* break the plant, put a tiny amount of it on your armpit. If it's not reacting (itching, becoming red, etc) after 10 minutes, continue.
* break the plant, put a tiny amount of it on your lips. If it's not reacting, after 10 minutes, continue.
* break the plant, put a tiny amount of it on your tongue. If it's not reacting after ten minutes, if the taste is not off putting for any reason, and if you don't get any sensation/intuition (for a better word) that something is wrong, continue.
* masticate a tiny amount. Same.
* swallow a tiny amount. Wait for 2 hours. Observe obvious symptoms, but also digestion. It should be easy to process at this amount.
If all that pass (yeah, it's very long), remember this doesn't ensure the plant is perfectly safe, just lowers the risks.
And remember, kids, this is for plants only. Had someone show up touting this in one of my mushroom foraging groups once, where following this advice for every mushroom you see would probably get you killed within ten foraging trips in most areas.
Mushroom foraging isn't nearly as hard to learn as the general public believes, but you don't do it like this.
I've bumped into some homesteaders and permaculturists who love the word 'medicinal'. They don't seem to get that 'medicinal' means "the disease is worse than the cure", not "make salads out of this and enjoy!".
If it were just edible it would be labeled edible in the literature. If you consume it in a way or quantity that isn't recommended, well, there's a reason you don't see this stuff in the grocery store.
The reason is next to no company/investor wants to fund double blind clinical research on a natural product to come up with an FDA/medically sound treatment regimen due to there being no monopoly privileges conferred for doing so, therefore rendering it unprofitable from a capitalist free market point of view.
Big difference. It's not that all medicinal plants can be worse than the condition off the bat, it's that no one can make money by figuring out a dosage and putting it through the proper channels to allow manufacture and utilization for that purpose.
Herbalists have been doing their best to maintain a corpus of knowledge around these procedures for centuries. It isn't their fault that our boner for letting the market arbitrate ever aspect of our lives keeps useful research from being done.
I think you misread that. They didn't say that medicinal plants were worse than the condition - rather the opposite. The point they were making was "better than being ill" is not the same as "you will always feel better so eat it at any meal".
That's a bit overly cautious for identified edibles outside of a couple that can cause extreme reactions (raw shiitake, for example), but it's much better to be overly cautious with mushrooms than to be overly bold.
Eh, its not a bad test. Chicken of the woods is edible and quite delicious. But, some people(including me) will have severe gastrointestinal distress after eating. Mushrooms produce a plethora of compounds that people may react to. Much better to try in small doses the first time.
That test almost certainly wouldn't trigger your CotW GI issues -- I also have issues with CotW unless it is cooked to death, but 1/4t wouldn't do anything, so with that test you'd still be surprised by the GI issues the first time you ate a bunch.
If all that passes, it can still destroy your liver.
The critical word here is survival - it's better than dying from starvation.
Which is also why a lot of training will tell you to straight up avoid mushrooms. There's very little caloric value, and there are much safer ways to get nutrients.
Yeah but starvation probably isn’t a big concern for your average American lost in the woods. You can live weeks or months on your existing stores of food. Waters your top priority in a survival situation. IMO don’t eat anything you’re not 100% sure you can eat unless you’re in really dire straits.
Cicuta maculata, Spotted Water Hemlock in North America, fools all of these. The root smells good and tastes like a turnip. Nobody knows the smallest fatal dose. People who get help breathing may survive.
Chickling peas taste fine, but gradually and permanently paralyze your legs. They affect birds the same way.
> Chickling peas taste fine, but gradually and permanently paralyze your legs.
According to Wikipedia, this is only if you eat them for a long period. Otherwise the first sentence in its article makes no sense:
> Lathyrus sativus, also known as grass pea, blue sweet pea, chickling pea, chickling vetch, Indian pea, white pea and white vetch, is a legume (family Fabaceae) commonly grown for human consumption and livestock feed in Asia and East Africa.
Unless there is some way known to render them safe, as for the other toxic plants noted here: "L. sativus needs soaking and thorough cooking to reduce toxins", "Breeding programs are underway to produce lines of L. sativus that produce less ODAP", and "Some authors have argued that this toxicity is overstated, and L. sativus is harmless as part of a normal diet."
People carry on about cyanide in peach pits, but as a youngster I ate them like almonds and never suffered for it.
> I haven't heard this word since my SAT-prep classes. It means "chew". In case there are English-2nd language people here.
There's an interesting -- understandable but very wrong -- viewpoint that the right way to form sentences that a second-language speaker can understand is to talk in the way you might talk to a toddler.
Reality is pretty much the opposite. A toddler has perfect grasp of their language's grammar and is likely to know common words, less likely to know uncommon words. For best results, you'd communicate with a toddler using complex sentences and "easy" vocabulary.
A foreign learner has a much shakier grasp of the grammar and may have a pretty spotty vocabulary. But they're also likely to have a dictionary. And uncommon words are much easier to understand, given a dictionary, than common words are. The fact that they're uncommon means they don't have the wide variety of meanings and usages[1] that common words do. For best results, you'd communicate with a foreigner using simple sentences and "difficult" vocabulary.
[1] For reference, here are the ABC dictionary glosses for the very common Mandarin word 做:
> And uncommon words are much easier to understand, given a dictionary, than common words are. The fact that they're uncommon means they don't have the wide variety of meanings and usages.
A somewhat related phenomenon is that many fancy words in European languages have Latin or Greek roots, so foreign language speakers can correlate with a similar word in their own language, or, for those of us who wasted some of our youth on this, may even be familiar with the word in the original language.
Using "chew" rather than "masticate" is not talking to someone like they are a toddler though. It's the usual way you would explain the action to someone else.
If I say I'm talking to someone like they're a toddler the point of that is I'm speaking differently than I would to an adult. Using the word "chew" would not be something I'd avoid if talking to an adult.
For example, "hi, how are you?" Is something you could say to an adult or a child. It's not "speaking to someone like they are a child" though.
But correcting the original "masticate" to "chew" is an adjustment you make based on the mentality I described. As multiple comments have pointed out, "masticate" is not generally more difficult for a second-language speaker to understand than "chew" is, and in some common cases (Spanish, French...) it's considerably easier. The correction was targeted at native speakers, on the theory that they had limited vocabulary, but justified as if it was targeted at foreigners. If the intention was really to benefit foreigners, that impulse was misplaced, for exactly the reasons I detailed.
> For example, "hi, how are you?" Is something you could say to an adult or a child. It's not "speaking to someone like they are a child" though.
The example we have here is more along these lines:
A: Salutations!
A: Oh, I'm sorry -- I meant, "how are you?"
This is an example of speaking to someone like they are a child. You come out with a natural (for you)[1] word choice, and then pre-emptively decide your interlocutor can't handle it, so you adjust to something you believe is simpler. You are speaking differently than you would normally.
History and Etymology for masticate
Late Latin masticatus, past participle of masticare, from Greek mastichan to gnash the teeth; akin to Greek masasthai to chew — more at MANDIBLE
A question: I believe that poison ivy takes a long time to become symptomatic. It can take a week for symptoms to show. If someone were to follow this progression then I believe they would die due to having ingested it before seeing symptoms. Would following this kill you with poison ivy? Or would it give noticeable symptoms to make you stop before ingesting it?
From the primitivetechnology guy I heard the same. He also gives another tip, similar to part of ritual from the article:
A lot of toxic plants can be washed with clean flowing water for a few days. Chop them up and put them with a net in a clean natural stream if available for three days or so. Test the end result for the same way you would do with other unknown edibles (armpit, lips, etc).
