Often I have wondered who first thought of hunting mammoth. I figure this person was not identical to the first person who deliberately killed a mammoth, as the likely response to “Let’s go kill the giant elephant!” was probably “Sure. You go first. Oh, and don’t think you have to come back anytime soon.”
If I recall aright, an ancient test for diabetes was to see if ants (notorious for going after sweet things) would cluster around the urine of a suspected diabetic, so perhaps the ant-test preceded the human tongue one.
The fourth question (from someone feeling less than sophisticated for having to ask) - “What does THHGTTG stand for?”
:eek:
The Hitch-hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy!!!
QtM, I think that’s the point of people wondering about flour and such. If you’re living in a subsistence economy, how do you make the jump to all the steps necessary to turn wheat into bread?
(Answer: it wasn’t one big steps, but a lot of little ones. Like evolution, only with yeast.)
one of my fav. calvin and hobbes has calvin wondering who discovered milk.
i’ll drink what ever comes out of those.
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. A very good book.
I have a general theory, but no idea if it is correct. I am not sure, and have no way to actually verify.
I believe this discovery had to do with the basic asian principle of “likes” and the underlying principles of a type of animism. A modern example is the various animal penii and certain organs prescribed in chinese medicine for “sexual virility” and the idea that ingestion of like might impart like. Although these may be a bit dubious to the modern sensibility, a little hair of the dog that bit you has been a constant to immunity and “possesion”. The chinese probably also knew that a bit of poison over a long time could also innoculate you to the effects of that poison. And that bit of knowledge probably came from snake handlers.
“It was a brave man that first ate an oyster.” --Johnathan Swift
Haggis. I once described to a coworker how haggis is made–mince up sheep innards, mix with oatmeal and onions, stuff in sheep stomach, boil. He bellowed, “WHY?”
Now, I know it makes perfect sense to eat the innards all at once after slaughtering a sheep, or anything else; they’re too nourishing to throw away, and they don’t keep worth a damn. Hence the mixed grill. But why make a stomach-size sausage of them?
Speaking of milk, what about cheese? “Hey, the stuff that comes out of the she-beast’s bag got all thick and smells like feet. And THIS batch got blue mold all over it. Let’s eat!”
[QUOTE=ryobserverHaggis. I once described to a coworker how haggis is made–mince up sheep innards, mix with oatmeal and onions, stuff in sheep stomach, boil. He bellowed, “WHY?”
Now, I know it makes perfect sense to eat the innards all at once after slaughtering a sheep, or anything else; they’re too nourishing to throw away, and they don’t keep worth a damn. Hence the mixed grill. But why make a stomach-size sausage of them?[/QUOTE]
Because stomach on it’s own is tripe - eww. Rather spicy minced innards to prevent the waste of protein, than tripe and onions!
A friend of mine still hasn’t forgiven me for my comment about pork sausages - “How else could they sell you snouts?”
Olives. Right off the tree, they’re unpalatably bitter. What was the thinking here? “Hey, everything’s better with salt. Let’s soak 'em in this container of brine for a couple weeks and see what develops.”
Then too, sauerkraut. “Ach, du lieber! Zis cabbage iss round ze bend.” “Nein, nein. Zat iss impossible! I vill taste it to be sure…It iss gut! Better zan usual even!”
Ultimately, I have a food theory about fermentation and hence preservation as relates to the higher function of instinctual burying as demonsrtedaed by various animals- mammalian, avian, icthy, etc. Burying foods before, during, and after the winter in storage is instinctual and is perhaps the first preservation method. If one were to bury a carcass in specific mineralizations, preservation might occur. Otherwise fermentation, or even refrigeration in the winter. Environment and ecology dictate advances.
Sometimes I like to think how the evolution of culture would have evolved if it was entirely up to me. Like, if I could go back to cave man times and play it like a video game with infinite lives - how long would have it taken me to figure things out. Would I have figured out fire? Would I have figured out that putting food over fire is the first step on the pathway to deliciousness? Would I have figured out how to selectively breed wild plants to produce the most productive strains of vegetables? The answer to all of the above questions is generally “no.” Had it all been on me, we’d still be eating twigs and berries and sheltering in caves - yeast and grains, particularly, are something I would NEVER have figured out.
This depresses me, to realize that I’m dumber than a caveman, so I dont think about it too often. But eventually I forget that it depresses me, and the cycle starts afresh.
