1.) I have long ago come to the conclusion that people will eat/drink just about anything with nonzero taste. It’s not surprising that they ate the things listed above. Me, I’m amazed that people found out the medicinal effects of certain herbs – to know wjhich ones were good, a lot of people had to eat a lot of ones that had no effect, or were bad.
2.) I can easily see some people drinking milk. As noted above, there’s an easy analogy with human milk. People drink goat’s milk, too, after all, and water buffalo milk products. I’ve been told that certain tribes even drink horse milk. What’s surprising to me is that milk drinking caught on in a big way even though mosdt of the population must have been lactose-intolerant. We all start out lactose-tolerant, but eventually most people in certain groups that traditionally don’t raise cattle lose the ability to break down lactose, with unfortunate gastric results that a lot of folks on this board are familiar with. People must have kept at it until they self-selected for those able to metabolize lactose. To me, the stick-to-it-iveness required for that is remarkable. As Marvin Harris notes in his book Good to Eat/The Sacred Cow and the Abominable Pig, theChinese, American Indians, and many African people are generally lactose-intolerant, which explains the lack of dairy in their cuisine. But it’s hard to imagine Indian and European food without it.
3.) Cheese I can easily understand . The traditional story is that cheese first formed in a pouch made from an animal’s stomach used to carry milk. The rennet remaining in the stomach caused the milk to curdle and formed a cheese. If I were the unfortunate who carried this and had no other food, I’d try it before tossing it out. Once I found that the damned stuff would keep (in a world where most food-- especially dairy products – spoiled fast), I’d be making it all the time.
4.) As far as bread goes, we can see a natural progression. The grain was originally threshed or ground, mixed with water, and became porridge. Baked porridge became unleavened bread – kinda like crackers or matzoh. One theory I’ve heard had it that some cook left the bread dough he/sge’d been working with overnight and came back in the morning to find that natural yeast had settled on it, making it rise. Rather than throw it out, they tried baking the “spoiled” dough, and discovered modern “bread”. I’ve no doubt that this discovery was made over and over again.
5.) Eggs are even easier to understand – lots of animals eat eggs. If people have no instincts for this, they could certainly see other animals eat them. And eggs don’t run very fast. So it would be easy to get them from a nest abandoned by a scared-off mother. The yolk of the egg, like the bulk of the grains we eat, is really stored nutrition for the growing chick or seed. As with the case of milk and honey, we’re taking the nutrition originally intended to nurture the young of something else.
