What don't we eat anything which is edible?

[clairobscur]

Something puzzles me. During most of human history (and still today in some places), getting enough food has been the major concern of most people. Nevertheless, there are plenty of edible things which weren’t eaten in many places. A lot of insects, for instance would be perfectly edible. And a lot of people had quite often an empty belly. Then, how comes that these insects weren’t eaten on a regular basis more or less everywhere, rather than only in certain places or times?

Our ancestors, for the main part, shouldn’t have been able to afford the luxury of being picky about what they ate. Of course, in case of famine, people would eat unusual things, but knowing they could, why didn’t they eat them on a regular basis? In such or such place, these foods are/were considered a delicacy, so it’s not like they all have a really awful taste. So, what could explain that not all possible sources of food were exploited everywhere, becoming part of people’s regular diet? (I’m excluding the peculiar case of religious bans).

I assume there’s no real factual answer to this question, but still some posters could have interesting opinions on this topic…

[Achilles]

The simple answer is that humans eat whatever they can in order to survive. The more choice they have, the more picky they become.

It also depends on the relative nutritional value of the foods - just because humans can eat something without getting sick / ill doesn’t mean that they are necessarily getting anything good out of the foodstuff.

So in short, more-or-less anything of nutritional value is eaten by humans. If it’s not eaten everywhere, it’s just because the humans in that location have found a substitute what they find more palatable…

Hope that helps…

[Mangetout]

I think insects may often have been avoided because some of them are unpleasant-tasting and/or toxic, discouraging experimental eating (once you’ve munched and spat out three or four different sorts of nasty caterpillar, you may be less inclined to try additional kinds, even though those might happen to tast like chicken).
They may also have been overlooked or avoided because they are often associated with decay.

[Achilles]

@Achilles

found a substitute what they find more palatable…

Obviously, I’m not from Cornwall, so that should read “that they find more palatable…”

[Master_Wang-Ka]

Depending on where any given Stone Age tribe lived, they may simply never have been desperate enough. Why eat cockroaches when you can get oysters… or mastodon steak… or venison… or fish… or whatever, you know?

Some stone age folks DID eat insects; ants and grasshoppers were staples of two different groups I can think of.

And, off in the land of pure speculation, it seems to me that protein-to-effort ratio counts for something, too. I can spend all day hunting a buffalo, because once I bag the sucker, my whole family can eat off him for a week.

If, on the other hand, I spend the whole day digging for mealworms, or catching grasshoppers, by evening, I’m lucky to have enough for a good feed for me alone for one meal.

Economically, it seems to me that the buffalo’s the better deal.

[Master_Wang-Ka]

…and now that I think about it, all food aside, it seems to me that trying to make clothing, blankets, tepees, or much of anything else out of empty insect carapaces would be a losing proposition, too.

Give me the buffalo, any day.

[Charlie_Tan]

@clairobscur

During most of human history (and still today in some places), getting enough food has been the major concern of most people.

I don’t think so and I think MWK is on the right track. Most recorded famine disasters in the world seems to be done on purpose for reason of power, politics or the all time favorite - money. Yes, at times people tend to get hungry and maybe skip a meal, but the notion that humanity has barely been able to keep one step ahead of starvation is not true. Instead, humanity grew with the availability of food. As we got more and more efficient, people started breeding. I have a hard time thinking that Caveman Grunt and Cavewoman Gruntina, facing starvation, would decide to make more little runts.

I’ve got no online source for this, but refer you to Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond and All the troubles in the world by P.J. O’Rourke.

[tremorviolet]

There’s something to the “if you’re hungry, you eat what’s available” theory. A while back, I read an article (check out the link, there’s a picture of a basket of spider ) on fried spiders in Cambodia being considered a delicacy. Evidently, the Cambodians started eating spiders (among other things) during the desperate days of the Khmer Rouge and devloped a taste for spider. (eeeww)

For the millions forced at gunpoint into the fields, grubs and insects such as spiders, crickets, wasps and “konteh long” - the giant water beetles found in lakes near the Vietnamese border - were what kept them alive.

“When people fled into the jungle to get away from Pol Pot’s troops, they found these spiders and had to eat them because they were so hungry,” said Sim Yong, a 40-year-old mother of five.

“Then they discovered they were so delicious,” she said, proffering a plate piled high with hundreds of the greasy fried arachnids.

“And our spiders are by far the best in Cambodia.”

Since spiders are one of the only insect-type things the Cambodians still consume, I’m betting the other bugs weren’t tasty.

[Hunter_Hawk]

Another readable book that discusses issues like this is The Sacred Cow and the Aboinable Pig (aka Good to Eat), by Marvin Harris. I’m sure there are more recent books that discuss the sociology of food like this, but I haven’t really looked for them.

As noted before, it seems to boil down to the food value of the item vs. how difficult it is to acquire.

[KP]

I think it’s easy to underestimate the amount of insects that humans have eaten in various times and places. I had a friend who was an entomologist, and she was full of examples that alas don’t come to mind at present. Insect consumption has been noted in situations of scarcity right up to that US pilot who was shot down in Bosnia a few years back

The human line, going back to the pre-mammal tenrecs has had a lot of insectivory. I can’t think of a single primate (other than Man) that doesn’t eat some insects as a protein supplement, whether they are labeled herbivores, carnivores or omnivores.