One could probably try all the mentioned ritual techniques.
The Greeks and Romans used to eat lupine seeds (it's a legume, they look a bit like edamame, but very, very, very high in alkaloids).
The simplest solution was throw them in a bag with a string and soak them in a stream for a week or two. The labor intensive solution involves boiling and rinsing them three or more times.
Legumes are good protein, but come on. Lupines do self-sow though, and you can probably get more than a cup per plant, so I expect you could be looking at an entire field of lupines and thinking it would feed your extended family for a week.
A suggestion -- you can buy survival guides to edible plants, specific to regions. If you're unsure, the boy scouts or wilderness orgs will have recommendations.
If you're going backpacking, tossing one of them in your pack seems like you can shortcut a bunch of the above.
Yes, but remember it's still easy to pull an "into the wild" ending.
One day I was with David Manise, a survivalist teacher. He pulled out a root, and made us tasted it. Young wild carrots. Pretty funny how small it is compared to our domesticated version, we really did a number on the specie by breeding them.
Then 10 meters away, he harvested another one. Looked the same. Only it was young hemlock. It's what Seneca used for killing himself.
The lesson here, is that eating wild plants is always risky, no matter what protocol or book you use.
I still love the idea, romantically, of going in the wood and finding my food with the help of some kind of Junior Woodchucks' Guidebook.
Shamans eat mushroom (Amanita muscaria) to get hallucination trip. Multiple toxins in the mushroom cause severe side-effects that spoil the trip, including severe headaches that last 10 hours. Instead of eating the mushroom directly, they fed it to reindeer and then drank its urine reducing the amount of toxins.
Imagine the process that led to the discovery of this process.
Or maybe it was originally conceived as a cure for headaches and the deers would naturally eat those mushrooms. But more than likely born out of somebody doing something initially that other people would class as stupid, turned out it worked better than intended and caught on from that.
Though I'd like your version too be true. Given we are well aware of drug and the influence of inspiration for many forms of art that have been zeniths in many areas of that. The influence upon science has not been as well looked into that I'm aware of. But odd articles: https://allthatsinteresting.com/amazing-drug-discoveries (though not sure that last one can be counted) with the discovery of DNA having some credit to recreational drugs.
Even in the present day, civet coffee [seeds from the excrement of civets who had eaten coffee berries] is used for its milder taste. [1]
Not really related to food, but urine was used in leather tanning etc. I read about this in the book "Eskimo Life" [1893] by Fridtjof Nansen, the famous explorer. [2] It is not unusual to have used animal urine and excrement for various purposes.
> "The civets are taken from the wild and have to endure horrific conditions. They fight to stay together but they are separated and have to bear a very poor diet in very small cages. There is a high mortality rate and for some species of civet, there's a real conservation risk. It's spiralling out of control. But there's not much public awareness of how it's actually made. People need to be aware that tens of thousands of civets are being kept in these conditions. It would put people off their coffee if they knew"'.
> In the coffee industry, kopi luwak is widely regarded as a gimmick or novelty item.[18] The Specialty Coffee Association of America (SCAA) states that there is a "general consensus within the industry ... it just tastes bad".
I agree. Industrial scale exploitation of animals for gourmet items of dubious taste abound, and should be discouraged. I was just pointing out that the practice mentioned by OP was not as rare as it sounded.
Acorns are high in tannins, which, among other things, make foods astringent (painfully chalky). Repeated soakings in water reduces them and you can make a flour.
But now you have a bunch of water high in tannins, which work as a preservative. I'm not sure how someone figured out you could soak leather in it. But I know that walnut colored stain can be made from walnut husks, so decoration may have lead to observation of improved durability. If it works for walnuts why not acorns?
I think this is why pottery was such an important step in human technology. After pottery, the process of boiling the shit out of things to make them palatable, safe to eat, or useful for crafts expanded our resources tremendously. There are cultures that simmered things without ceramics but it's complicated work to keep from damaging your container. Imagine doing all the detailed work to weave a water-tight basket and then your child manages to burn a hole into the damn thing.
Not only the discovery process, but convincing others that it was a good idea too...
"Whatcha up to Bob? Going hunting?"
"Kinda. I'm gonna go trap a reindeer!"
"Oh good, for dinner?"
"Nope; I'm going bring it here to feed it mushrooms"
"To make it fatter to eat?"
"No, so I can drink it's urine afterward. It's powerful stuff after they eat the mushrooms"
"..."
In a similar way, I've wondered how many times someone discovered how to make cheese, and failed to sell the idea to others. "You left milk in a sheepskin bladder for how long, and you want us to eat it? No thanks, pass the chicken"
It's harder for us to rationalize it in an era where 'food security' is something only fringe groups had to wrestle with.
Some of our older holidays in the West trace their histories to feast-or-famine cycles.
I sometimes joke about 'how did they figure out this was edible' and suggest that they gave some village criminal the choice between banishment or eat this piece of fruit. If you survive you can stay. But it's probably more a combination of observing dogs eating things, and utter desperation during a drought.
Which if you think about it is extra scary because a lot of foods that we list as poisonous cause digestive distress. You don't want diarrhea when you're starving, and definitely not if you are dehydrated.
> In a similar way, I've wondered how many times someone discovered how to make cheese, and failed to sell the idea to others. "You left milk in a sheepskin bladder for how long, and you want us to eat it? No thanks, pass the chicken"
I used to think about cheese and yogurts as strange, but honestly the "discovery" that mold is edible is more fundamental.
Anyone who has eaten a good sourdough bread knows that the secret to good sourdough is... to leave it out until the good tasting natural molds start to grow on it.
I think it is a relatively natural leap to go from natural-mold bread (wheat + sugar + water + time) to natural-mold cheese and yogurts (milk + time).
fwiw: Both cheese and sourdough require lactobacillus, not molds. (And lactobacillus has actually antifungal properties - mold being a fungus, that doesn't bode well for "natural mold")
So, no, mold isn't edible. And it isn't part of bread. If your starter shows mold, you have seriously messed up. (Some cheeses do use mold, though. Blue cheese, Brie, Camembert,...)
Yeast is a fungus. Sourdough bread has always been described to me as "natural yeast", which I assumed was a fungus microorganism.
EDIT: Seems like Sourdough Type I has Saccharomyces exiguus, Candida milleri, or Candida holmii as its fungus. Perhaps it isn't "Mold", but those aren't bacteria either. In any case, the ancient, or even middle-ages cook, wouldn't have known about these different microscopic microorganisms when they created sourdough, cheese, or yogurt.
The growth of Lactobacillus is still important apparently for sourdough. In any case, the idea of micro-organisms changing the taste (for the better) of various recipes would have been discovered by the first baker of leavened bread, a truly ancient discovery. Yogurt and Cheese are simple extensions of the principle.
You allude to this, but it's been explained to me that the sourness of sourdough comes from the (wild) bacteria, while the rise of the dough comes from the wild yeast.
When you feed your sourdough starter, you discard most of it and supply fresh flour and water. This sets up ideal conditions for growth. The yeast is faster to grow than the bacteria, so the ratio of yeast to bacteria is higher immediately after feeding. Thus, you can control the sourness of the dough through those feedings and their timing relative to preparing the final bread dough.
The microorganisms should be invisible. You just see their effects on the mixture. Your starter is probably good if it doubles in size within a few hours of feeding (due to carbon dioxide production by the yeast). If there's visible mold, that's very bad. The yeast should be strong enough to defeat any stray mold long before it can grow enough to be visible. I would just throw that batch out and start from scratch.
