Slightly inspired by this thread (though the question has nagged at me for years):
How do foods like the Fugu Fish get “discovered”? I mean, if your Fugu Chef isn’t absolutely on top of the game (what with the venomous spots changing from one fish to the next) you could be dead in your Miso Soup within seconds. So who figured out that Fugu was edible in the first place? I mean, who watched person after person keel over after eating a Fugu, before saying… But yeah, there’s gotta be SOME way for me to eat it without kicking the bucket!
And there’s tons of stuff like that. I always used to wonder about Durian - who took it upon themselves to say, I don’t CARE what it smells like, I’m gonna taste that thing (much to their culinary delight, although this point is considered debatable). But then I figure, tropical country, food is food, eventually someone is hungry enough to give in and eat something no matter how it smells.
But clearly the first person to lay into a Fugu wasn’t treading carefully, and I gotta believe that he died a quick death. Same with subsequent attempts, I’m sure. So how does a food evolve from deadly poison to haute cuisine? What makes a culture continue to eat food that is known to be deadly until a safe method of consumption is found? It’s not like fugu is the only fish in the sea! And who is the guinea pig for this?
Fugu Chef: Fuji, my friend, I think I’ve perfected my Fugu.
Fuji: Yeah, that’s what you told Joe, and I don’t see him here anymore, do I?
Fugu: True, but this time I’m sure that I cut out the correct organs, without piercing anything that I shouldn’t have. Besides, I’ll buy you a hot sake beforehand.
Fuji: You’re on. (Glug. Chomp. Wheeze. Collapse)
Fugu: Great, back to the drawing board.
There are other examples of things that I can’t imagine how someone figured out that they were food, but they’re not springing to mind at the moment. But anyone have any insight into this?
Let me tell you about me and fugu. I used to eat it as a kid; it was one of the few fish I was willing to eat.
They were even more fun to catch, since they’d puff up with air when you brought them to the surface. You could even bounce them like a basketball.
Of course, we called them blowfish and never knew they were poisonous (this isn’t exactly what the Japanese eat, of course – it’s an Atlantic Ocean species). Luckly, the toxin resided in the fish’s liver; if you removed that, the meat (the tail, primarily) was perfectly safe.
So, without even knowing it, we ate fugu, and since it was easy to make them non-toxic, it was no big deal.
It would seem likely that something similar happened in Japan. People would eat fugu and do fine (you don’t usually eat the fish’s liver, anyway). Others, would get some of the toxins from the liver and die. (It was probably more of an issue with raw fish than cooked.) Eventually, someone figured the source of the poison.
And, of course, I’ll mention tapioca, which is poisonous until heated. The raw root is filled with toxin, but boiling it breaks down the poison. Legend has it that an exporer in South America, lost and without food, decided to end it all quickly, so he heated up some manioc root and discovered it was just fine to eat.
And almonds - who decided to domesticate those? The wild ones are full of cyanide, and it’s not like you can figure out how to make those edible, they’re going to be poisonous no matter what you do. You have to breed the cyanide out of them, which probably takes a while as you need a few years for each generation. (I mean, they’re trees, I’m assuming they don’t flower and fruit right away.)
There is a green that grows in parts of Africa that you have to prepare by:
Boiling it for awhile.
Dumping out all the water, being sure to carefully rinse the greens.
Boiling it some more.
Again dumping out all the water, and rinsing.
Serve and enjoy!
When my aunt was young, she tried to short-circuit this process, and damn near died - they had to take her to the hospital. A dentist years later asked her if she’d been poisoned as a child, since her teeth were thing and brittle (aparently a sign of being poisoned when young).
So, who was it that said “If you boil it once, it’ll kill ya, but what if I boil it twice?”
Ackee fruits are like that as well. Eat them when they’re unripe, or don’t boil them in enough changes of water, and you will very likely die in a convulsive delirium, spewing liquid from both ends. And if you ever have the urge to bite into a raw taro root, my advice is don’t; the sensation is rather like what I imagine chewing on fiberglass would be like.
