5 ms·

I have to wonder what was going through the mind of the first person who stored some milk in a sheep's stomach, waited a few days, and decided, "Hey, this coagu

by douche 10y ago

I have to wonder what was going through the mind of the first person who stored some milk in a sheep's stomach, waited a few days, and decided, "Hey, this coagulated mess looks like something I'd like to eat"

smallnamespace 10y ago
They might have been starving at the time.
- evilduck 10y ago
  Thousand-year eggs? Stinkheads? Casu Marzu? Hakari? I'm pretty sure all of these were a starving person digging up their old trash, looking at it and making a hard decision.
  - M_Grey 10y ago
    Not even that hard a decision if you're starving, especially when it doesn't make you crap liquid and die.
    - evilduck 10y ago
      The first person to discover their edibility would not have known if they were about to crap liquid until they died when they ate it, but they likely would have known that in general rotten food can make you ill, hence the hard decision, chancing survival against a potentially earlier death.
      - M_Grey 10y ago
        The fact that any of us are here to have this chat leads me to believe that the basic principles of testing edibility have been handed down since antiquity. Smell it. "Oh that's rank! Yet, I am starving." Touch it to your lips. "They're not numb! Result." Touch it to your tongue. "No burning, no numbness, no tingling, good!" Eat a very little bit, "Tastes better than I'd have thought." Wait. "I'm alive, and I feel a very little bit less hungry!" Eat some more. "I'm not hungry, I don't have dysentery, and I can still see."
        danharaj 10y ago
        Not to mention the permutations a human living in subsistence conditions would try. What if I cook it? What if I dry it? What if I soak it for a while? And so and and so forth.
        M_Grey 10y ago
        Definitely. Especially anytime that food was likely to spoil rapidly and was incredibly valuable, like dairy. It also explains things like pemmican, which clearly evolved from a, "What if I add some berries and pound the ever loving crap out of it?" experimental lineage.
        Zancarius 10y ago
        I'd imagine it's also influenced by our stomach acid which plays a pretty substantial part in killing off most of the nasty things that could make us ill, although most of those same nasty things have defensive mechanisms that can help them survive the initial onslaught of the acid (high protein foods seem to provide some refuge [1]). Your comment reminded me of a YouTube channel I find weirdly (perhaps morbidly) fascinating [2]. Once your body is acclimated to eating dubious quality materials, even in modern society, it seems that you're less likely to get sick provided you're still relatively careful (not that I'd recommend it). Steve1989 has gotten sick from his adventures, although surprisingly it was from a more recent Ukranian MRE contaminated with E. coli, and not from some of the more expected sources. It's worth watching a few of his videos if you can stomach it, if not for the surprise at what questionable materials he actually gets down, but for the unusual number and types of things that have survived (he's eaten a cookie from 1951, 61 year old peanut butter, and even Civil War era hardtack). I guess my memory was triggered by your mention of numb lips. As I understand it from the channel above, rancid nuts are particularly bad at causing numbness and swelling. I certainly wouldn't recommend trying anything of the sort unless you were absolutely desperate! Definitely check out his channel. It's gross, I'll warn you, but it's also fascinating. [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC106573/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC106573/ [2] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC2I6Et1JkidnnbWgJFiMeHA/videos https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC2I6Et1JkidnnbWgJFiMeHA/vid...
    - mannykannot 10y ago
