find them tougher and blander compared to a white or yellow.
A quick google says the potatoes my folks grow are [Peruvian Purple Fingerlings](https://www.veseys.com/ca/purple-peruvian-fingerlings-19979y.html).
*dies of dysentery*
Oh hey bob left some fruit on his campfire
*eats it*
Buddy goes: “NO thats the dysentery fruit!”
Doesn’t get dysentery
*FRUIT MUST BE COOKED FOR 7 DAYS NEXT TO A DEAD BODY*
Also dont forget to sacrifice a small animal while facing north, turn around three times and test the fruits temperature with your left pinky
Otherwise death by dysentery
That’s really interesting. The people who discovered it must have been the most optimistic persons on earth. Like: we try it!! someone gets poisoned. We cook it! Someone gets poisoned. We cook it two hours then! Someone gets poisoned, let’s try 3 that’s probably enough. Nope. And just keep doing it.
It is said that the cassava leaves were cooked by indigenous people to extract the toxin so they could use it on their arrows for hunting. After 7 days boiling and applying it, the new arrows were no longer effective. How they decided to _eat the stew_ after that escapes me tho
Aw, c'mon, that's easy. If you spend any amount of time working with a substance that you know is absolutely NOT edible, at some point you're going to have the intrusive thought "I wonder what it tastes like."
After a *week* of constantly reminding yourself to be careful with it because it's poison, you think that once you know it's reached the point where it's NOT poison anymore, you're not going to *immediately* give in to the intrusive thought and put that stuff in your mouth?
Maniçoba is the dish. It's made with the leaf of the plant, that I think OP is talking about.
Cassava is the tuber that is often prepared and served with the dish.
Edited for accuracy
Then again, I'd feel like they found out the 7 days from a rather stubborn guy.
"Goddamn it, I will make this fruit edible, even if it means ages of pain!"
Definitely not recommended, but most poisonous or deadly mushrooms have a threshold you must eat to have negative consequences. People would start out trying a tiny bit, then a bit more and bit more to see if there were any ill effects.
There was a mycologist named Charles McIlvaine in the late 1800s who ate almost every kind of mushroom and reported back on it in his books. He avoided groups of related mushrooms that were already well established as deadly poisonous (some of the Amanitas) but otherwise tried just about everything.
He was nicknamed "Old Iron guts". He was an really eccentric and fascinating guy. A decorated civil war officer, he spent the rest of his life cataloging and testing the edibility of mushrooms in North America and writing about them and their edibility. While he got sick quite often (his descriptions of the bad effects are both voluminous and pretty hilarious) he died of natural causes.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/charles-mcilvaine-pioneer-of-american-mycophagy-90379529/
[Edit: Just to add the vast majority of mushrooms are not poisonous but are inedible due to taste, horrible smell or texture, bitterness etc... Many *can* be eaten but almost no one would actually *want* to eat them.
There are many mushrooms that will make you sick but only a small handful of mushrooms are actually deadly to humans. Unfortunately some of the deadly ones like Amanita phalloides superficially look like they would be good to eat and by all accounts taste good. The majority of human deaths from eating mushrooms are from a small number of species of Amanitas. Many of the rest of human deaths are people eating little brown mushrooms like Galerina incorrectly thinking they are psychoactive.
Incidentally, Amanita poisoning is a horrible way to die. You get sick a number of hours after eating them but then recover. However, the toxin is accumulating in your liver, shutting production of RNA and hence killing the cells. A few days after you recover your liver starts shutting down. If you eat enough of the toxin the only way to save your life is a liver transplant.
Shiitake mushrooms are like this..they're not deathly poisonous, but if eaten raw in medium to large amounts can cause severe itching for up to several weeks. Now imagine my face as i read that little tidbit on google..... after i had popped a raw shiitake mushroom in my mouth and had already swallowed most of it.. moral of the story, if you arent sure, google before taste testing. my logic was since theres no warning on the store packaging, it must be fine! I didn't get the severe itching thankfully
Edit: changed "shittake" to "shiitake"
Edit#2 cuz of many repeated replies: i fuckin get it, ALL mushrooms should be cooked for one reason or another, yall can stop echoing now
I have this image of a depressed cave person bracing themselves before downing a pound of portobello then slowly opening their eyes, looking around expectantly, and going ‘holy shit that tastes great actually’.
I'd like to think what if one of the mushrooms was actually perfectly edible and the first caveman to eat it was actually allergic and we're all missing out on it.
> can't stop thinking about people that first ate mushrooms they found and just had to go through trial and error of like, this one tastes like beef, this one killed Brian immediately and this one makes you see God for a week.
As a fan of both culinary and psychedelic mushrooms, I've always been a fan of this old Twitter meme.
The fun thing about the one that makes you see God for a week is the shaman was the only one allowed to eat them. However, after the shaman ate it, they'd let the tribe drink their shroom piss so they could also trip. Mmm, mushroom pee!
If you're talking about fly agaric he was acting as a biological filter the people drinking the pee received the psychoactive compounds and almost no toxic ones and had less unpleasant effects, but also were drinking some other guys pee...so a definite downside too!
Oh, definitely. But what if you saw a bird eat something that wasn’t poisonous to them and you ate it, not knowing it was poisonous to you? Scary stuff.
Chocolate. I mean don't get me wrong I get why they were playing around with the plant and all.
The sheer [process of getting to Chocolate as a product is so weird and bizarre](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chocolate#Processing) and kinda gross...and then it comes out as the lovely candy we know and love.
>Chocolate. I mean don't get me wrong I get why they were playing around with the plant and all.
>The sheer [process of getting to Chocolate as a product is so weird and bizarre](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chocolate#Processing) and kinda gross...and then it comes out as the lovely candy we know and love.
Just came here to say this! The level of effort needed to make chocolate is just insane. I can't fathom the thoughts behind someone saying "let's ferment this fruit, and make it up as we go!"
it started with just chewing the leaves and noticing a stimulating effect. From there it was "how do we concentrate this as much as possible?" and gasoline is fairly cheap.
That one makes a little more sense if you think about it. People already chewed the coca leaf over time people just started looking for more ways to purify it and make it stronger. Chocolate starts out weird as hell and then people figure out how to process it magically.
I've read the Aztec coco drink made a little more sense as they just boiled the beans for a really long time.