The thing is, with all of these foods, there were probably dozens (if not hundreds) of people who prepared them the wrong way and died; thus, their knowledge didn’t get passed on. Whowever was the first to boil it in two changes of water (or whatever), quite possibly by accident, would have survived and passed on this knowledge to other members of their group, who would then have one more food resource to draw on.
Jared Diamond in Guns, Germs, and Steel talks about the hypothesized domestication of almonds; he posits that hunter-gatherers would have eventually stumbled across an almond tree that wasn’t bitter, and upon finding the seeds were edible would have gathered them up and taken them back to camp. Some of the seeds would be dropped on the ground, and would grow into edible almond trees. People being fairly bright, it would soon be figured that non-bitter almonds make non-bitter-almond trees, and so another crop was developed.
I often wonder exactly how hungry someone would have to be to attempt to eat weird looking things. Fruits and veggies I can sort of understand, because I’d guess people saw animals eating something and think, “OK, that’s obviously edible…” But LOBSTER? Looks like a big scary BUG. Now we know lobster is yummy, but the first guy who ate one probably didn’t know about drawn butter, even!
But again, like cashews - I’ve never even seen a cashew in its shell, but I understand they’re not easy to crack. How did anyone even know there was something (eventually) edible in there??
I think cultural perceptions might colour your view of things. I don’t find, and never have found lobster, crabs, shrimps, etc. to be unapetising in the least. Various insects are eaten in several cultures.
Weird-looking is not an issue. Weird-smelling, that’s something else.
Still, plenty of people have been starved throughout the ages, which means that the odds that someone, somewhere tried something, no matter how repulsive, are pretty high. (Plus, some people are just weird to begin with.)
And around these parts, at least, lobster was once construed as poor man’s food, relegated to the poor fishing schmucks, villagers, inmates (not to mention their previous use as fertilizer by the Native Americans). Then I guess someone figured out how to make it the right way, and an industry was born.
A few years ago my mother harvested her first lot of olives (yep all 8 of them), with a bit of research we discovered they were toxic unless a complicated series of brining etc was undertaken. Weeks it took!
Who the hell dicovered this? Lets take a toxic fruit and marinade it in a whole-lot-of-shit and then see if we can eat it.
It does make you wonder, the worlds most popular oil came from a toxic wee fruit.
Of course I wish the world knew how revolting kiwifruit really is and how sad I am that much of the world thinks a Kiwi is that horrible hairy wee fruit.
Correct. Or rather than cooked: processed… And regarding the “Spanish explorer” story – well, he could have asked the indians. There are two edible species this root – manihot utilissima, lower in toxicity, which just needs to be fully peeled and cooked and can be eaten directly(*), and manihot esculenta, which requires a more thorough grinding/washing/cooking/drying, and is the source of tapioca.
That asterisk, BTW should have led to a footnote to the effect that boiled manioc root is not bad, but by itself nothing to write home about either. Big lump o’ starch, basically.
yBeayf, I forgot about Ackee - you have to wait until it opens up on the tree and drops it’s seeds - before that, it’s poisonous. US Customs won’t let you bring it in unless it’s bottled at a factory.
RealityChuck, what about this?
Take some milk.
Let it curdle.
Take the curds and mush them together into a lump.
Let it age until it turns green (Danger! Things growing on your food!).
Enjoy!
Ah, behold the power of cheese.
The more I hear about this stuff, though, the more I realize that our ancestors didsn’t worry about bacteria like we do. Eskimos burried stuff in the dirt to eat later, people left milk products in the back room to age, etc. So, for rising bread, I see this sequence:
someone pounds this wheat thing into a flour. People in africa pound manioc (a big old root!) into flour, so why not?
make a flat bread thing out of it.
someone leaves a little extra dough laying out in a warm place, contaminated with wild yeast.
dough rises. Huh? Let’s fry it and see what it tasts like! Delicious!
I was reading somewhere (I do not remember where) that “bitter” almonds can still be purchased and eaten. Sometimes people die from eating too many of them. I also read that it isn’t the cyanide in the almond that was bad. Instead the almond has an enzyme that produces cyanide once you eat it. Roasting the almonds denatures the enzyme and makes the almonds safe. I have no cite for this, but I’ll look around to see if I can dig up anything.