I have always wondered how our ancestors learned to avoid poisoning themselves-we humans can eat a wide variety of foods, but no other animal will eat unpleasant-tasting foods. For example-my dog will not touch chili peppers…while I devour them! What about other foods…like manioc (cassava): there is one variety of theis root that is deadly poison-to make it edible, you have to grate it up, and soak in water several times (the soaking removes the poisonous prussic acid). Or, take mushrooms-many wild musrooms are delicious-but a fair number are also DEADLY to humans-how did primitive man learn which ones to avoid?
Or, how about really unpleasant looking foods (like raw oysters)? (recall Samuel Johnson’s remark…“he was a brave man, who first ate an oyster!”
As for peppers and other hot foods…wehumans seem to like these foods, even though they are unpleasant the first time…certainly my Springer Spaniel cannot comprehend why I likejalapeno peppers!
a) dogs eat just about anything, but have a quick vomit reflex.
b) rats also eat just about anything, but have good memories for food: if a particular food made the rat sick, the rat won’t eat it again.
c) humans, too, eat just about anything, and exhibit a range of responsive behaviours between those of the dogs and rats.
d) despite the instinctive responses, dogs, rats and humans all regularly die from food poisoning.
I’d imagine that when a caveman saw his cavepal vomit up some mushrooms and promptly die, he likely took it to heart.
That’s about the only explanation that seems to make sense to me, lieu, although I’ve been hoping a better answer would appear from some reliable source. Considering all the exotic foodstuffs, not to mention the elaborate preparation methods, it’s amazing to me how much variety there is to the stuff we ingest.
Even the simplest cookbook’s recipes are amazing, I think. The quantities of thus and such involved in even simple dishes suggest that much trial and error (not to mention individual tastes) has gone on in that choice that finally got written down.
Considering that babies will put anything in their mouths, it’s not hard to extrapolate to adults doing similar things. And once you get an eyeful of the stuff folks will eat on “reality TV” you can sense that not everything that looks inedible really is. So the experimental eater, coupled with a skeptical observer, is what probably led to the inclusion of all those things like truffles, blowfish, poke sallet, and all those chilies that melt glass.
I’m just glad to have the experimenting done before I had to. I would probably starve if left to which wild berries and nuts to try. And I can’t see me eating grasshoppers and ants, even with a healthy coating of chocolate.
There is at least one Chapter in “Guns, Germs, and Steel” that tackles part of this question (the topic of the chapter is how man domesticated certain edible plants, including some which in their wild form taste crappy or are poisonous). Too bad I haven’t actually read the chapter yet. I think “Botany of Desire” my also help illuminate this problem.
Wouldn’t it be grand if instead of leaving them on my shelf, I’d get around to reading these damn things so I could answer the question – instead of serve as a bibliography?
Most poisonous foods are more likely to make you violently ill than full-on dead, so there was some opportunity for education. Oral tradition accumulates, like the “primitive” people in today’s Amazon Basin with the advanced botanical knowledge, and the repertoire is refined over generations.
Recnt related thread: Who Thought To Eat Green Apples?
I liked a quote I saw years ago that said, “The first man to eat a chili pepper was very brave. The second man was even braver.”
I’d like to know who figured out that soaking the inedible fruit of the olive tree in poisonous acid (lye) would make them edible and tasty.
So we’re saying that our collective gustatory repertoire is based on the outcomes of a history of “Triple Dog Dares” with the results favoring the darer regardless of the outcome of the dare…
Somehow, that seems to fit.
I’ve always assumed some sort of simple natural selection: those that picked edible foods survived and passed the knowledge on to their offspring, and those who didn’t, well… didn’t.
And Phase: I think that salt water (brine) will also cure olives, and some olive trees stand next to oceans and… well… sooner or later a hungry monkey is going to drag his knuckles down to the shore.
A minor nitpick, but rats are in fact rather cautious and picky eaters, very sensitive to toxins in their food. This sensitivity is necessary in part because they are unable to vomit. (cite)
I’ve always wondered this myself, especially for things like Fugu.
For those of you who may not know, Fugu is a Japanese delicacy. It is a deadly poisonous blowfish that must be precisely prepared. Various bits must be removed with surgical skill. If all the deadly bits are not properly removed – you die. Fugu is extremely expensive and can only be prepared by licensed Fugu specialists. Even so, about a hundred Japanese die every year from eating improperly prepared Fugu.
So how did this start? I can’t believe it was through trial and error. I mean, if your neighbor croaks from eating this butt-ugly fish, your natural reaction is not to say, “Hmm, let’s cut out this bit and try again!” Your natural reaction is to leave the damn thing alone.
Slight nitpick. Lye is a strong base, not an acid.
This is just a WAG but isn’t it possible that people may have experimented on animals? For example, you could feed different parts of the fugu to dogs till you figured out which parts didn’t make them die. Or they may have experimented on captive enemies. Heck, they may have been trying to discover poisons rather than the other way around.
What about grains? Who thought to grind up grass seed, mix it with water to make dough, then bake it?
Here’s how it works:
Note that many spices have anti-bacterial properties. This is thought to explain why tropical cultures are more likely to spice their food heavier - the practice tends to curb spoilage.
http://www.utsc.utoronto.ca/~burton/foodcourse/spices.html
Yebbut we weren’t talking about spoilage, but foods that are poisonous from the get-go. No amount of spices will change that.
Well, the dose makes the poison…
… and the OP mentioned Chili peppers.
… and the analysis can be extended to explain why and how societies experiment with food.
Here’s a nice excerpt from my link.
Humans have been around for quite a while. And even today plenty of humans can’t resist a dare.
I’d say that it’s pretty much blind luck. Any number of circumstances- ranging from macho display to extreme hunger- can prompt a human to eat something that they know has bad effects. Eventually people will stumble upon what can and cannot be eaten, even down to the rediculous details. We’re talking about millions of years to figure it out. And the forces of custom, culture and folklore are pretty good at keeping that kind of knowledge in a population.
Even in modern times we see this going on. A few hundred years ago, you’d be hard pressed to convince a European that the lead paint they put on their face was gonna kill them but a tomato woudn’t. It all go sorted out in the end.
Good question. It’s already been pointed out that lye is a base, not an acid. That doesn’t get to the root of the question, though.
One does not need lye to make olives edible. There is a process called “oil curing” that also produces an edible olive. You can read about it here. The first step in oil curing is to pack the olives in salt and let them shrivel over a period of about a month. I assume a lot of the bitterness is extracted as the olives dehydrate.
My guess is that olives were originally used only for their oil, and that oil curing was discovered by someone fiddling with the process of oil extraction. The lye process probably came much later.
Wrong. Number of fugu-related deaths, in Japan, between 1997 and 2001:
1997: 6
1998: 4
1999: 2
2000: 0
2001: 3
It should also be noted that the majority of fugu poisoning cases involves fish that was prepared at home, supposedly by unlicensed people.
That being said, I have nothing to add in regards to the OP.