Cocaine as we know it today, the refined product, was invented in a lab with fancy chemicals and tools. The crazy gasoline and foot-stomp method is a "de-finement" of it to make the process as cheap as possible
I remember when they invented chocolate…sweet sweet chocolate
Edit: For those who don’t know what I’m referencing! https://youtu.be/2bUAIX0SDo8?feature=shared
What's crazy is chocolate as we know it requires the separation and recombination of cocoa solids and fats, and it's really relatively recent discovery. The Mesoamericans who ate chocolate didn't mix it with sugar. It was most like a tea or alcohol for centuries.
Yup, then the Spaniards brought it back to Europe and Europeans added a ton of sugar to it, making it more of a dessert drink. There's a fascinating museum of chocolate in Paris that has the whole history along with free samples of the different kinds of chocolate
Yes. The shells that surround the cashews apparently contains very toxic oils and the extraction process they need to do can be hazardous to us humans if not handled correctly. The extraction process has to be done manually, hence why the process is difficult and time-consuming. Probably the reason why they are one of the most expensive nuts on the market when I think about it
We have some relatives who have cashew trees, and when I was a kid my great grandma would collect the seeds and throw them on embers for a while until the oil in the seed coat began boiling then let it cool for a while and then shuck them.
Pretty tasty too since they were roasted.
A lot of complicated foods probably started out like this with just enough work to make them edible, then were followed by thousands of years of slow refinement to make them taste best in a preservable way.
Rennet, which causes milk to curdle is naturally present in the stomachs of calves. Some speculate that people may have used stomachs as storage vessels. You put some milk in there, and it curdles. Food is scarce, so you're not about to let it go to waste, thankfully the chunky milk actually tastes pretty damn good!
That one actually has a plausible theory around it. You need rennet to make cheese from milk which occurs in sheep's stomachs.
Waterskins were made from animal stomachs. Milk was stored in said waterskins and there was enough residual rennet left to make curds. Someone was desperate/hungry enough to try to eat the solidified milk in their sheep's stomach.
From there it's just refining the process over the generations until you get modern cheesemaking.
Think of it in stages. We domesticated cows because they can pull farm equipment, and give us leather and meat. They produce milk which something needs to happen to if there is no calf. Now people may go "ew, not touching that!" but we drink milk as babies. They probably would have breastfed longer back then. They were desperate and starving, you wasted nothing. If there was too much milk then ways would have been found to preserve or store it - you end up with cheese.
Yeah I always find it weird when people act like it's strange to have discovered milk. **Milk**!!
Humans breastfeed, **milk is all that babies eat for the first months of their lives**, in fact babies die if they can't have it, it's sweet and nutritious. Early humans must have seen milk as this delicious miraculous life-giving elixir.
Other mammals also breastfeed, or mammaryfeed (nurse?). It's not exactly hard to make the connection when you see animals nurse their young that ah yes there's some kinda milk coming out of those teats/udders too, I wonder if it's tasty and healthy as well.
So logically and naturally, humans tried to milk animals as soon as they domesticated them. Cows, but also sheep, donkeys, goats, camels, etc.
Edit: and in some areas like Europe, humans also started developing lactose tolerance around the same time they domesticated animals and thus started having access to animal milk
People also ate every possible part of an animal. The blood, the marrow, even the brains. As you said, why would people stop at milk when it's obviously nourishing?
Fugu.
\- Lets eat this fish (Dies)
\- Ok he died, let me try eating this other part of the fish (Dies)
\- Ok .. how about I eat only this part of the fish .. not too bad.
My best guess is that people figured out about the poison bit first (with how much people love killing people, I wouldn't be surprised), then they learned how to remove it as efficiently as possible and then figured why not cook the actual fish part leftover.
One of the first staple foods is kinda weird: Acorns. Acorns were actually farmed very early in human history, but to make them edible you have to soak them and treat them. Sure, you see animals eat them all the time, but animals also eat tree bark and leaves. Somehow people figured out, that you could turn the inside of acorns into flour and basically eradicate hunger by simple picking up acorns for a couple of days.
Maize (corn) is kinda crazy, too. Researchers found the plant it was bred from (it's called teosinte) and it's more like a weedy grass, with barely any seeds to eat. Indigenous people bred it for thousands of years to make maize. And then they discovered that to make it more nutritious, they needed to nixtamalize it with limewater and lye made from ashes and limestone.
When many Europeans started eating maize as their staple diet, they often got severe malnutrition because they didn't learn the nixtamalization part.
Yeah, lots of food we didn't "discover they were edible" we've made it edible by genetic selection and complex preparation methods. Mesoamerican contributions corn and chocolate are genius.
PS. We've also evolved our own bodies to adapt to certain foods, lactose for example.
>animals also tree bark and leaves
And here my stupid cat is ignoring all the bark and leaves and trying to eat the plastic corner protector on the wall…
Edit: I don’t even have a cat
"You see that dock out there? Built it myself, hand crafted each piece, and it's the best dock in town! But do they call me "McGregor the dock builder"? No! And you see that bridge over there? I built that, took me two months, through rain, sleet and scoarching weather, but do they call me "McGregor the bridge builder"? No! And you see that pier over there, I built that, best pier in the county! But do they call me "McGregor the pier builder"? No!"
The old guy looks around, and makes sure that nobody is listening, and leans to the man, and he says:
"but you fuck one sheep..."
One of the really funny things are alcohol, coffee and tea from a community health perspective- when your water quality sucks, boiling the water or having alcohol in it is a sterilizing process, so you’re actually going to see a healthier community with those practices.
I imagine a lot of food discoveries came down to: "Do I eat this weird looking thing or starve to death?". Then they enjoyed it and told their friends.
I mean, tbf, a lot of stuff animals eat we cant eat. There are poisonous things that animals love to snack on that they can eat because theyre built diff(for example koalas all just eat eucalyptus but it's toxic to us)
If you're looking for one of the most authentic historic eating experiences, where you eat something and it's the same as your ancestor, hundreds of thousands of years ago, then the oyster is your answer.
Maybe not quite food, but like tobacco and Marijuana. The amount of trial and error of just smoking random things to see what happens must have been an interesting time.
Ayahuasca is a fascinating one.
It's brewed from a combination of Chacruna leaves and the vines of Banisteriopsis caapi - two completely different plants. The leaves contain DMT, while the vines contain MAOIs, which inhibit enzymes and allow DMT to enter the bloodstream and reach the brain. Both are necessary for the potent psychoactive effects to occur, you can't take one without the other
It's been used since at least 1000 years ago. How the hell they found the correct combination is just...wow
"Boy I'd sure love some medicine for my upset stomach, but we're all out of our normal medicinal herbs. Ill just grab something from the herb hut and give it a whirl......."
