at Thu, 18 May 2006 00:23:28 GMT in
<[email hidden]>, [email hidden]
(jmcquown) wrote :
Quoted message said:The fiddlehead ferns post(s) got me thinking about this.
I think in earliest times we (humans, that is) watched what animals ate
and decided they must be good or safe to eat or whatever.
Probably a combination of learned experience, careful observation,
adventurous (risky?) experimentation and sheer desperation. We can safely
conclude that there was never a point where we started out with no ideas ab
initio about what to eat or else we would have to presume we suddenly
appeared out of a vacuum. Nonetheless, as humankind grew, colonised new
areas, and evolved societies we also no doubt expanded our dietary choices.
The careful observation part would have come in in trying to make some
rational choices about what things were likely to be poisonous. For
instance, if you see mushrooms which never have more than small "bites"
taken out of them but not totally eaten, or looking pristine, chances are
that these mushrooms are poisonous. Then you can proceed with a bit of
measured trial and error: taste stuff. If it tastes bad, spit out and move
on. If not, then it might be something to include. By starting with small
samples you could probably identify a few other potential foods that were
somewhat poisonous (i.e. if you get a bad stomachache it's probably a bad
choice) while minimising the risk of death. You can't, of course, eliminate
the risk of death altogether and that's where desperation comes into play.
Faced with trying something and possibly living versus not trying it and
definitely dying (from starvation), it's pretty certain you'll opt for the
former. So things marked as suspect might have been discovered in fact to
be fine through this process.
Quoted message said:Ditto crab or shrimp. Think about it: do they look particularly
appealing? Not to me, but man do they taste good when cooked!
What, exactly, does "appealing" look like? For instance, can you make a
distinction based simply on visual appeal between, say, a cow on the hoof
and a spruce tree? One is quite edible, the other generally not. But
without some other external frame of reference I'm hard-pressed to call one
more "appealing" than the other.
Quoted message said:Tomatoes were thought for a long time outside of the Americas (north and
south) to be poisonous. But native people were eating and enjoying them
for a long time before they were introduced to Europe.
We get back to the risk vs. desperation factors. Tomatoes looked like (and
indeed are related to) nightshades, which are poisonous. Small wonder that
Europeans categorised them as risky! Among the natives, however, it's
possible that at some point desperation drove a group to try them, and find
that they didn't die. It's equally possible they had no exposure to the
deadly nightshade and had no concept that tomatoes might be poisonous.
Quoted message said:Quoted message said:Who decided corn was a good thing to seed and harvest? At some point in
the Americas corn (maize) must have grown wild but who looked at it and
said, "hey, think I'll eat some of that"? I'm thinking probably because
squirrels and other ground creatures loved the kernels (just a guess) so
someone thought there must be something to it. Now we have cornbread,
tortillas, flatbreads...
In earliest times as I understand it gathering populations took whatever
seeds they could that were locally available. Wild precursors of corn were
presumably common in the Americas. Once societies started to think about
agriculture, there would have been a period of experimentation when people
tried different gatherable seeds and found out which ones produced the most
reliable and high-yield harvests. Again in the Americas we can presume corn
was one of the winners of these experiments.
--
Alex Rast
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