      Cheese is more than just tolerable: by reducing the amount of lactose present, it turns milk into a food for lactose-intolerant adults. It is thought that adult lactose intolerance was the primal state of humanity, and that cheese consumption was a step on the way to adult tolerance, in those cultures that developed it. http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v493/n7433/abs/nature11698.html http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v493/n7433/abs/nature11...
      - hyperpallium 10y ago
        Yes, and lactose tolerance in adulthood seems to have evolved quite recently (7000 BC IIRC). Of course, human infants are already lactose tolerant (so they can suckle). I'm guessing the switch-off evolvee for involuntary weening, and had survival value. I believe bread, beer and wine pre-date cheese, and so the idea of a transformation through some agent wasn't that far-fetched. And milk obviously is nutritous. I'm not sure, but can you make sorta cheese, in the way that rotting fruit is natural fermentation, and dough can rise from wild-yeast (and unlevened bread was being eaten already). Once the idea is born, you can work to improve it. It's easy to think of primitive humans as dummies, but they were probably smarter than most of us, and once they got an idea, they would tweak it. Plus, it only takes one clever and lucky person in a network of communities to hit on an improvement, for it to spread. But there's a question of why the lactose tolerant mutation spread so widely... was there a starvation event? An outcompeting, or invasion by stronger, milk-fed warriors? But I expect cheese making eating was very wide-spread well before this event, and it was a great source of calories. Blessed are the cheese makers.
        masklinn 10y ago
        > But there's a question of why the lactose tolerant mutation spread so widely... was there a starvation event? An outcompeting, or invasion by stronger, milk-fed warriors? It seems calorical contribution was the main factor in sub-saharan africa but in europe (the other main source of the mutation) it is mostly linked to vitamin D deficiency (the mutation spread from areas with less sun, especially inland areas with limited access to fish).
      - deleted 10y ago
  - bitJericho 10y ago
    Not even starving. Look up ashens on YouTube. Maybe it was just for kicks.
fridek 10y ago
Probably they made a waterbag from the stomach and stored milk in it.
strommen 10y ago
I have to wonder what was going through the mind of somebody who selected the username "douche".
- mundo 10y ago
  It means "shower" in French.
kaffeemitsahne 10y ago
People weren't always such wimps as we are today :-)
danieltillett 10y ago
You don’t have to wait a few days for rennet to work. It will coagulate the milk in minutes. In the past when everyone lived on the edge of starvation you could not be so fussy in what you ate. If you really want to see what starvation will make people eat take a look (from a great distance and upwind) at Hákarl [1]. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hákarl https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hákarl
- kough 10y ago
  I tried this – on a visit to Iceland, my (older) family friend / impromptu tour guide made me and my traveling companions taste it. The young Icelandic locals in the rest area laughed their asses off and snapchatted the whole thing, because "no one eats that anymore, it's for old people obsessed with traditions." Makes sense, it was truly disgusting. The Hvalspik (https://guidetoiceland.is/history-culture/the-worlds-most-disgusting-icelandic-food https://guidetoiceland.is/history-culture/the-worlds-most-di...) really was quite interesting though.
  - danieltillett 10y ago
    Some traditions deserve to die. Another one that I will not be sad to see go the way of the dodo is Surströmming [1]. I love the quote from Wolfgang Fassbender "the biggest challenge when eating surströmming is to vomit only after the first bite, as opposed to before”. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surströmming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surströmming