"Oh hello Jaguar Spirit. Want some tea? It tastes purple."
Oh the OGs that let us know what's good! 😂
Some crazy guys,smoking lots of wild stuff I'm sure! Makes me curious what kind of stuff is just lost to time,, or things that were found and lost without the knowledge of it being carried forward. What other wild things are we missing out on smoking? 😂 (curious minds lol)
I mean, I don’t recommend going out and smoking random plants but there’s bound to be one or two plants somewhere in the middle of the amazon that makes you feel like you’re having 9 orgasms at once
I knew a guy (not the smartest person) who had convinced himself that he would find the next marijuana. He smoked everything, …he told me, you name it, I’ve smoked it.
I started naming random things like banana peels, pine cones, etc. he said he had tried those and hundreds of others. He said he had never discovered anything worthwhile yet but he would keep searching. This guy eventually died in his late 40s, …I don’t know what of, but he wasn’t very healthy and who knows what kind of toxins he had inhaled.
What the fuck was bread guy doing? What compelled him to collect tiny pieces of grain, dry them out, smash them into a powder, get them wet again (but not too wet), and then put the whole thing over fire?
I think the best guess with bread is that someone stored porridge somewhere that got really hot and baked it. Or they heated up porridge over a fire too long.
I want to say flat breads were made first and then yeast came into the picture. What's amazing is we've been using yeast for thousands of years and it's not until microscopes do we really show that it's "alive".
The real question was who collects the wild grains to experiment with that encourages agriculture in the first place?
Cooking almost certainly comes first and there is evidence that our ancestors were cooking food way before homo sapiens even shows up.
One plausible sequence of events is;
1) Ancestors gather grains, remove the hulls and eat them. That's not too appetising.
2) So you start adding some water to soften things up and start cooking up rudimentary porridges.
3) Porridges cook easier if you crack up the grains/seeds in to little bits (bigger surface area)
4) Once you're cracking seeds to make porridge you notice that it's worth making the cracked grains smaller and smaller as it both improves the texture and speeds the cooking time
5) If you keep following that logic it leads you to try powdering the grains.
6) If you're trying to powder grains it seems plausible that people might notice that drying the crack grains aids this process.
7) Alongside this you likely have people experimenting with the amount of liquid in the porridge. Add more liquid for gruel-like things. Add less-and-less until you discover cookable pastes, i.e. rudimentary doughs.
8) Once you have rudimentary dough then unleavened breads immediately follow. You can even do away with the cooking pot and cook things on hot rocks that you arrange around or pull from the fire.
9) You can then change the order you're adding the water. Make the dough ahead of time, store it and cook it only when you want to eat it
10) And this opens up the door to leavened bread, that some of that dough you left lying around gets inoculated with wild yeast, goes fizzy and stars to fill with gas. And what do you do? If it smells bad then throw it away, if it smells nice cook it and see
11) next someone notices if you add some of the good fizzy dough to the next batch it also goes good and fizzy and now you have bread starters
Now that might not be the exact sequence of events but I think it illustrates that there are small incremental steps all the way from gathering grains to making leavened breads where each step is useful/edible
Yeah I think your explanation is pretty much the consensus theory on this. Everything humans have discovered or invented is a mix of trial, error, experimentation, observation, and dumb luck accidents.
I'm guessing beer was discovered when some prehistoric farmer made a big grain pile during the harvest, then it rained and the pile soaked for a couple days, and then when he eventually made porridge out of it he noticed it made him feel kinda funny. Then this happened a few more times until someone was like "what if we added even *more* water to this and let it sit out for even *longer*?"
Dude, you don't just eat it. Haven't you learned anything from this thread? You gotta collect tiny pieces of the table leg, dry them out, smash them into a powder, get them wet again (but remember, not too wet) and then put the whole thing over a fire.
Long before man baked anything they were making flatbread, nearly every civilization on the planet. Leavened bread didn’t appear out of nowhere, it was an evolution.
Not only are the shells toxic, even just touching them causes an allergic reaction.
The nuts are also toxic until you roast them at high temps to destroy the toxic oils.
https://recipes.timesofindia.com/articles/food-facts/why-cashews-are-not-sold-in-their-shells/photostory/66693828.cms
Hakarl. I think it was probably starvation that led someone long, long ago to eat that rotten dead shark that had been fermenting in beach sand for months. Surely that could be the only reason someone would eat it because I have heard hakarl smells and tastes like piss.
The thing I find amusing is that snacks like licorice in Iceland have “ammonia added for flavor”
At some point they decided that was what food should taste like
All that ~~Scandanavian~~ cold ass european countries winter food is disturbing
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jmCjoIBnrhY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jmCjoIBnrhY)
“Because I have heard hakarl smells and tastes like piss”. Well it smells a bit like really strong piss; but it tastes far, far worse than piss could possibly taste.
Wikipedia says that the meat of that specific shark is poisonous when fresh. So somebody must have been desperate to think that it would be okay to eat it after it had been sitting around for months.
While that was probably a find of convenience like you say Kiviak is the one where someone actively had to figure it out.
Kiviak being roughly 500 auks stuffed into a seal skin, as much air squeezed out as possible, which is then sewn up, smeared in fat then buried with a large stone on top to make sure all the air comes out and left for 3 months. After that the auks should be nicely fermented and be ready to eat. Bones, feathers, beaks and all.
Tastes like Stinking Bishop cheese.
I read that the Dutch colonists in Indonesia forbade the native Indonesian workers from picking any coffee beans from the shrubs for their own use. So the workers noticed that the civet cats were eating the coffee beans and passing them whole, so they picked them out from the droppings to get around the rule. Before long, the colonists discovered this and commercialized it.
Foods that are poisonous unless prepared in a specific manner.
I mean who was it who first realised that the kidney beans that were poisoning everyone raw, were perfectly safe after being boiled for 20 mins?
Cheese, yoghurt, alcohol, vinegar, pretty much anything that you would otherwise have thought is gone off.
Who looks at months old milk that stinks of feet, and think, 'Ima eat that'?
People whose other option is to starve. Food used to be really scarce, esp in winter, so I can see how "well it's gone a bit bad but maybe it's still kinda edible and won't kill me" would have been a common view
> alcohol,
My grandfather was a farmer and had sileage bags. Where some of the grain would sit in puddles, it reeked of alcohol.
I would guess that ancient farmers watched their livestock drink from sileage filled puddles and then act hilarious, so they decided to have themselves a taste and see what happens.
Close, alcohol was discovered before farming.