People ate cheese before they drank milk. I can't look up the source right now, but the gist of it was that cheese and yogurt are older than lactose tolerance in humans.
This is surprising for a couple reasons. It's easy to imagine the invention of cheese or yogurt if you assume people were already consuming milk. Wine and malting were invented under similar circumstances - fermentation of something already consumed. If humans weren't drinking milk, why'd they have it sitting around in containers?
Second, modern lactose-intolerant humans can drink on average about a cup of milk without major issues - so even before widespread lactose tolerance, some amount of milk would still be useful. Further, wouldn't children have been tolerant of lactose even before adults gained that ability? Human milk is more lactose dense than that of any dairy animal (especially the sheep and goats we probably domesticated first).
On Food And Cooking (my source for everything here) puts domestication of sheep and goats between 9000 and 8000 BCE, milk consumption known to exist between 5000 and 4000 BCE, and cheese production around 2500.
Adult lactose tolerance might be relatively new, but at what age is the intolerance switch usually flipped in humans that lack that specific gene? If it's more in the puberty range than toddler age then pre-mutation groups would have plenty of use for animal milk despite every individual eventually growing out of it. "Certain storage/transport containers make the child-drink palatable for old persons" would be very discoverable.
Who believe (among many other surprising things) that the legend of Santa Claus involves reindeer for this reason and point out that he wears red and white because so does that mushroom.
The bits of their ebook that I've read are less kooky than their website would make it seem.
There's also a video showing how to remove the neurotoxic component so that the other psychoactive component can be enjoyed. No urine or reindeer necessary.
The site you link to even claims that it is a myth:
"This change (to the red suit) is often mistakenly attributed to... the Coca-Cola Company...the red suit was shown on the covers of Harper's Weekly at least forty years before".
Coca Cola can however probably be given a fair amount of credited for making this the ubiquitous look.
Other people then drink the shaman's urine to share in the trip, with even fewer toxins. The same hallucinogenic molecules get recycled several times. It isn't that difficult for the shamans to extrapolate this process backwards one step to let the reindeer get their asses kicked by the mushroom, and then the shamans only have to handle once-through urine.
It's the discovery that drinking the shaman's urine gives a trip that concerns me, but lanted ales exist, so maybe it was just a process of elimination to discover who was spiking the booze supply?
I've spent quite some time with a Shipibo master in the Peruvian Amazon. Master's like him will explain that the plants "talk" to them and tell them what they're good for healing and how they should be prepared and dosed.
Certainly a reasonable opinion and one that I'd have shared before living with these people, but now I'm not so sure. There's a peculiar and wonderful connection between a shaman and nature (particularly a shaman from unbroken ancestral lines dating back hundreds of years). It's certainly something special to witness.
"Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm" by Buhner is an eye opening and thoroughly researched book in this area if you felt inclined to explore.
I believe that shaman originally drank their own urine to have repeated trips and discovered the reduced toxicity. I suspect using reindeer came later as a way to outsource the toxicity reduction.
There are other ways to prepare Fly Agaric (Amanita Muscaria) to reduce toxicity. Baking at a low temperature with lemon juice simulates the digestive process enough to help.
The liver can make some things more water soluble to be excreted via the kidneys, or more fat soluble to be excreted via the gallbladder > stomach > bowel.
I haven’t looked in to it, but I’d hazard a guess that, if this story is true, some of the toxins are excreted via the second route mentioned above, thereby rendering the urine less toxic.
Everyone I’ve known who has consumed amanita muscaria has said something to the effect of “I won’t do that again”. Two mates ended up in hospital for a bit.
Amanita Muscaria can be consumed safely (with no tripping) by parboiling for 10 minutes and discarding the water. Repeat this process at least twice. It's got a lovely nutty flavour.
Alkaloids. I can't remember if the heat denatures them or they are solluble, I think it's a mix of both.
There's a theory out there that 'bitter tasters' are an evolutionary adaptation by our Eastern European forebears who lived in an area where alkaloid levels were high in soils. If you avoided alkaloid-embittered foods your liver lasted longer, and so your genes were better represented.
Amanita Muscaria contains muscimol and ibotenic acid. Ibotenic acid is neurotoxic and a prodrug to muscimol, which has the desired psychoactive effect.
It's like sword making in Japan. The process was ritualized and copied, long before there was understanding of the underlying chemistry and why it worked.
Most of what we know how to do, like cooking, is learned by copying, not by understanding.
Despite bow and arrow being refined for millenia, the compound bow wasn't invented until 1966, when the inventor realized that nobody had applied modern engineering principles to bow design.
Err.. doesn't the Mongol bow count? I distinctly recall reading how the fact that it was made of multiple materials made it a lot more lightweight and efficient than bows made out of one piece.
EDIT: NVM, I confused "compound" for "composite"
EDIT2: And this passage on Wikipedia explains my confusion
> In literature of the early 20th century, before the invention of compound bows, composite bows were described as "compound".[2] This usage is now outdated.
I think with the success of systematic scientific understandings, we look past other, previous ways of knowing things. Medicines (eg antibiotic containing "witches brews," pain & fever relieving tree bark, etc.) existed prior to scientific medicine.
People arrived at this knowledge somehow. Ritualized copying is how knowledge was transferred, not attained. A lot of knowledge of complex processes to utile nutritional and medicinal resources probably predates our species... The knoweldge was possibly attained by means that we don't understand anymore.
In any case, compound bows are bows. Bows were invented, reinvented and refined, & spread many times. The composite bow (made of wood, horn & sinew) is a complex design using ancient materials, each with different properties. Even the simplest wooden bows, if important, usually embed quite a lot of knowledge about material selection, treatment, and construction. High powered crossbows and such utilizing spring steel were the last "prescientific" burst of innovation, taking advantage of newly abundant materials.
It's not really all that different from the modern incarnation of that particular type of machine. When that guy was doing it in the 1960s, we know how he invented. He used knowledge of physics to calculate force, stored energy and designed for specific optimization. What was the Scythian bowmaker doing as he selected glue to attache sinew to his radical new bow design?
I don't think there was any special "way of attaining knowledge" prior to science; it's always been, and still is, trial and error. Science is just the formalized and most advanced version of the same thing humans have always done to discover new things.
I think there is a special aspect to science, and the vast majority of the specialness is actually "Look for the reasons why you're wrong, instead of looking for why you're right." That is the major pre-science flub-up that was made. If I were thrust back in time to a receptive culture, that is the point I would make, not specific ones about p-values or peer review or an attempt to institute our exact journal process.
We're really good at figuring out why we're right, even when we are patently wrong. It takes training to overcome that even partially, and before people take too many Science Triumphalism laps, I wouldn't rate us as being all that great at it today, either. Fortunately, you don't have to be perfect at it to obtain advantage.
(This also merges well with the general Chesterton's Fence idea; instead of assuming that you're right in the act of tearing down the fence and finding all kinds of reasons why you're right, you need to seek the reason why you are wrong. No amount of piling up the reasons why it's OK to tear down the fence matters, because it only takes one solid reason why you shouldn't to tip the balance. This is mostly because, alas, benefit in general is often bounded and at a not-that-large value, but harm is not well-bounded. It's a lopsided distribution of value.)
There is indeed a special aspect to science - it's the scientific method, a systematic means to separate fact from baloney.