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- coldtea 10y ago
  >If you really want to see what starvation will make people eat Apart from the smell, this is not different from tons of other cured meats, salami, beef jerky etc (actually, beef jerky doesn't smell that nice, either). More of a cultural thing than starvation? Especially since Icelanders are pretty well off, and as far from starvation as possible and still eat it...
M_Grey 10y ago
The answer is the same as the people who gave oysters or crabs a try... when you're starving you'll try literally anything. When it doesn't turn out to be toxic, or make you feel ill, that's something you stick with. Something like cheese is even better, since you can turn a wasted surplus into portable, stored calories.
danharaj 10y ago
I am skeptical of all of the replies so far implying that the threat of imminent starvation is what drove people to discover weird foods. We're intelligent omnivores, we like finding and trying new foods. Finding as many food sources as possible is one of the essential tasks of a group of humans living in subsistence conditions. Note the distinction between subsistence and starvation. What went through their mind? Perhaps that milk spoils way too quickly and food that you can store for long periods of time is vital for survival. They probably would have known a great deal about the preparation and preservation of food in general, like the use of fire or that drying and covering food makes it last much longer. Their tolerance for food with strong unpleasant flavors would have been much higher than yours or mine and they would have had knowledge on how to test potentially dangerous substances to see how edible they are. If you stored milk in a stomach, it would coagulate very quickly. The substance would be solid: something you can dry! Aha. This could be a good way to store surplus milk. Early homo sapiens were pretty smart and had skills few of us today possess.
- nerdponx 10y ago
  Well, that and the fact that fresh cheese actually smells nice. I think a lot of the people replying here are thinking "yogurt" when they ought to be thinking "fresh farmers cheese."
- radicaldreamer 10y ago
  Exactly, it would be odd if early humans were less creative than today. The main difference seems to be infrastructure and they didn't have the positive feedback englightment loops the developed world does today.
- 13of40 10y ago
  > If you stored milk in a stomach, it would coagulate very quickly. The substance would be solid: something you can dry! Aha. This could be a good way to store surplus milk. You can make cheese without any sheep stomach involved, so it was probably more of an "Ah ha! Faster cheese!" sort of moment.
  - 10y ago
pmoriarty 10y ago
I suspect a lot of substances we now know to be edible were first tested on prisoners.
- ars 10y ago
  They didn't really keep prisoners back then, certainly not for long periods of time. Jailing someone is a relatively modern invention, back then they preferred corporal punishment (lashing most often).
  - pmoriarty 10y ago
    What about slaves?
    - ars 10y ago
      Slaves they had, but were far too valuable to use for testing things like this. Only kings and such could afford to waste salves that way. And anyone rich enough to have slaves probably did not need to test random foods since they already had what they needed. War captives maybe, or those condemned to die, but those are state things, and the state is unlikely to need to test foods. They most likely used animals, same as we do today. Dogs would be my guess.
ruricolist 10y ago
It's more probable that the original was a goat: "Upon killing a kid, a farmer simply takes its milk-filled stomach, ties it off in a tight knot or sews it shut, perhaps covers it in mesh to keep the flies off, then hangs it from the ceiling of a cool, dark room. He then waits for a few months until the natural rennet within curdles and hardens the milk into a thick, creamy cheese..." http://roadsandkingdoms.com/2015/the-secret-life-of-cheese/ http://roadsandkingdoms.com/2015/the-secret-life-of-cheese/