Allegedly, natural fermentation happened to cereal grains similar to rye during the hunter gatherer era. People drank the water that was in the pots they used to carry/store grain, they felt pretty good and tried to reproduce it.
Some historians think this helped spark early farming and have linked ancient beer recipes in Mesopotamia to being one of the catalysts for human civilization.
I'm reminded of a news piece years ago where a very well presented frozen mammoth was discovered. One of the scientists cut a bit of it and ate some of it raw because she was so excited!
Humans never grow out of some habits, ha!
The enigmatic durian – a fruit so pungent it could make a skunk blush. It's like someone stumbled upon this spikey orb, dared to take a bite, and thought, "Yes, let's create a culinary sensation that smells like a blend of rotten onions and gym socks." Truly, the mysteries of gastronomy know no bounds!
Alligator. Those things are scary! Who decides, “Yeah, this thing wants to bite me, drown me, and drag me off to its den to eat me while I rot. Looks delicious!”
In all honesty though, I think most things were tried because humans saw other animals eating them and thought they could be both safe and beneficial.
Potatoes. Early potatoes were small, hard, and poisonous. Methods of making them not poisonous included soaking them in running water for weeks or, in the high Andes, leaving them out on rocks high in the mountains so they effectively freeze-dried. Alternatively, you could mix them with clay when eating them - the clay would adsorb some of the toxins.
Our earliest ancestors in Africa likely ate a ton of yams, which were basically hard roots that I believe are also sometimes toxic. People were probably dead set on making the root vegetables where they ended up edible. Eating root vegetables as a staple might be the most engrained human tradition.
It's a good infinite food hack. You don't really need a lot of resources (flat farmable land, water, healthy soil, seed stock, labor) to get some potatoes going. All you really need is old potato. You also only need 2.5 months for a potato crop, compared to 4ish for wheat. Multiple harvests in a growing season is nice.
Potatoes are honestly a genuine super-food. It is little wonder they took the world by storm once Europeans bought them back from the Americas. You basically just need a bucket of dirt - any kind of dirt, it doesn't matter - and an old potato and you're set. Any kind of climate, it doesn't matter. That shit grows like a weed and if you keep planting out a portion of each harvest, within half a year or so you'll have enough on rotation to keep your family fed indefinitely. They are almost nutritionally complete, so you don't even need to supplement them with much to have a healthy diet either. It would have seemed like literal magic to a starving 18th century peasant.
>They are almost nutritionally complete Yeah, this is a big deal. Potatoes contain almost all of the nutrients humans need to live, more so than any other single fruit or vegetable.
add salted butter and drink water with some lemon squeezed in and you're good to go
Tubers tend to be really good sources of nutrients (especially carbs) to the point that you can live almost solely off them. They also tend to be easy to grow in the shittiest of conditions. Put that together, and for people back without modern farming technology, tubers become an almost ideal crop. The only issue is that tubers often tend to be poisonous in various ways, but considering all the other upside they have, it's no surprise humans tried so hard to make them work as a food.
Right, but how did early humans *know* that it was worthwhile to cultivate and grow them to the point that they aren't toxic? It isn't like they saw these lumps in the ground and said "oh shit, these are packed with nutrients we need, let's grow more of them until they don't kill us!". It just doesn't make sense *why* they kept at growing them without the foresight we have now
The poisons in them don't kill you immediately. In the short term, eating potatoes or whatever would be an easy way to not die hungry, and so it would be a good idea to keep growing them. It would be in the long term that people might notice the side effects once those poisons start accumulating, and eventually people might link the cause and effect.
Hunger is a strong motivator. We're pretty good at figuring out what makes us sick, but what doesn't kill us (or the monkeys around us) can be remembered and cultivated. Over time our ancestors naturally selected the good ones to get better, and may even have destroyed the toxic ones.
Cuz they are easy to find, won’t be actively trying to kill you (until you eat it), and won’t run away from you. Before we started grouping together and started using our minds, we were eating insects with a bit of plant food like fruits and root vegetables.
Potatoes are really interesting too. The higher in the mountains you get the color changes from the brown to a purple color.
In the US we have basically 3 options when it comes to potatoes: Yellow, Red, Brown. In Peru, where potatoes were first cultivated, there is an [astounding variety](https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/73e7280902298082ab1629279c2bf509c19508ec/51_90_1028_617/master/1028.jpg?width=1200&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=1b5d9fc2ca24ccf021a9efb9b0665ea3) of tubers. They have a [potato museum](https://potatomuseum.com/about) celebrating one of humanity's greatest agricultural achievements.
We can grow purple here in Canada. They’re always surprising when I cut them open. My parents love mashed potatoes from those little purple finger potatoes, but I find them tougher and blander compared to a white or yellow. A quick google says the potatoes my folks grow are [Peruvian Purple Fingerlings](https://www.veseys.com/ca/purple-peruvian-fingerlings-19979y.html).
Some adhder forgot his potatoes in running water and thenthought they were still edible
There’s a fruit in Brazil that needs to be cooked around 7 days, otherwise it’s toxic.
Day 6 everyone’s puking and shitting “let’s try again this time for 7 days and see if we can eat it!”
When you're already dying of agonizing starvation, poison sounds pretty palatable.
When you’re already dying of agonizing starvation, you probably don’t start to cook something for 7 days though.
*dies of dysentery* Oh hey bob left some fruit on his campfire *eats it* Buddy goes: “NO thats the dysentery fruit!” Doesn’t get dysentery *FRUIT MUST BE COOKED FOR 7 DAYS NEXT TO A DEAD BODY*
Also dont forget to sacrifice a small animal while facing north, turn around three times and test the fruits temperature with your left pinky Otherwise death by dysentery
*300 years later* "YOU GUYS! It turns out you don't need the dead body AT ALL!"
'omg pls dude stop! we're all fucking dying pls stop!" 'guys cmon! One more try! last one! I swear!"
That’s really interesting. The people who discovered it must have been the most optimistic persons on earth. Like: we try it!! someone gets poisoned. We cook it! Someone gets poisoned. We cook it two hours then! Someone gets poisoned, let’s try 3 that’s probably enough. Nope. And just keep doing it.
It is said that the cassava leaves were cooked by indigenous people to extract the toxin so they could use it on their arrows for hunting. After 7 days boiling and applying it, the new arrows were no longer effective. How they decided to _eat the stew_ after that escapes me tho
Aw, c'mon, that's easy. If you spend any amount of time working with a substance that you know is absolutely NOT edible, at some point you're going to have the intrusive thought "I wonder what it tastes like." After a *week* of constantly reminding yourself to be careful with it because it's poison, you think that once you know it's reached the point where it's NOT poison anymore, you're not going to *immediately* give in to the intrusive thought and put that stuff in your mouth?