A companion to that is the idea that the universe can be modeled. Rules that work for the model work for the universe. As obvious as that sounds to us, it is a revolutionary concept.
it's a process, and thus far the only one that seems to work. It can't be very special (in the sense of "extraordinary") if it's what everyone who succeeds is doing.
I usually see the phrase "ways to attain knowledge" in the context on anti-scientific woo, so it makes me a bit wary. Thus far I haven't seen a single "alternative" that holds water, but I've seen some that lead people to wrong conclusions, sometimes with dire consequences.
The difference is that you can make lots of swords in different ways over the years and compare. The mystery with food, especially food that kills you slowly, is how to do that without killing your whole village.
It's a really funny thing, tradition: people tend to believe it represents something that has existed for ages without changing, even though we often have no real proof of that (none of us have been around for more than one lifetime after all).
I suspect most traditions are more about the collective belief that a shared social ritual is rock-solid and unchanging, and people taking comfort in that, than whether or not it really is.
And yet, if all you do is wash + cook Cassava, you'll die in relatively short order - since there's a good amount of cyanide in there. Wikipedia has a small section [0] on how it's prepared 'in the wild':
> A safe processing method known as the "wetting method" is to mix the cassava flour with water into a thick paste and then let it stand in the shade for five hours in a thin layer spread over a basket. In that time, about 83% of the cyanogenic glycosides are broken down by the linamarase; the resulting hydrogen cyanide escapes to the atmosphere, making the flour safe for consumption the same evening.
> . The traditional method used in West Africa is to peel the roots and put them into water for three days to ferment. The roots then are dried or cooked.
How easy are either of those to discover? Especially since low levels of cyanide consumption doesn't have immediate health effects.
Across a thousand years, it starts becoming likely.
Biff: "Didn't you know you're not supposed to eat Cassava?"
Awk: "No. What's the problem? I did a couple weeks ago, and I'm fine."
Biff: "It's deadly. What did you do?"
Awk: "I mixed the paste with water to make dumplings, then Thag came by wanting to show me his new club. So I let it sit in the shade for the afternoon."
Biff: "Interesting. Let's try that again and feed it to Grep and see what happens."
Ah, but you miss the point - whether you leave it to sit for an afternoon or not, as long as it's cooked you'll be fine. Unless you do it for a significant portion of your food - and Cavassa's pretty easy to grow, so it'd make for a nice staple crop - in which case you'll die after a few years.
So the feedback loop isn't "weeks" it's "years" or "decades".
"Fine" given that you eat such foods rarely and/or your time horizon is months not years. No immediately apparent health effects, but long term ones - sort of like eating fish high in mercury.
Yes, assuming you have all the required elements (ingredients, time, tools, etc).
There's plenty of people who are okay at following basic directions for cooking - but the moment anything goes astray or they want to do something that's not exactly in the recipe (say, substitute one ingredient for another), they don't understand what is happening and how to fix it.
A lot of cooking is about knowing general rules and how to apply them, but if you've never learned them, you can end up with inedible messes. This is where those who arn't terribly confident can decide that it's all too difficult and give up.
Knowing the heuristics of what flavors pair and balance one another isn't really understanding what is going on in our tastebuds or brains any more than music theory understands the ear and auditory processing. The individual that invented the trebuchet didn't know about gravity, calculus or unified theory but the rocks still brought down walls. There is something between copying and true understanding. I call it engineering and its my favorite part of the maturation of any technology because when you dont know why something you are using works there is still deep magic and wonder left. Once we figure it all out, the book is over, i know who dunnit and all the wonder is explained away.
I was thinking more of the physics/chemistry aspects of cooking. Flavour combinations are very much a personal and cultural thing.
For instance, knowing that certain ingredients release a lot of liquid when cooked, or that fresh ingredients often behave quite different to dried, canned or preserved variants.
I know I'm not the only one to have used fresh pineapple with meat, and come back to find that the pineapple's enzymes have started to digest the meat and all you have left is some meat paste.
Those things mean you either need to know what's going on, or be willing to experiment (and suffer the failures).
Also, on the subject of wonder/deep magic aspect - I think you can still know precisely how something works and still be amazed at it. Knowing that it's billions of microorganisms eating sugars and farting CO2 causing your bread to rise is still incredibly cool.
I was talking about airplanes with a woman once, and it became apparent she didn't know how they flew. I offered to explain it, and she declined, saying she wouldn't feel safe if she knew the mechanics of it.
For me, it was different. Knowing all about airplanes made me feel safer in them.
I didn't learn how to use my switch by reading or by science, I just pressed buttons till I got what I wanted. Same for my old digital watches. Sadly this doesn't work well for IoT devices with one button and a led.
Probbably part of why it took so long for the scientific method to take hold, you can just poke at a lot of things and try a lot of things and get a lot of success.
> The process was ritualized and copied, long before there was understanding of the underlying chemistry
Even chemistry itself is derived from alchemy and observations made during decades/centuries of experimentation and reporting. There are still some reactions that we do not fully understand while we know they actually work.
For example, we still don't know a lot about how wine aging works. Like, we really don't know exactly what chemical reactions the tannins go through as wine ages in the bottle.
There still has to be a reason to keep experimenting with a plant that keeps killing your patrons. There has to be a belief that in the end it will yield a tasty, non-lethal dish that would be worth the trail of dead bodies the recipe demanded.
I guess for many places it was simply that food supplies were never that plentiful, so it's worth the risk to try and make safe something that looks like it could be edible.
If your food supply is plentiful there probably wouldn't be the same incentive. But for most people, for most of human history food has not been that plentiful, so any extra source would have been welcome.
This is probably also true of all the ways we've found to preserve food. When you know the winter is going to be lean it's worth experimenting with things to see if you can eek out out supplies of that little bit longer.
Apart from scarcity, I wonder what it was about dishes like Fugu[1]. Maybe every fish didn't kill everyone all the time, so the element of danger added to the intrigue, etc.
Slight off topic, but I wonder how accurate the references in novel/series "The Clan of the Cave Bear" where medicine man/woman skills are mainly handed down from one generation to next. However also handed down is the skill to take tiny amounts of unknown herbs or potential foodstuffs and observe effects on their own body before working out what to do/how to use to treat ailments etc and add to common body of knowledge.
> There has to be a belief that in the end it will yield a tasty, non-lethal dish that would be worth the trail of dead bodies the recipe demanded.
Experience with other foods where proper prep can make them safe suggests that it can be done. And if a plant is in plentiful supply, that provides motivation.
And you can experiment on animals and captives, it's not necessary to kill your family.
Most of discoveries like these fall under the "enough monkeys + enough time" rule.
That is one of the biggest reasons I'm excited about the possibility of meeting an alien species; imagine all the things they must have discovered in their millions of years of trial and error.
Even if they're not godlike in terms of technology, the simple difference in perspective must have yielded at least a few discoveries that could potentially change human civilization.
The crazy thing is, we are extremely close to becoming those godlike aliens.
We can now simulate most biological processes, and the technology to simulate even more is quickly approaching. What will be world be like when we can execute centuries of trial and error in milliseconds?
We would still have to solve the politics of applying those technological advances uniformly rather than the benefit of a relatively small percentage of the species.
> The crazy thing is, we are extremely close to becoming those godlike aliens.
Yes, I also actually worry about the possibility that the first alien civilization we meet may be less advanced than us, and the greedy fucks among us will exploit them the same way they do their fellow humans.
> We would still have to solve the politics of applying those technological advances uniformly rather than the benefit of a relatively small percentage of the species.
This is solved already... Capitalism makes it work across time.