by douche 10y ago

smallnamespace 10y ago

They might have been starving at the time.

evilduck 10y ago
Thousand-year eggs? Stinkheads? Casu Marzu? Hakari? I'm pretty sure all of these were a starving person digging up their old trash, looking at it and making a hard decision.
- M_Grey 10y ago
  Not even that hard a decision if you're starving, especially when it doesn't make you crap liquid and die.
  - evilduck 10y ago
    The first person to discover their edibility would not have known if they were about to crap liquid until they died when they ate it, but they likely would have known that in general rotten food can make you ill, hence the hard decision, chancing survival against a potentially earlier death.
    - M_Grey 10y ago
      The fact that any of us are here to have this chat leads me to believe that the basic principles of testing edibility have been handed down since antiquity. Smell it. "Oh that's rank! Yet, I am starving." Touch it to your lips. "They're not numb! Result." Touch it to your tongue. "No burning, no numbness, no tingling, good!" Eat a very little bit, "Tastes better than I'd have thought." Wait. "I'm alive, and I feel a very little bit less hungry!" Eat some more. "I'm not hungry, I don't have dysentery, and I can still see."
      - danharaj 10y ago
        Not to mention the permutations a human living in subsistence conditions would try. What if I cook it? What if I dry it? What if I soak it for a while? And so and and so forth.
        M_Grey 10y ago
        Definitely. Especially anytime that food was likely to spoil rapidly and was incredibly valuable, like dairy. It also explains things like pemmican, which clearly evolved from a, "What if I add some berries and pound the ever loving crap out of it?" experimental lineage.
      - Zancarius 10y ago
        I'd imagine it's also influenced by our stomach acid which plays a pretty substantial part in killing off most of the nasty things that could make us ill, although most of those same nasty things have defensive mechanisms that can help them survive the initial onslaught of the acid (high protein foods seem to provide some refuge [1]). Your comment reminded me of a YouTube channel I find weirdly (perhaps morbidly) fascinating [2]. Once your body is acclimated to eating dubious quality materials, even in modern society, it seems that you're less likely to get sick provided you're still relatively careful (not that I'd recommend it). Steve1989 has gotten sick from his adventures, although surprisingly it was from a more recent Ukranian MRE contaminated with E. coli, and not from some of the more expected sources. It's worth watching a few of his videos if you can stomach it, if not for the surprise at what questionable materials he actually gets down, but for the unusual number and types of things that have survived (he's eaten a cookie from 1951, 61 year old peanut butter, and even Civil War era hardtack). I guess my memory was triggered by your mention of numb lips. As I understand it from the channel above, rancid nuts are particularly bad at causing numbness and swelling. I certainly wouldn't recommend trying anything of the sort unless you were absolutely desperate! Definitely check out his channel. It's gross, I'll warn you, but it's also fascinating. [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC106573/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC106573/ [2] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC2I6Et1JkidnnbWgJFiMeHA/videos https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC2I6Et1JkidnnbWgJFiMeHA/vid...
  - mannykannot 10y ago
    Cheese is more than just tolerable: by reducing the amount of lactose present, it turns milk into a food for lactose-intolerant adults. It is thought that adult lactose intolerance was the primal state of humanity, and that cheese consumption was a step on the way to adult tolerance, in those cultures that developed it. http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v493/n7433/abs/nature11698.html http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v493/n7433/abs/nature11...
    - hyperpallium 10y ago
      Yes, and lactose tolerance in adulthood seems to have evolved quite recently (7000 BC IIRC). Of course, human infants are already lactose tolerant (so they can suckle). I'm guessing the switch-off evolvee for involuntary weening, and had survival value. I believe bread, beer and wine pre-date cheese, and so the idea of a transformation through some agent wasn't that far-fetched. And milk obviously is nutritous. I'm not sure, but can you make sorta cheese, in the way that rotting fruit is natural fermentation, and dough can rise from wild-yeast (and unlevened bread was being eaten already). Once the idea is born, you can work to improve it. It's easy to think of primitive humans as dummies, but they were probably smarter than most of us, and once they got an idea, they would tweak it. Plus, it only takes one clever and lucky person in a network of communities to hit on an improvement, for it to spread. But there's a question of why the lactose tolerant mutation spread so widely... was there a starvation event? An outcompeting, or invasion by stronger, milk-fed warriors? But I expect cheese making eating was very wide-spread well before this event, and it was a great source of calories. Blessed are the cheese makers.
      - masklinn 10y ago
        > But there's a question of why the lactose tolerant mutation spread so widely... was there a starvation event? An outcompeting, or invasion by stronger, milk-fed warriors? It seems calorical contribution was the main factor in sub-saharan africa but in europe (the other main source of the mutation) it is mostly linked to vitamin D deficiency (the mutation spread from areas with less sun, especially inland areas with limited access to fish).
    - deleted 10y ago
- bitJericho 10y ago
  Not even starving. Look up ashens on YouTube. Maybe it was just for kicks.

fridek 10y ago

Probably they made a waterbag from the stomach and stored milk in it.

strommen 10y ago

I have to wonder what was going through the mind of somebody who selected the username "douche".

mundo 10y ago
It means "shower" in French.

kaffeemitsahne 10y ago

People weren't always such wimps as we are today :-)

danieltillett 10y ago

You don’t have to wait a few days for rennet to work. It will coagulate the milk in minutes. In the past when everyone lived on the edge of starvation you could not be so fussy in what you ate. If you really want to see what starvation will make people eat take a look (from a great distance and upwind) at Hákarl [1]. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hákarl https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hákarl