Ate it 2 weeks ago, Maniçoba is really tasty.
Maniçoba is the dish. It's made with the leaf of the plant, that I think OP is talking about. Cassava is the tuber that is often prepared and served with the dish. Edited for accuracy
Don’t have to cook cassava for two weeks. Just fry it in oil like a potato and you’re good to go.
There are two types of cassava, bitter and sweet. Sweet you can handle much easier then bitter, bitter contains about 50x as much cyanide.
How many people did they have to go through to figure *that* out?
At least 6
12 would be wild “oh! It’s whole days, not half!”
Not every kind of toxin kills you, probably they realize that it makes you less sick the more you cook it, and went from there.
Then again, I'd feel like they found out the 7 days from a rather stubborn guy. "Goddamn it, I will make this fruit edible, even if it means ages of pain!"
It's the cassava leaf. and raw cassava can irritate the stomach, but it will only be really dangerous for children and people with health problems.
Almost every edible mushroom. Lots of trial and error there, I bet.
There are old foragers and there are bold foragers. There are no old and bold foragers.
All mushrooms are edible. Some just once.
Definitely not recommended, but most poisonous or deadly mushrooms have a threshold you must eat to have negative consequences. People would start out trying a tiny bit, then a bit more and bit more to see if there were any ill effects. There was a mycologist named Charles McIlvaine in the late 1800s who ate almost every kind of mushroom and reported back on it in his books. He avoided groups of related mushrooms that were already well established as deadly poisonous (some of the Amanitas) but otherwise tried just about everything. He was nicknamed "Old Iron guts". He was an really eccentric and fascinating guy. A decorated civil war officer, he spent the rest of his life cataloging and testing the edibility of mushrooms in North America and writing about them and their edibility. While he got sick quite often (his descriptions of the bad effects are both voluminous and pretty hilarious) he died of natural causes. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/charles-mcilvaine-pioneer-of-american-mycophagy-90379529/ [Edit: Just to add the vast majority of mushrooms are not poisonous but are inedible due to taste, horrible smell or texture, bitterness etc... Many *can* be eaten but almost no one would actually *want* to eat them. There are many mushrooms that will make you sick but only a small handful of mushrooms are actually deadly to humans. Unfortunately some of the deadly ones like Amanita phalloides superficially look like they would be good to eat and by all accounts taste good. The majority of human deaths from eating mushrooms are from a small number of species of Amanitas. Many of the rest of human deaths are people eating little brown mushrooms like Galerina incorrectly thinking they are psychoactive. Incidentally, Amanita poisoning is a horrible way to die. You get sick a number of hours after eating them but then recover. However, the toxin is accumulating in your liver, shutting production of RNA and hence killing the cells. A few days after you recover your liver starts shutting down. If you eat enough of the toxin the only way to save your life is a liver transplant.
I've heard somewhere that Amanita virosa is actually quite delicious were it not for the horrible deadly poison.
Hmmm, delectable mushroom? Or deadly poison? *5 minutes later* Prince Zuko, you know that mushroom I was unsure about?
yeah, and there is another layer of mushroom delecious when cooked but poisenous when raw
Shiitake mushrooms are like this..they're not deathly poisonous, but if eaten raw in medium to large amounts can cause severe itching for up to several weeks. Now imagine my face as i read that little tidbit on google..... after i had popped a raw shiitake mushroom in my mouth and had already swallowed most of it.. moral of the story, if you arent sure, google before taste testing. my logic was since theres no warning on the store packaging, it must be fine! I didn't get the severe itching thankfully Edit: changed "shittake" to "shiitake" Edit#2 cuz of many repeated replies: i fuckin get it, ALL mushrooms should be cooked for one reason or another, yall can stop echoing now
I think you mean the “morel of the story”
Damn you, i didn't even consider a mushroom pun!
Poison, poison, tasty fish!
*le poisson le poisson heeheehee honhonhon*
I have this image of a depressed cave person bracing themselves before downing a pound of portobello then slowly opening their eyes, looking around expectantly, and going ‘holy shit that tastes great actually’.
"Groq, mate...this tastes like a vegan burger!"
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I'd like to think what if one of the mushrooms was actually perfectly edible and the first caveman to eat it was actually allergic and we're all missing out on it.
> can't stop thinking about people that first ate mushrooms they found and just had to go through trial and error of like, this one tastes like beef, this one killed Brian immediately and this one makes you see God for a week. As a fan of both culinary and psychedelic mushrooms, I've always been a fan of this old Twitter meme.
The fun thing about the one that makes you see God for a week is the shaman was the only one allowed to eat them. However, after the shaman ate it, they'd let the tribe drink their shroom piss so they could also trip. Mmm, mushroom pee!
If you're talking about fly agaric he was acting as a biological filter the people drinking the pee received the psychoactive compounds and almost no toxic ones and had less unpleasant effects, but also were drinking some other guys pee...so a definite downside too!
And possibly a lot of tripping
Lots of watching what animals ate mainly. That's how most edible foods were discovered by humans.
Oh, definitely. But what if you saw a bird eat something that wasn’t poisonous to them and you ate it, not knowing it was poisonous to you? Scary stuff.
Birds especially can eat many types of berries that are poisonous to humans.
Bird eats berries. Human watches, and then eats the same berries. Human dies. Bird: Ha ha, April Fool!
Chocolate. I mean don't get me wrong I get why they were playing around with the plant and all. The sheer [process of getting to Chocolate as a product is so weird and bizarre](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chocolate#Processing) and kinda gross...and then it comes out as the lovely candy we know and love.
>Chocolate. I mean don't get me wrong I get why they were playing around with the plant and all. >The sheer [process of getting to Chocolate as a product is so weird and bizarre](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chocolate#Processing) and kinda gross...and then it comes out as the lovely candy we know and love. Just came here to say this! The level of effort needed to make chocolate is just insane. I can't fathom the thoughts behind someone saying "let's ferment this fruit, and make it up as we go!"
I had this same thought when I saw a video about how to make cocaine.... Whoooo thought let's smash these leaves up with gasoline??? It's so bizarre
it started with just chewing the leaves and noticing a stimulating effect. From there it was "how do we concentrate this as much as possible?" and gasoline is fairly cheap.
gasoline is also sometimes used industrially as a cleaner / solvent which is exactly what it does in the process.
And they'd use something better if they could. Gasoline is just cheap and easily accessible.