(What is discovered now will with most certainty be available specie-wide in a couple of decades... and it's accelerating).
Being Swedish, it's a bit weird that they don't acknowledge that the "young Swedish doctor named Hans Rosling" then went on to become quite famous for other things, too [1]. Usually things like that are pointed out in texts like these.
I think it's might have been a knowing ommission. This piece is pretty much a transcript of Tim Harford's series "50 Things That Made the Modern Economy". The episodes for that series are only 8 minutes long, so there isn't much time for extra biographical info without sacrificing the main story of the piece. I wouldn't be surprised if this article wasn't just written up by a scribe from the show's script and Harfords byline slapped on it.
Harford also presents the excellent series More Or Less, which is all about numbers and statistics in the news. Rosling gets mentioned fairly often, and is clearly something of a personal hero (and friend I think) of Tim's. He knows exactly who he was and what he did. I just don't think there was the time in the programme to cram that in.
If I were POTUS I would have weekly dinners with three to four people I admire. From different fields, but some connecting subject. Presumably the guest would find that stimulating, as well. Everything off-the-record, in an informal atmosphere (some chairs by a fire maybe). Afterwards, the guest list is published (for transparency – but not the subjects that we talked about).
I mean, you can have anybody! Nobody declines such an invitation.
Do presidents actually do this? I feel it would be the greatest perk.
Lets put petty political posturing aside. If you have any issue you care about, the opportunity is singular. It would be a great waste to decline, no matter the dinner faire.
It's also surprising that they failed to mention sword-swallowing—any other British news outlet would have shoe-horned that into the pictures no matter how orthogonal (or inappropriate) to the story.
Something I didn't see in the article or mentioned in comments here, much to my surprise, is the simple fact that "the dose makes the poison" as the saying goes. In hunter-gatherer societies they would have consumed a wide variety of foods in moderation, with any of them potentially toxic if consumed to excess. As they learned how to prepare the toxic but plentiful food (plentiful because toxic, naturally) they would have, step by step, developed the techniques all without the need for anyone getting killed by poisoning. I think we tend to miss this because we are obsessed with logical puzzles and poisons that have binary action, but almost nothing in the plant kingdom is like that. This obviously has some corollaries for modern diets and fad diet obsessions as well.
Yeah, its not like, when encountering a new food that a) they have to consume large enough quantities of it to be fatal b) that there are not proxies (e.g. taste) or testing protocols (does it irritate the lips) that can provide clues to its toxicity, or c) relevant similarities to other known species that would suggest its probable toxicity or d) there are not existing observations of wildlife doing some sort of processing that reduce toxicity of said species.
All of these also provide means of refining food processing techniques to reduce toxicity. If after cooking, the root is less irritating to the gums, or tastes less bitter, then maybe cooking it some more will do better.
I'm not sure they had the luxury of a variety of foods in moderation. I think in early societies they fasted and then gorged when food became available.
Hunter-gatherer societies hunted and gathered by definition. They had no such luxury of a choice of meats, just "what was killed today" or "nothing". They would have had no such luxury of being picky about which of the edible plants they ate, except for not eating too much of the poisonous ones. It's only after a long time of mutual adaptation that any society can become so dependent on a single foodstuff like cassava or nardoo. And that gives plenty of time to develop the process of preparation, step by step.
When the alternative is starvation, one becomes open to trying new/dangerous things. Given a number of starving groups with only poisonous plant A available, let's say only one group stumbles on a sequence of steps that work while the others die off. The survivors pass along the knowledge that poisonous plant A can be made edible by performing a sequence of steps (even without understanding exactly why those steps worked).
So now the descendants of those survivors can transfer that knowledge (i.e. that a poisonous plant can be made edible) the next time a food shortage occurs and all that is available is poisonous plant B. Rinse and repeat over and over again through the centuries.
Over time, the substances that no viable process was discovered for get labeled as poisonous. So now your 'culture' has a list of safe foods, a spectrum of unsafe foods that can be made safe (and how), and unsafe foods.
I think when hunter-gatherer societies discovered cooking, they could have tried to cook unpalatable plants to make them easier to digest. Then they could've used cooking on poisonous food stuffs to see if it made them edible.
As new cooking techniques were unlocked, they could've combined them to make things even less poisonous.
Cassava is also bitter as hell to start. Most things that reduce that bitterness also reduce the toxicity.
As long as it doesn't become a primary foodstuff such that it will build up in your system, you don't need to get all the hydrogen cyanide.
However, any group that can get all the HCN out, will also be much better off when the famine comes. They will survive; the other groups will not. That's a powerful force.
I suspect the question reveals a blind spot in perspective. Food, by its very nature, is dangerous and fights back. Modern society insulates us from this risk; with a secure, safe, food supply, risking one's life to try something new seems insane and it's hard to imagine enough people have ever done it to learn significant secrets and what would be the point anyway? If the food supply is neither secure nor safe, risking one's life to give the community a new option seems much more reasonable and even heroic, and an area in which people would try extreme things for a shot at glory.
Do people get injured or even killed hunting wild game? Of course. That's expected, and it's just how you get food. Do people get injured or even killed learning the secrets of wild plants? I would expect that's expected, too.
So my suspicion is that this question is a lot like asking, "How did 18th century humans learn to defeat smallpox?" Well. It was hard. And the stakes were high. And a lot of people died while we tried stuff that didn't work. But in the end, humans are brave and resourceful especially when the need is great.
Those are quite complex and evolved processes to learn in the first place to start with. It must be something more than trial and error, right? Am I the only one thinking that if a plant killed me, or slowly made my legs paralyzed, more likely one would abandon that process rather than say: let's try to roast it and/or leave it outside for a couple of days. Unless they were desperate and had no other food source.
The case with the cake is even more mesmerizing, it slowly blocked overtime their ability to process B1. How could people tell that it was from that food?? And how do they go, yeah, we just forgot to do X
Off course it's trial and error, what else can it be? I suspect that you may be underestimating the terror of constant life in the shadow of a famine. This may give an idea:
A woman doctor wrote to a friend in June 1933 that she had not yet become a cannibal, but was "not sure that I shall not be one by the time my letter reaches you." The good people died first. Those who refused to steal or to prostitute themselves died. Those who gave food to others died. Those who refused to eat corpses died. Those who refused to kill their fellow man died. Parents who resisted cannibalism died before their children did.
> The case with the cake is even more mesmerizing, it slowly blocked overtime their ability to process B1. How could people tell that it was from that food??
Keep the information about ill effects as part of the cultural package alongside the prep rituals? That way you can kinda sorta notice that the ill effects still occur and cooks can try to add new preparation methods.
Alternatively, simple evolutionary process: cooks semi-randomly add new steps (whether because luck or opportunity), some tribes push back deadly effects further back and thus have better survival rates, leading to their preparation methods spreading. Nardoo occurs throughout Australia, so native populations would have tried using it for a very long time (tens of thousands of years).
What's even more puzzling than people figuring out complex processes with multiple non obvious steps to successfully remove increasing amounts of (slow acting) poison from plants in relatively short amounts of time is the contrast to medicine.
It took people literally millenia to figure out pretty obvious things. That blood letting probably wasn't such a hot idea for most ailments. Or that the awesome cadaverous smell of your hands that you took such professional pride in basically meant that your obstetric services massively decreased both mother and child's survival chances compared to no outside help at all.