There are two big changes in humans, versus all other primates, that together gave us by far a wide range than any of our relatives:

Culture: the transmission of acquired knowledge is a valuable adaptive skill, but it’s also led to some maladaptive choices at various times and places. Humans tend to treat their mental conceptions as ‘more real than real.’ I’m sure many people have starved without thinking of insects as potential food, or simply been unable to bring themselves to overcome cultural bias. It’s actually quite common for humans to die for cultural bias - think of wars. In a similar vein, this is why some military survival training includes the actual eating of insects: just telling soldiers that they ar potential food isn’t enough

Technologies: like agriculture and adaptable hunting tools, mean we may not have to resort to low yield insects very often. High-yield insect stores like colonies [e.g. bees, termites, ants] and cultivatable insects [mealworms and grubs] are still used by some cultures as food. Even we us e.g. mealworms are more often used as animal feed.

As a pragmatic matter, famine usually has a reason: draught, natural disaster, etc. By the time, we’ve exhausted our preferred food supplies, large or accessible insects probably aren’t very doing very well either, and would quickly be cleaned out. Insects can be notoriously ‘hungry’ in many life phases: the maggots eating a human corpse may only mass a kilogram or less.

This appetizing image leads to another problem: unfamiliar foods mean less familiarity with the required food technology. I have a long essay on how “food” isn’t just a substance, but often a composite of materials and technology. Worldwide staples like manioc (aka cassava and tapioca) can be poisonous unless properly prepared. Many local diets must be prepared in certain ways to make them nutritious enough to sustain life. (Natives of south/central Mexico laboriously ground their maize on lime millstones, even for their livestock, because the lime released essential tryptophan and niacin that neither man nor pig could otherwise absorb.) Eating unfamiliar insects could hurry as many fatalities as it delayed. Corpse maggots, for example, might contain many human pathogens.

[Tim_T-Bonham.net]

@The Gaspode

I have a hard time thinking that Caveman Grunt and Cavewoman Gruntina, facing starvation, would decide to make more little runts.

Actually, it’s pretty unlikely that they even realized that there was a connection between sex and reproduction.

It takes a bit of knowledge of biology to understand this. Many cultures, even fairly recent ones that were quite a bit more advanced than cavemen, did not understand the connection.

[citrus_x_paradisi]

OP: (I’m excluding the peculiar case of religious bans)

Sorry to nitpick, but I have to bring this up. There’s a sociological drive for all religious bans. Sometimes, like in the Indian ban of consuming cows, there’s also a good empirical reason for doing so.

[Charlie_Tan]

@t-bonham@scc.net

Actually, it’s pretty unlikely that they even realized that there was a connection between sex and reproduction.

It takes a bit of knowledge of biology to understand this. Many cultures, even fairly recent ones that were quite a bit more advanced than cavemen, did not understand the connection.

I hate to do this, but do you have a cite for that?
I’m pretty sure Romans 2k years ago had a clear understanding of this. Also, consider the crime of Onan in the OT, spilling his seed on the ground.

And then we have this:

The earliest known illustration of a man using a condom during sexual intercourse is painted on the wall of a cave in France. It is 12,000-15,000 years old

Cite.

[Ross]

We should draw a distinction between knowing that there is a definite and predictable connection, and understanding that connection. It’ll come down to levels of understanding in the end, I should think.

[Ravenman]

@Master Wang-Ka

Some stone age folks DID eat insects; ants and grasshoppers were staples of two different groups I can think of.

Stone age, nothing. When I was in Laos a few years ago, I saw the people of small villages running around holding a large bamboo stick, smothered with some sort of sticky substance. Some type of large insect, along the lines of a cicada, seemed attracted to the pole, and would get stuck on it. The folks would pick them off and eat them right there.

And in China - whoa, baby - they proudly proclaim that they eat anything with four legs that isn’t a table or a chair. And there’s no limit on non-four legged creatures, either: scorpions, silkworms, fish heads, chicken feet, trotters, snakes, and anything else you can imagine.

As others have said, we don’t have that much problem with food scarcity in the US. So, like little children, we can be finicky about what we eat. Other parts of the world which are not so blessed with the abundance of Midwest wheat fields, Texas beef, and California vegetables are less picky than we, and indeed come to embrace many foods that we’d find yucky.

[adirondack_mike]

@The Gaspode

Cite.

All PP can come up with is cite from Johnny Come Lately: A Short History of the Condom ? Of course it’s in the illustrated and enlarged edition.

[pravnik]

[QUOTE=The Gaspode]
I hate to do this, but do you have a cite for that?
I’m pretty sure Romans 2k years ago had a clear understanding of this. Also, consider the crime of Onan in the OT, spilling his seed on the ground.

I’ll back him up that a few cultures didn’t or don’t make the connect between sex and pregnanacy. Malinowski wrote that the Trobriand islanders thought that pregnancy was caused by an ancestral spirt entering the womb as a woman bathed in the island lagoon. Children are recognized as looking like their fathers, of course, but thats’s jsut because intercourse during pregnancy “shapes” them in his image.

[clairobscur]

@Ravenman

As others have said, we don’t have that much problem with food scarcity in the US. So, like little children, we can be finicky about what we eat. Other parts of the world which are not so blessed with the abundance of Midwest wheat fields, Texas beef, and California vegetables are less picky than we, and indeed come to embrace many foods that we’d find yucky.

My question wasn’t really refering to affluent countries. I can understand that contemporary american people won’t begin to try eating things they find unappealing. But rather why middle-age europeans didn’t, like the chinese you mentionned, ate “everything which has legs” (or not, actually)? Which would probably have resulted in these food being part of the european, and as a consequence, of the american culinar tradition.