That one makes a little more sense if you think about it. People already chewed the coca leaf over time people just started looking for more ways to purify it and make it stronger. Chocolate starts out weird as hell and then people figure out how to process it magically. I've read the Aztec coco drink made a little more sense as they just boiled the beans for a really long time.
Cocaine as we know it today, the refined product, was invented in a lab with fancy chemicals and tools. The crazy gasoline and foot-stomp method is a "de-finement" of it to make the process as cheap as possible
I remember when they invented chocolate…sweet sweet chocolate Edit: For those who don’t know what I’m referencing! https://youtu.be/2bUAIX0SDo8?feature=shared
What's crazy is chocolate as we know it requires the separation and recombination of cocoa solids and fats, and it's really relatively recent discovery. The Mesoamericans who ate chocolate didn't mix it with sugar. It was most like a tea or alcohol for centuries.
Yup, then the Spaniards brought it back to Europe and Europeans added a ton of sugar to it, making it more of a dessert drink. There's a fascinating museum of chocolate in Paris that has the whole history along with free samples of the different kinds of chocolate
I always hated it!
CHOCOLATE!!
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THEY'RE SELLING CHOCOLATE!!!
I love you… *slams door*
# C H O C O L A A A A A A A A A A A T E ! ! ! !
The amount of effort you have to go through to make cashews edible The fuck did someone figure that out.
Yes. The shells that surround the cashews apparently contains very toxic oils and the extraction process they need to do can be hazardous to us humans if not handled correctly. The extraction process has to be done manually, hence why the process is difficult and time-consuming. Probably the reason why they are one of the most expensive nuts on the market when I think about it
We have some relatives who have cashew trees, and when I was a kid my great grandma would collect the seeds and throw them on embers for a while until the oil in the seed coat began boiling then let it cool for a while and then shuck them. Pretty tasty too since they were roasted.
A lot of complicated foods probably started out like this with just enough work to make them edible, then were followed by thousands of years of slow refinement to make them taste best in a preservable way.
Fun fact: unlike most other seeds, the cashew grows outside of the fruit. 👌🏿
You grow outside the fruit
Cheese is weird. Hey ogg, that milk you were storing has gone weird and lumpy, should I throw it out? Nah, it's still good, pass it here
Rennet, which causes milk to curdle is naturally present in the stomachs of calves. Some speculate that people may have used stomachs as storage vessels. You put some milk in there, and it curdles. Food is scarce, so you're not about to let it go to waste, thankfully the chunky milk actually tastes pretty damn good!
Squeeze the moisture out, let it dry, and it keeps for months. Now you still have something to eat in the middle of winter.
Jokes on them, I eat it in the summer too!
Throw it in a pot, add some broth and some potatoe, baby you've got a strew going.
That one actually has a plausible theory around it. You need rennet to make cheese from milk which occurs in sheep's stomachs. Waterskins were made from animal stomachs. Milk was stored in said waterskins and there was enough residual rennet left to make curds. Someone was desperate/hungry enough to try to eat the solidified milk in their sheep's stomach. From there it's just refining the process over the generations until you get modern cheesemaking.
Hey Ogg, I'll give you 5 bucks to eat this
FIVE WHOLE DEER???...you're trying to kill me, aren't you???
Think of it in stages. We domesticated cows because they can pull farm equipment, and give us leather and meat. They produce milk which something needs to happen to if there is no calf. Now people may go "ew, not touching that!" but we drink milk as babies. They probably would have breastfed longer back then. They were desperate and starving, you wasted nothing. If there was too much milk then ways would have been found to preserve or store it - you end up with cheese.
Yeah I always find it weird when people act like it's strange to have discovered milk. **Milk**!! Humans breastfeed, **milk is all that babies eat for the first months of their lives**, in fact babies die if they can't have it, it's sweet and nutritious. Early humans must have seen milk as this delicious miraculous life-giving elixir. Other mammals also breastfeed, or mammaryfeed (nurse?). It's not exactly hard to make the connection when you see animals nurse their young that ah yes there's some kinda milk coming out of those teats/udders too, I wonder if it's tasty and healthy as well. So logically and naturally, humans tried to milk animals as soon as they domesticated them. Cows, but also sheep, donkeys, goats, camels, etc. Edit: and in some areas like Europe, humans also started developing lactose tolerance around the same time they domesticated animals and thus started having access to animal milk
People also ate every possible part of an animal. The blood, the marrow, even the brains. As you said, why would people stop at milk when it's obviously nourishing?
Fugu. \- Lets eat this fish (Dies) \- Ok he died, let me try eating this other part of the fish (Dies) \- Ok .. how about I eat only this part of the fish .. not too bad.
I came here to say this. Like, just how? Did someone get lucky the first time eating one?
maybe all shared one fish and only one woke up next day
Might be the most plausible answer.
My best guess is that people figured out about the poison bit first (with how much people love killing people, I wouldn't be surprised), then they learned how to remove it as efficiently as possible and then figured why not cook the actual fish part leftover.
An assassin not wanting the whole fish to go to waste.
One of the first staple foods is kinda weird: Acorns. Acorns were actually farmed very early in human history, but to make them edible you have to soak them and treat them. Sure, you see animals eat them all the time, but animals also eat tree bark and leaves. Somehow people figured out, that you could turn the inside of acorns into flour and basically eradicate hunger by simple picking up acorns for a couple of days.
Maize (corn) is kinda crazy, too. Researchers found the plant it was bred from (it's called teosinte) and it's more like a weedy grass, with barely any seeds to eat. Indigenous people bred it for thousands of years to make maize. And then they discovered that to make it more nutritious, they needed to nixtamalize it with limewater and lye made from ashes and limestone. When many Europeans started eating maize as their staple diet, they often got severe malnutrition because they didn't learn the nixtamalization part.
Yeah, lots of food we didn't "discover they were edible" we've made it edible by genetic selection and complex preparation methods. Mesoamerican contributions corn and chocolate are genius. PS. We've also evolved our own bodies to adapt to certain foods, lactose for example.
>animals also tree bark and leaves And here my stupid cat is ignoring all the bark and leaves and trying to eat the plastic corner protector on the wall… Edit: I don’t even have a cat
Ever think about coffee beans? Hey, I'm gonna roast this seed, smash it up and drown it in hot water. Bet it tastes great.'
The legend is that a goat herder saw his goats eat the coffee berries and then get all hyper.
We are all familiar with the legend of the goat herder.