[Edit: I wonder if the difference can be purely explained by people being much better at figuring out what increases their and their kin's survival chances compared to those of others]
> How could people tell that it was from that food? And how do they go, yeah, we just forgot to do X
There's no need for people to understand what is going on. People have a tendency to try random stuff without any reason. The folks who accidentally do the right thing survive, while the others die.
And it's also important to note that probably not a single person came up with the whole procedure. People might use a recipe that worked for a similar plant, and adapt it. A lot of people probably died or became ill. They likely never realized their mistake. It's just that over the years the people who did it right had an evolutionary advantage and survived, and now we wonder how they figured it out, when it was all just an accident.
Not only trying random stuff but being subject to random events -- you have to flee camp, you come back a couple of days later to find your porridge has 'grown', you leave it by the fire, get distracted, come back later and you've got some leaven 'bread'.
You carry milk in a gourd, the end of the journey and it's separated, you try to make the same again but go too far end up with butter ...
> There's no need for people to understand what is going on. People have a tendency to try random stuff without any reason.
You're not giving people very much credit. The things they try may seem random to an outside observer, but they made sense to the person trying them. They had some mental model of how it works, and applied that model. Sometimes even a very inaccurate model is good enough.
Yeah, but it's an important point that taking risks without a model can lead to solutions that would not be found otherwise. Suppose there are ten options for survival and 100 people who are under threat. If they try to develop a theory and all fail, and do not act without hope of success, then they all die. If they develop a theory and follow it, and it is wrong, then they all die. But if at least one option is correct, and they simply try them at random, disagreeing with each other, then about ten people will survive and pass on their genes and/or knowledge.
People are not 100% rational, and being 100% rational is not evolutionarily optimal.
I think you are giving people too much credit. I feel like most of the time the mental model only comes after the fact, in an attemp to rationalize whatever ridiculous things people do.
Look at people who flock to homeopathy, or those who buy "water vitalisation" devices, or other ridiculous gimmicks. There's no rational reason why people would come up with ridiculous things like that. Unless you look at it from an evolutionary perspective. These ridiculous ideas are just people randomly exploring the search space, and natural selection picks the ones who got something right.
> Look at people who flock to homeopathy, or those who buy "water vitalisation" devices, or other ridiculous gimmicks. There's no rational reason why people would come up with ridiculous things like that.
What are you talking about? Those things absolutely have a model behind them. It's an incredibly bad model that doesn't stand up to any serious scrutiny, but it is a model none the less.
> These ridiculous ideas are just people randomly exploring the search space, and natural selection picks the ones who got something right.
I think you might be giving the word "model" too much weight. It doesn't have to be a mathematical proof or anything. "God won't let me die because I'm too pretty" is a model.
you could say its something more but thats a question of belief. most of these cultures will tell you eventually they have learnt it either from ancestors or from spirits / god. that being nothing which can be proven by the scientific method, for science, it's nothing more, and if thats what you believe, cultural knowledge and trial and error is all that remains as a possibility.
lots of cultures carry knowledge which is 'strange' for them to have or carry. how they came about it is often a mystery at best.
Nice to see the PR campaign for Secret of Our Success getting some traction. It's a fantastic book and Joe Henrich's stuff is super interesting, his thesis is that humans are pretty dumb on our own and culture is like an enormous shared brain that allows us to adapt to hostile environments. Lots of traditions don't make any sense at all, but they're important.
Don't spend as long processing your cassava and you won't notice the effects of the poisoning until a lot later. To you it just seems like you're saving an hour or so per day. If you think about it, being extremely conservative when it comes to tradition has been one of the very best strategies for staying alive up until relatively recently in the human timeline.
ha I was gonna comment this sounds like a book I read recently (since I didn't read TFA because who even does that).
I'm unsatisfied with the cassava and acorn stuff. I get that metabolism is externalized and I get that once it is a cultural practice then that's just how it is. I struggle with envisioning the part in between where the processing is newish and becoming a practice, especially in regards to something like the cassava toxin that doesn't happen until decades later. How does a processing strategy sustain in those early iterations? Versus the animal husbandry practices, they have more immediate results that seem less vulnerable to biases making false causation. I think I struggle with the making sense part of it, what I got from the book is that considering cause is a luxury won by doing it "because I said so".
A big part of where I come from, the state of Kerala have been consuming the root for atleast a century. It was our main carbohydrate source. And the process is mostly boiling it in water. I am curious if I am not aware of people getting sick because of this, or the particular variant that was imported in the old times did not have the toxin.
> Nardoo, a type of fern, is packed with an enzyme called thiaminase, which is toxic to the human body. Thiaminase breaks down the body's supply of Vitamin B1 [...]
A slightly tortured sentence - B1 is thiamin, so thiaminase is an enzyme that breaks it down by definition, not some sort of (in)convenient coincidence.
(Perhaps it's deliberately avoiding using both 'thiamin' and 'thiaminase' for fear of confusing the poor reader, but I might have opted for 'is packed with an enzyme that breaks down the body's supply of thiamin (vitamin B1)' - or just not name it beyond B1 at all. IANAJournalist, though.)
Aren’t enzymes proteins that aren’t absorbed? Maybe they’ll break down thiamine in the digestive tract, but they shouldn’t really break down the body’s internal stores, right?
>> Body storage of thiamine is minimal, the liver being the main extra-muscular storage site. In young and healthy non-alcoholic individuals, subjective symptoms appear after 2 to 3 weeks of a deficient diet (Brin,1963). Characteristic early symptoms include anorexia, weakness, aching, burning sensation in hands and feet, indigestion, irritability and depression. After 6 to 8 weeks the only objective signs at rest may be a slight fall in blood pressure, and moderate weight loss. After 2 to 3 months apathy and weakness become extreme, calf muscle tenderness develops with loss of recent memory, confusion, ataxia and sometimes persistent vomiting (Anderson et al,1985).
For people to learn to cook poisonous plants safely, a lot of other people must have died from food poisoning. So why did they eat bad stuff? Well, if you're hungry enough, you'll eat anything. And people frequently got very hungry in history. The clever part is where somebody remembers who died or got ill and passes on the information.
Someone has to know what other people ate, know what of what they ate killed them, remember that, pass it on, and be believed for that to work. It's easier if the person gets sick and doesn't die, and then they themselves can tell the story.
>Someone has to know what other people ate, know what of what they ate killed them, remember that, pass it on, and be believed for that to work.
Yes, this is the tricky part. Per the article, such knowledge is passed on culturally, i.e. by people imitating their betters. But that's not the whole story. My guess is that occasionally, in unusual circumstances, some wise person would step in and say, 'No, don't do that!' (without necessarily being able to explain why).
An important clarification is that, contra the article, people can't literally imitate other people. Rather, they guess the meaning of other people's behaviour. Again, without necessarily being able to explain it or even state it in words. See Chapters 15,16 of The Beginning of Infinity, by David Deutsch.
This is basically the sound argument for conservatism.
A lot of traditions and systems don't seem to make any sense, but you need to be very careful before tearing them out, because they were often formed through generations of hard won experience ("written in blood"), and if you lose them, you have to start that process over.
On the other hand, those things were found out by trying many different things.
I think societies benefit from having a relatively large body of somewhat conservative folks, and some more experimentally minded people to come up with new, improved stuff.
The optimal ratio likely depends on how quickly the environment around you changes, how safe it is etc.
People that defend the Carnivore diet, argument that plants don't want to be eaten and because they lack locomotion to run away but are excellent at chemistry, have developed toxins to protect themselves from predators.
As I understand it birds are not sensitive to capsaicin, and unlike mammals who will eat the entire fruit, seeds and all, passing it through their digestive tract, birds are careless eaters and will drop half their food while eating, effectively spreading seeds.