kough 10y ago
I tried this – on a visit to Iceland, my (older) family friend / impromptu tour guide made me and my traveling companions taste it. The young Icelandic locals in the rest area laughed their asses off and snapchatted the whole thing, because "no one eats that anymore, it's for old people obsessed with traditions." Makes sense, it was truly disgusting. The Hvalspik (https://guidetoiceland.is/history-culture/the-worlds-most-disgusting-icelandic-food https://guidetoiceland.is/history-culture/the-worlds-most-di...) really was quite interesting though.
- danieltillett 10y ago
  Some traditions deserve to die. Another one that I will not be sad to see go the way of the dodo is Surströmming [1]. I love the quote from Wolfgang Fassbender "the biggest challenge when eating surströmming is to vomit only after the first bite, as opposed to before”. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surströmming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surströmming
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
coldtea 10y ago
>If you really want to see what starvation will make people eat Apart from the smell, this is not different from tons of other cured meats, salami, beef jerky etc (actually, beef jerky doesn't smell that nice, either). More of a cultural thing than starvation? Especially since Icelanders are pretty well off, and as far from starvation as possible and still eat it...

M_Grey 10y ago

The answer is the same as the people who gave oysters or crabs a try... when you're starving you'll try literally anything. When it doesn't turn out to be toxic, or make you feel ill, that's something you stick with. Something like cheese is even better, since you can turn a wasted surplus into portable, stored calories.

danharaj 10y ago

I am skeptical of all of the replies so far implying that the threat of imminent starvation is what drove people to discover weird foods. We're intelligent omnivores, we like finding and trying new foods. Finding as many food sources as possible is one of the essential tasks of a group of humans living in subsistence conditions. Note the distinction between subsistence and starvation. What went through their mind? Perhaps that milk spoils way too quickly and food that you can store for long periods of time is vital for survival. They probably would have known a great deal about the preparation and preservation of food in general, like the use of fire or that drying and covering food makes it last much longer. Their tolerance for food with strong unpleasant flavors would have been much higher than yours or mine and they would have had knowledge on how to test potentially dangerous substances to see how edible they are. If you stored milk in a stomach, it would coagulate very quickly. The substance would be solid: something you can dry! Aha. This could be a good way to store surplus milk. Early homo sapiens were pretty smart and had skills few of us today possess.

nerdponx 10y ago
Well, that and the fact that fresh cheese actually smells nice. I think a lot of the people replying here are thinking "yogurt" when they ought to be thinking "fresh farmers cheese."
radicaldreamer 10y ago
Exactly, it would be odd if early humans were less creative than today. The main difference seems to be infrastructure and they didn't have the positive feedback englightment loops the developed world does today.
13of40 10y ago
> If you stored milk in a stomach, it would coagulate very quickly. The substance would be solid: something you can dry! Aha. This could be a good way to store surplus milk. You can make cheese without any sheep stomach involved, so it was probably more of an "Ah ha! Faster cheese!" sort of moment.
- 10y ago

pmoriarty 10y ago

I suspect a lot of substances we now know to be edible were first tested on prisoners.

ars 10y ago
They didn't really keep prisoners back then, certainly not for long periods of time. Jailing someone is a relatively modern invention, back then they preferred corporal punishment (lashing most often).
- pmoriarty 10y ago
  What about slaves?
  - ars 10y ago
    Slaves they had, but were far too valuable to use for testing things like this. Only kings and such could afford to waste salves that way. And anyone rich enough to have slaves probably did not need to test random foods since they already had what they needed. War captives maybe, or those condemned to die, but those are state things, and the state is unlikely to need to test foods. They most likely used animals, same as we do today. Dogs would be my guess.

ruricolist 10y ago

It's more probable that the original was a goat: "Upon killing a kid, a farmer simply takes its milk-filled stomach, ties it off in a tight knot or sews it shut, perhaps covers it in mesh to keep the flies off, then hangs it from the ceiling of a cool, dark room. He then waits for a few months until the natural rennet within curdles and hardens the milk into a thick, creamy cheese..." http://roadsandkingdoms.com/2015/the-secret-life-of-cheese/ http://roadsandkingdoms.com/2015/the-secret-life-of-cheese/