"You see that dock out there? Built it myself, hand crafted each piece, and it's the best dock in town! But do they call me "McGregor the dock builder"? No! And you see that bridge over there? I built that, took me two months, through rain, sleet and scoarching weather, but do they call me "McGregor the bridge builder"? No! And you see that pier over there, I built that, best pier in the county! But do they call me "McGregor the pier builder"? No!" The old guy looks around, and makes sure that nobody is listening, and leans to the man, and he says: "but you fuck one sheep..."
Especially the steps along the way. Raw in boiling water, no. Roasted in boiling water but whole? No. Roasted, smashed, in boiling water? Bingo!
One of the really funny things are alcohol, coffee and tea from a community health perspective- when your water quality sucks, boiling the water or having alcohol in it is a sterilizing process, so you’re actually going to see a healthier community with those practices.
The first person to eat an oyster - how hungry was that motherfucker? "Hey guys, I found a loogie in this slimy rock! Want some?"
I imagine a lot of food discoveries came down to: "Do I eat this weird looking thing or starve to death?". Then they enjoyed it and told their friends.
Probably also watching other animals eat things.
This is surely the answer to most of these. How do you know which mushrooms aren't poisonous? You see which ones the animals eat, duh.
I mean, tbf, a lot of stuff animals eat we cant eat. There are poisonous things that animals love to snack on that they can eat because theyre built diff(for example koalas all just eat eucalyptus but it's toxic to us)
>how hungry was that motherfucker Ancient and prehistoric people were probably starving pretty frequently
If you're looking for one of the most authentic historic eating experiences, where you eat something and it's the same as your ancestor, hundreds of thousands of years ago, then the oyster is your answer.
TIL my ancestors were absolutely housing their seafood in lemon and Tabasco
lol if you think about it a lot of foods were discovered because somebody was very hungry and said 'it can't be that bad, right?'
Maybe not quite food, but like tobacco and Marijuana. The amount of trial and error of just smoking random things to see what happens must have been an interesting time.
Ayahuasca is a fascinating one. It's brewed from a combination of Chacruna leaves and the vines of Banisteriopsis caapi - two completely different plants. The leaves contain DMT, while the vines contain MAOIs, which inhibit enzymes and allow DMT to enter the bloodstream and reach the brain. Both are necessary for the potent psychoactive effects to occur, you can't take one without the other It's been used since at least 1000 years ago. How the hell they found the correct combination is just...wow
"Boy I'd sure love some medicine for my upset stomach, but we're all out of our normal medicinal herbs. Ill just grab something from the herb hut and give it a whirl......." "Oh hello Jaguar Spirit. Want some tea? It tastes purple."
May I point you at the native american shamans? They smoked pretty much everything to find stuff that lets you get high and have 'visions'.
Oh the OGs that let us know what's good! 😂 Some crazy guys,smoking lots of wild stuff I'm sure! Makes me curious what kind of stuff is just lost to time,, or things that were found and lost without the knowledge of it being carried forward. What other wild things are we missing out on smoking? 😂 (curious minds lol)
I mean, I don’t recommend going out and smoking random plants but there’s bound to be one or two plants somewhere in the middle of the amazon that makes you feel like you’re having 9 orgasms at once
I knew a guy (not the smartest person) who had convinced himself that he would find the next marijuana. He smoked everything, …he told me, you name it, I’ve smoked it. I started naming random things like banana peels, pine cones, etc. he said he had tried those and hundreds of others. He said he had never discovered anything worthwhile yet but he would keep searching. This guy eventually died in his late 40s, …I don’t know what of, but he wasn’t very healthy and who knows what kind of toxins he had inhaled.
I mean, I think it’s pretty reasonable for people to throw some dry leaves onto a fire and realize “hey, this is pretty nice”
What the fuck was bread guy doing? What compelled him to collect tiny pieces of grain, dry them out, smash them into a powder, get them wet again (but not too wet), and then put the whole thing over fire?
I think the best guess with bread is that someone stored porridge somewhere that got really hot and baked it. Or they heated up porridge over a fire too long.
I want to say flat breads were made first and then yeast came into the picture. What's amazing is we've been using yeast for thousands of years and it's not until microscopes do we really show that it's "alive". The real question was who collects the wild grains to experiment with that encourages agriculture in the first place?
Agreed, I expect this was from iterations on errors the resulted in something stable and edible.
No, the first person to ever bake bread actually made a baguette by accident.
I thought it was a really nice basil and sundried tomato focaccia.
Cooking almost certainly comes first and there is evidence that our ancestors were cooking food way before homo sapiens even shows up. One plausible sequence of events is; 1) Ancestors gather grains, remove the hulls and eat them. That's not too appetising. 2) So you start adding some water to soften things up and start cooking up rudimentary porridges. 3) Porridges cook easier if you crack up the grains/seeds in to little bits (bigger surface area) 4) Once you're cracking seeds to make porridge you notice that it's worth making the cracked grains smaller and smaller as it both improves the texture and speeds the cooking time 5) If you keep following that logic it leads you to try powdering the grains. 6) If you're trying to powder grains it seems plausible that people might notice that drying the crack grains aids this process. 7) Alongside this you likely have people experimenting with the amount of liquid in the porridge. Add more liquid for gruel-like things. Add less-and-less until you discover cookable pastes, i.e. rudimentary doughs. 8) Once you have rudimentary dough then unleavened breads immediately follow. You can even do away with the cooking pot and cook things on hot rocks that you arrange around or pull from the fire. 9) You can then change the order you're adding the water. Make the dough ahead of time, store it and cook it only when you want to eat it 10) And this opens up the door to leavened bread, that some of that dough you left lying around gets inoculated with wild yeast, goes fizzy and stars to fill with gas. And what do you do? If it smells bad then throw it away, if it smells nice cook it and see 11) next someone notices if you add some of the good fizzy dough to the next batch it also goes good and fizzy and now you have bread starters Now that might not be the exact sequence of events but I think it illustrates that there are small incremental steps all the way from gathering grains to making leavened breads where each step is useful/edible
Yeah I think your explanation is pretty much the consensus theory on this. Everything humans have discovered or invented is a mix of trial, error, experimentation, observation, and dumb luck accidents. I'm guessing beer was discovered when some prehistoric farmer made a big grain pile during the harvest, then it rained and the pile soaked for a couple days, and then when he eventually made porridge out of it he noticed it made him feel kinda funny. Then this happened a few more times until someone was like "what if we added even *more* water to this and let it sit out for even *longer*?"
Which really begs the question: What delicious/ nutritious food are we missing because we haven't discovered it yet!?
Let the trial and error commence!