Those species just "choosed" to follow a different strategy. Less expensive. Resources are liomited and you can spend your resources in making complicated poisons or in making more seeds. In the end is all about how many seedlings survived.
Herbivores evolved to be able to deactivate it, or host other microorganisms able to deactivate it.
Carnivore stomach is short and very acid to be able to dissolve bones and horns. Most complex molecules wouldn't survive to be dipped in acid two times in two different stomachs and be taken in the intestine by the blood vessels later.
Terrestrial mammals are safe to eat normally if not rotten (not so much safe to kill them). Plants are unsafe to eat by default, except domesticated species and some wild species. Ripped fruits like 50/50, often safe to eat but not always.
This article is interesting but somewhat misleading, to the point that I don't know what information to trust. Yes, it does take many steps to turn cassava into a refined flour for baking, but cassava is easily eaten--just peel and boil it, as I do often (it's readily available in many grocery stores in Canada, and a staple of Latin American culture). Cooking is the same basic process used to make many borderline or poisonous foods edible, from bitter almonds to kidney beans. The author appears to conflate some specialized regional cooking techniques with simply making food safe to eat.
You are buying and eating the so called sweet variety which is safe to eat after proper cooking. The ones used for making flour is called bitter and way more toxic thus the elaborate process.
Practically all the plant foods we can buy have been very heavily altered from their native form. Even many things we think of as "wild", like berries, were cultivated and bred by vanished populations.
The whole Amazon was heavily populated and orcharded before Columbus and his ilk spread measles, yellow fever, smallpox, etc. Pop. estimates range up to 100M. Amazon trees are very different from their wild origins.
I wondered about this too, having seen it on sale in the local supermarket. Thought it was strange people weren't mistakenly dropping dead all over the place!
You're presumably eating cyanide-less "sweet" cassava, which is different (and far less toxic) than the "bitter" varieties eaten in Africa and South America.
The author appears to conflate some specialized regional cooking techniques with simply making food safe to eat.
Agreed. I'm from Brazil and cassava is a pretty common thing to eat. Where I live, especially, it's usually deep fried and we eat it like french fries, for example.
It's made by boiling the plant leaves a whole week to remove the toxins.
Doing it by on a stove today is extremely time consuming, imagine doing this in the middle of the forest with heavy rain falling every couple of hours.
Joke aside, this article is... incomplete at best:
> "Toxic plants are everywhere. Sometimes simple cooking
> processes are enough to make them edible. But how does
> anyone learn the elaborate preparation needed for cassava
> or nardoo?
> No single person does, according to Joseph Henrich, an
> evolutionary biologist.
> He argues this knowledge is cultural.
...
> In South America, where humans have eaten cassava for
> thousands of years, tribes have learned the many steps
> needed to detoxify it completely: scrape, grate, wash,
> boil the liquid, leave the solid to stand for two days,
> then bake.
> Ask why they do this, and they will not mention hydrogen
> cyanide. They will simply say "this is our culture".
Never ask a scientist something outside their specialties. Evolutionary biology and sociology are differenent. This article misses the fact that these cultures also do know that the food is unsafe without these steps. In Japan, where they eat fugu, the poisonous fish, they know why they remove the toxic parts. In France, where we do tons of cheese from raw milk, we know why we need fresh milk to do that: otherwise you get sever food poisoning. My mom used to grow rhubarb and do jam, she explained to me that the leaves are toxic.
I agree that there may be or have been useless steps in the process and that it was not as well understood 100 years ago as it is now, but this is not just pure dumb imitation.
"But overall we apparently did better by copying without question than by assuming, like the chimps, that we were smart enough to tell which steps we could safely ignore."
Explanation rather than defense. The process of cargo-culting makes a lot of sense over evolutionary timescale, because only very recently have people started to discover and achieve the means of not working by trial and error (and falling prey to ritualised processes and local maxima).
I mean, it's fine for people not to dedicate all the brain to all the things all the time, some level of cargo-culting makes us way more efficient in more pressing / important task trough the day.
like, shaking a tv remote usually helps getting some life into it. there's some reason to it, it scrapes a little the oxidation between the batteries and the contacts, but for most people is cargo-culting, imagine everyone having to do a research on it before accepting shaking as the methodology, and this for all the daily tasks we do because we saw our parents do before us.
I remember a documentary years ago with a cool redemption story in it. They followed a primate troupe around for a couple of years.
One of their newest members was a young male that had been ousted from his birth troupe. He had trouble integrating but they let him be. Let's call him George.
Next year was a drought year. Food is getting scarce. Distress is building. One day, some of the troupe find George eating some fruit. Fruit that the troupe had never been observed eating. WTF George, you can eat those? So they watch him, and watch him, and nothing bad happens. Pretty soon the whole troupe is eating this new food source that has been under their noses the whole time.
Hypothesis: primates do not instinctively know what is edible any more than we do. It's learned behavior picked up from observation. If one social group eats a food it doesn't mean that all of them do, and in this case bringing in an outsider brought new ideas.
I found the arguments fascinating. Especially surprising was the argument that e.g. using bones to divine where to hunt can serve a useful role despite the apparent uselessness of divination. In this case, the argument goes, it serves as a randomizing tool to prevent over-hunting in one spot by independent groups (though of course the tribes themselves could not provide that reasoning).
The author of that book is referenced in the article.
>No single person does, according to Joseph Henrich, an evolutionary biologist.
>He argues this knowledge is cultural. Our cultures evolve though a process of trial and error analogous to evolution in biological species. Like biological evolution, cultural evolution can - given enough time - produce impressively sophisticated results.
I recommend reading the blogpost to everyone. It's very interesting and very well written IMO, and its contents keep coming up in my thinking ever since I've read it (several months) so it's had quite an impact on me.
I haven't read the book, but now that I think of it, maybe I should.
It's interesting that the same ideas are finding their way into AI lately. The AlphaStar Starcraft 2 agent was trained first using imitation learning to mimic human games, then was evolved using a sort of cultural evolution whereby different agents competed and the best were saved for the next generation.
Wow, one of the characters in the story, Hans Rosling, is the same fellow famous for his application Gapminder and the TED talks where he tells us about our misconceptions of the world (that are frequently more negative than they should be).
"Nardoo, a type of fern, is packed with an enzyme called thiaminase, which is toxic to the human body. Thiaminase breaks down the body's supply of Vitamin B1, which prevents the body using the nutrients in food.
Burke, Wills and King were full, but starving."
It's interesting how resistant people often are to accepting that the contents of what you eat significantly matters rather than just the caloric content, when discussing diets and weight management.
Yet in the context of people starving to death while eating food chock full of calories, nobody seems to be up in arms shouting "Heresy! Calories in, calories out!"
Firstly calories in, calories out is still in effect there. The toxin inhibited the calories in part. "In" doesn't mean "in your mouth" it means metabolised.
Secondly, obviously none of these people are referring to eating poison when they say where you get calories doesn't matter in terms of weight management. They are talking about people eating things that are plausibly going to be eaten by someone in a modern society, not people wandering the outback with no idea what they are doing. For similar reasons they also don't append "for individuals with something approximating normal metabolic function" every time they say say it.
Using the above story as evidence against calories in/calories out for weight management is missing the forest for the trees.
Societies are full of random stuff we learned just by trial and error and we don't even know why we do it. Can't recommend enough this book The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25761655-the-secret-of-o...)