But that’s not why I am posting in this thread. I am posting about cassava.
I used to live in Zambia, in a part of the country where the staple food is something called cassava nshima, which is essentially gelatinous gray play-do. It is as delicious and nutritious as it sounds - no protein worth mentioning, rather, varying doses of cyanide, off-putting taste, smell, and appearance, and if not made correctly, it sticks to your fingers like play-do laced with superglue. The term for this sticky, improperly prepared nshima involves an adjective which is also used to describe a certain kind of diarrhea. I actually really like it now, and sometimes crave it, but it is a textbook definition of “acquired taste.”
Anyway. How is cassava nshima prepared?
First, you have to plant some cassava.
Then, wait two or three years.
Then, dig up the tuber - it will be, if you are lucky, about the size of a well-fattened forearm, hard as a rock, and covered in something that is an exact cross between tree bark and coconut husk.
Now, dealing with a rock-like tuber is difficult, so you want to soften it up a bit. To do this, first find a mostly stagnant pool of water. Place the tubers in the water, and come back four or five days later, once the cassava has started to rot. (You’ll know it is ready by the smell.)
Now you can peel off the brown bark-like layer, and also a weird, vaguely pink, plastic-y, seemingly-unbiodegradable layer -throw this away- and you have something that both looks and smells like a pair of soggily wadded-up tube socks. Dig in with your fingers, remove the fibrous bit in the middle, and now you are ready to make nshima.
Well, first you have to pound it, and dry it out, and pound it again, and dry it out again, then maybe pound it and dry it once more time, then sift it. But then you are ready to make nshima!
And cassava is not even native to Zambia! It comes from South America! Not to further denigrate a foodstuff of which I am actually quite fond, but cassava tubers dont seem the kind to charter a boat and sail themselves halfway around the world, which means that some poor deluded person once thought to themselves “This stuff is great! All you have to do is get it to ferment in some dirty water, and it comes out tasting kind of like feet! I shall travel the world, spreading its cyanolicious joy to all corners of the globe!”
To me, cassava does not seem like the kind of thing that would make it on the short list of things to export to other continents. But then, to me, things that you have to let rot in a puddle before you can eat it would not be on my short list of Tasty Things. And then I would have missed out, so there you go.
love
yams!!
A Mediterraneaner might have plucked a long gone fallen olive from the ocean. A seaside olive tree or its predecessor might have shed into the sea.
A popular cuisine in the Bahamas: Conch
Imagine an ugly scavaging sea living creature related to the snail. Now Imagine eaqting it raw . I wonder who was the first person to try that.
Form and function. A stomach is to be stuffed.
I think a lot of these questions have the same answer as a modern redneck joke: “Hey, watch this!”
In the same category as fugu - almonds are poisonous. So who got the idea to plant orchards of them and sell the results for high prices?
In fact, it’s even weirder than fugu. Puffers are fish, fish are edible, so after a few thousand tragic accidents, you learn these parts of this fish are bad news. But ancient almonds- be like munching a cyanide capsule. Makes you wonder why they bothered with hemlock. There’s good reason to NEVER EVEN TRY to eat one of those lil’ nut things. Not go looking for some mutant variety that JUST MIGHT not be fatal. (I got this from some book about ancient agriculture I read years ago).
Oh - and in the “Watch THIS!” category - chile peppers. Need I say more?
One of the most popular new medications for diabetics is Byetta. Its active ingredient is a protein, exenatide, that was initially discovered in the saliva of the Gila monster. “Hmmmm, let’s see if we can get some saliva from this lizard, and let’s inject it into Uncle Bob and see if it lowers his blood sugar.”
And then there is:
CIRCUMCISION.
No no, pineapple on a pizza, that´s sacrilegous.
I offer you durian.
The bloody thing looks more suited to lob at your enemies in anger than the source for dessert. After you get through the large, sharp spines on the outside the first thing you get for your troubles is a waff of gaseous vileness, it reeks to high heaven and back. But still, you haven´t eaten in two weeks so it´s a matter of life and death, so you brave up and tuck in to find the fruit of doom tastes like leper ass.
When I visited Singapore I saw that they had the common sense to ban the thing from the subways, hefty fine and all; the smell of even an unopened durian is very powerful and merciless.