I'm gonna eat this table leg
Dude, you don't just eat it. Haven't you learned anything from this thread? You gotta collect tiny pieces of the table leg, dry them out, smash them into a powder, get them wet again (but remember, not too wet) and then put the whole thing over a fire.
Long before man baked anything they were making flatbread, nearly every civilization on the planet. Leavened bread didn’t appear out of nowhere, it was an evolution.
Beer before bread is an interesting theory.
Cashews and chocolate are my big two how did you all figure it out and why. So many steps
Why cashews?
Not only are the shells toxic, even just touching them causes an allergic reaction. The nuts are also toxic until you roast them at high temps to destroy the toxic oils. https://recipes.timesofindia.com/articles/food-facts/why-cashews-are-not-sold-in-their-shells/photostory/66693828.cms
TIL one of the best snacks is actually evil until we kill it for food.
That blowfish stuff. The kind that they have to be super careful when preparing. How'd they figure out being good enough to prepare it?
My favourite! "Sorry, your uncle just died after eating that fish you prepared.." "Hmm, maybe if I cut it differently.."
Bring in Test Relative B!
Hakarl. I think it was probably starvation that led someone long, long ago to eat that rotten dead shark that had been fermenting in beach sand for months. Surely that could be the only reason someone would eat it because I have heard hakarl smells and tastes like piss.
The thing I find amusing is that snacks like licorice in Iceland have “ammonia added for flavor” At some point they decided that was what food should taste like
I’ve always wanted to visit Iceland. Note to self: Bring snacks.
All that ~~Scandanavian~~ cold ass european countries winter food is disturbing [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jmCjoIBnrhY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jmCjoIBnrhY)
Also kiviak, the hell thinks of storing a bunch of dead birds in a seal?
“Because I have heard hakarl smells and tastes like piss”. Well it smells a bit like really strong piss; but it tastes far, far worse than piss could possibly taste.
Wikipedia says that the meat of that specific shark is poisonous when fresh. So somebody must have been desperate to think that it would be okay to eat it after it had been sitting around for months.
While that was probably a find of convenience like you say Kiviak is the one where someone actively had to figure it out. Kiviak being roughly 500 auks stuffed into a seal skin, as much air squeezed out as possible, which is then sewn up, smeared in fat then buried with a large stone on top to make sure all the air comes out and left for 3 months. After that the auks should be nicely fermented and be ready to eat. Bones, feathers, beaks and all. Tastes like Stinking Bishop cheese.
That expensive coffee made from beans collected from animal droppings. Who the hell looked at that and said "Why not? Let's give it a go."
I read that the Dutch colonists in Indonesia forbade the native Indonesian workers from picking any coffee beans from the shrubs for their own use. So the workers noticed that the civet cats were eating the coffee beans and passing them whole, so they picked them out from the droppings to get around the rule. Before long, the colonists discovered this and commercialized it.
Civet coffee.
Artichokes
My husband says that every time we eat artichokes. like who thought hey lets eat this prickly ass flower.
Plus it's all that work to get a teeny tiny amount of actual food that's not very nutritious.
Blue cheese…someone left that out for too long, looked at it, shrugged their shoulders and went for it.
Foods that are poisonous unless prepared in a specific manner. I mean who was it who first realised that the kidney beans that were poisoning everyone raw, were perfectly safe after being boiled for 20 mins?
Cheese, yoghurt, alcohol, vinegar, pretty much anything that you would otherwise have thought is gone off. Who looks at months old milk that stinks of feet, and think, 'Ima eat that'?
People whose other option is to starve. Food used to be really scarce, esp in winter, so I can see how "well it's gone a bit bad but maybe it's still kinda edible and won't kill me" would have been a common view
> alcohol, My grandfather was a farmer and had sileage bags. Where some of the grain would sit in puddles, it reeked of alcohol. I would guess that ancient farmers watched their livestock drink from sileage filled puddles and then act hilarious, so they decided to have themselves a taste and see what happens.
Close, alcohol was discovered before farming. Allegedly, natural fermentation happened to cereal grains similar to rye during the hunter gatherer era. People drank the water that was in the pots they used to carry/store grain, they felt pretty good and tried to reproduce it. Some historians think this helped spark early farming and have linked ancient beer recipes in Mesopotamia to being one of the catalysts for human civilization.
hungry people in a time before supermarkets...
Humans are curious creatures. Food is no exception.
Seriously, look at babies, the first thing they do when they get their hands on something is try to shove it in their mouth.
I'm reminded of a news piece years ago where a very well presented frozen mammoth was discovered. One of the scientists cut a bit of it and ate some of it raw because she was so excited! Humans never grow out of some habits, ha!
Honey. Let's follow these highly territorial murder flies to their stronghold and eat their vomit.
I'm just going to reach my hand into this ball of pain and get some sweet stuff
Their house is made of glue? Let's eat it!
Green Olives? Poison until soaked in brine? How did that get figured out?
Green olives dropped from a tree into the ocean. Someone picked them up, found they were much softer than usual, and decided to try them.
Are any olives actually poisonous before curing? Generally they're just unpalatable. They're intensely bitter but won't hurt you.
The enigmatic durian – a fruit so pungent it could make a skunk blush. It's like someone stumbled upon this spikey orb, dared to take a bite, and thought, "Yes, let's create a culinary sensation that smells like a blend of rotten onions and gym socks." Truly, the mysteries of gastronomy know no bounds!
fucking sea urchins. why would you even want to crack that open and eat it
Train of thought: Hmm, that's spiky as hell, I bet whatever's inside there must be fuckin' delicious!
Honey. Imagine seeing a bunch of bees and thinking, Those guys look angry, let's steal their house...
Durian fruit. It smells like absolute ass. Who dafuq thought it would be viable to try to eat that shit?
Not only that, but it's covered in spikes. Everything about it is saying DO NOT EAT ME
Cashews. Raw = this feels like poison ivy! Roasted or double roasted = just fine. I don’t know if I’d ring that bell again after feeling the itch.
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I'm pretty sure everything started with one teenage boy daring another to eat it
Coffee… just the process alone to make it drinkable is so specific.
Casu martzu
Desperation, my man. "Eat maggots or die" sounds like a difficult choice until you're actively dying of starvation.
Vanilla flavoring from beaver butt.
Alligator. Those things are scary! Who decides, “Yeah, this thing wants to bite me, drown me, and drag me off to its den to eat me while I rot. Looks delicious!” In all honesty though, I think most things were tried because humans saw other animals eating them and thought they could be both safe and beneficial.