I think the information about cassava is wrong, i eat it since i was a child only boiling and deep frying.
Also here in Brazil we have a plant called Maniçoba that has to be cooked for at least 4 days to release all hydrogen cyanide that it contais:
AFAIK, there are two different types of cassava: the one we eat, and the one that's poisonous (which I think they called mandioca braba) and is only used to make farinha.
The one I've always wondered about is fugu fish. How on earth did anyone figure out that one small part could be eaten, only if prepared in a way that takes something like 8 years to learn before you are ever allowed to serve anyone?
There's a delicious mushroom I regularly pick/eat and that is very popular throughout most of the world (Amanita sec. caesarae) that requires five different significant criteria to identify. If any of those criteria are different, the mushroom you're seeing is going to make you sick or kill you. Who figured this out? It was fairly easy for me to learn in the age of the Internet, but who were these generations of people who figured that out? Seems insane.
I wonder how this idea relates to things like masonry, where free masons are a highly ritualized organization but at the same time I’d imagine that they have a first principles understanding of their trade.
Remember that a poison food is a great adaptive advantage for the humans that dominate it. Your food will come with its own pesticide and you don't have to compete with other animals or pests.
Useful proxies like bitterness or stomach aches after consumption offer degrees that can covary with food preparation. If you cook it and it's less bitter, then cook it some more.
Well, I guess someone had to die first to find out. I mean, if people are starving, and the poisonous plant are the only alternative, I guess, is worth the risk....
I'm thinking ancient peoples were not experimental scientists. The idea that an organized process will produce good data, was not really current until the Renaissance? Anyway, I'm favoring the 'folks got sick or died' version.
Thank you for sharing this! But even on desktop its hard to read, must be hell on mobile. So I will just cite you:
1 - do not do it if you can avoid it
2 - if you really must, then try the folliwing:
* break the plant, put a tiny amount of it on your armpit. If it's not reacting (itching, becoming red, etc) after 10 minutes, continue.
* break the plant, put a tiny amount of it on your lips. If it's not reacting, after 10 minutes, continue.
* break the plant, put a tiny amount of it on your tongue. If it's not reacting after ten minutes, if the taste is not off putting for any reason, and if you don't get any sensation/intuition (for a better word) that something is wrong, continue.
* masticate a tiny amount. Same.
* swallow a tiny amount. Wait for 2 hours. Observe obvious symptoms, but also digestion. It should be easy to process at this amount.
If all that pass (yeah, it's very long), remember this doesn't ensure the plant is perfectly safe, just lowers the risks.
When an account has been around for a while, we tell the user we're banning it and why. But shadowbanning is useful in other cases, such as for spammers, or for accounts connected with a history of abuse on HN.
I've not met anyone who is "afraid" of GMO, though anyone with a severe allergy should be very careful of GMO: you just don't know what foreign proteins might be unexpectedly present. Lots of people are opposed to GMO for various reasons to do with patents, economics, power, ...
I think people are quite used to the idea that some parts of an edible plant may be poisonous: rhubarb is another well-known example. A plant requiring special treatment to not be poisonous is a bit more scary, but red kidney beans are not an exotic food in the UK.
Yet people die every year from improperly prepared fugu, improperly chosen mushrooms, unripe ackee, and other dangerous foods. And that's just food-related risks.
Random GMO experiments (cross-pollination in the 'wild') is how all current food crops got improved throughout history. Now, we're doing it more deliberately. Which is seen as worse somehow, which is just FUD.
GMO can involve genes from a totally different species, like fish genes + plant genes. "Cross-pollination" refers to within a species.
Do you 2 pro-GMO people have any reason you think it's "FUD, plain and simple"? Is that the argument, that it's no different to what nature does? Just repeating "FUD" like that doesn't make it so.
It's very reminiscent of the blanket dismissals of nuclear power/waste "fears" one reads on here, suggesting there are only bad, emotional-based reasons to have issues with it. Since there are no actual reasons, they must be just fears. Simple. "FUD, plain and simple".
But there is rational uncertainty about GMO safety–how could there not be.
There's no such thing as 'genes from a species', same as there's no such thing as 'words from another book'. They're just words.
Further, mutation, cross-species gene sharing (which can happen simply by digesting another species), gene-hopping happen commonly in nature already.
Again, calling GMO evil while what happens in your backyard garden 'natural and good', is not good science. Its witchcraft, emotional, ignorant. Its FUD.
Inserting BT toxins into plants makes them insecticidal. Organic farmers use BT bacterial topically, but the BT toxin rinses off. Nobody has tested dietary BT toxin. There is no reason to assume systemic BT toxin is safe.
The same applies to numerous other compounds. Each needs to be tested individually. Safety of one tells you nothing about others.
Breeding varieties of edible plants gives you small variations on what they both had.
Most GMOs are much worse. Tolerance of Roundup exposes us to large amounts of Roundup, lately discovered carcinogenic. Nowadays most oats and chickpeas are coated with Roundup, because they are sprayed before harvest to speed drying. Not GMOs, but a problem.
I believe this was being debunked throughout this thread. The usual exaggeration and hyperbole. Instead of 'most', replace with 'some', 'little' or 'none'.
And again, all modern useful garden plants depend upon a serendipitous/random mutation in the past that introduced new genes into the line, duplicated genes for useful growth patterns, or hopped genes to where they do entirely new things for the plant. At random.
So really, none of that above was real science, but instead more careless Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt being thrown about.
People who oppose "safe but artificial" things like GMO and vaccines, and people who oppose "unsafe but natural" things like poisonous plants (or for example, unpasteurized milk) are not necessarily the same group. In my experience, they've actually been opposite camps.
The tomato was considered dangerous to eat in Europe because of its relationship to the Nightshade family, so no one ate it. One day, some Italian <unpublishable> <unpublishable> decided to cook it into a sauce and give it to a woman, so she would get drugged and he could take advantage of her.
She didn't get poisoned, and he invented what we currently know as Italian cuisine.
So, my guess is going to be "by less than ethical ways".
I am not sure it was as erroneous as people say. In Mexico they grow "tomatillos" which are similar to tomatoes except they are smaller and stay green. They need to be cooked to be safe.
It could be generation of breeding them selectively in Europe that made them safe to eat raw.
Tomatillos aren't very closely related to tomatoes at all (they're a gooseberry) and are safe to eat raw -- you just shouldn't eat them raw when underripe.
That's what I heard, yet looking at WP it classifies tomatoes and tomatillos in the same family whereas gooseberries are a different order. I am not versed-enough in botanics to know how relevant this is, but I wonder what is true or not in these.
Ah, apparently its close relative is not the eurasian gooseberry but the cape gooseberry, which is the same genus as the tomatillo. They're also nightshades like peppers and tomatoes, but so is tobacco.
1 - do not do it if you can avoid it
2 - if you really must, then try the folliwing:
* break the plant, put a tiny amount of it on your armpit. If it's not reacting (itching, becoming red, etc) after 10 minutes, continue.
* break the plant, put a tiny amount of it on your lips. If it's not reacting, after 10 minutes, continue.
* break the plant, put a tiny amount of it on your tongue. If it's not reacting after ten minutes, if the taste is not off putting for any reason, and if you don't get any sensation/intuition (for a better word) that something is wrong, continue.
* masticate a tiny amount. Same.
* swallow a tiny amount. Wait for 2 hours. Observe obvious symptoms, but also digestion. It should be easy to process at this amount.
If all that pass (yeah, it's very long), remember this doesn't ensure the plant is perfectly safe, just lowers the risks.