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How do people learn to cook a poisonous plant safely?
- EucalyptusGrove 7y agoThe tomato was considered dangerous to eat in Europe because of its relationship to the Nightshade family, so no one ate it. One day, some Italian <unpublishable> <unpublishable> decided to cook it into a sauce and give it to a woman, so she would get drugged and he could take advantage of her. She didn't get poisoned, and he invented what we currently know as Italian cuisine. So, my guess is going to be "by less than ethical ways".
- Iv 7y agoI am not sure it was as erroneous as people say. In Mexico they grow "tomatillos" which are similar to tomatoes except they are smaller and stay green. They need to be cooked to be safe. It could be generation of breeding them selectively in Europe that made them safe to eat raw.
- Matticus_Rex 7y agoTomatillos aren't very closely related to tomatoes at all (they're a gooseberry) and are safe to eat raw -- you just shouldn't eat them raw when underripe.
- Iv 7y agoThat's what I heard, yet looking at WP it classifies tomatoes and tomatillos in the same family whereas gooseberries are a different order. I am not versed-enough in botanics to know how relevant this is, but I wonder what is true or not in these.
- Matticus_Rex 7y agoAh, apparently its close relative is not the eurasian gooseberry but the cape gooseberry, which is the same genus as the tomatillo. They're also nightshades like peppers and tomatoes, but so is tobacco.
- Ensorceled 7y agoTomatoes were domesticated, and eaten, in South America long before being imported to Europe so I'm guessing the story is, at best, apocryphal. Potatoes have a similar origin and also have poisonous leaves for the same reason (nightshade plants often contain solanine)
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- Qwertystop 7y agoI had heard that the reason tomatoes were thought poisonous in Europe is because the acidity would leach lead from pewter plates.
- Iv 7y agoWell, first, you make a lot of kids... Joke aside, this article is... incomplete at best: > "Toxic plants are everywhere. Sometimes simple cooking > processes are enough to make them edible. But how does > anyone learn the elaborate preparation needed for cassava > or nardoo? > No single person does, according to Joseph Henrich, an > evolutionary biologist. > He argues this knowledge is cultural. ... > In South America, where humans have eaten cassava for > thousands of years, tribes have learned the many steps > needed to detoxify it completely: scrape, grate, wash, > boil the liquid, leave the solid to stand for two days, > then bake. > Ask why they do this, and they will not mention hydrogen > cyanide. They will simply say "this is our culture". Never ask a scientist something outside their specialties. Evolutionary biology and sociology are differenent. This article misses the fact that these cultures also do know that the food is unsafe without these steps. In Japan, where they eat fugu, the poisonous fish, they know why they remove the toxic parts. In France, where we do tons of cheese from raw milk, we know why we need fresh milk to do that: otherwise you get sever food poisoning. My mom used to grow rhubarb and do jam, she explained to me that the leaves are toxic. I agree that there may be or have been useless steps in the process and that it was not as well understood 100 years ago as it is now, but this is not just pure dumb imitation.
- OJFord 7y ago> Nardoo, a type of fern, is packed with an enzyme called thiaminase, which is toxic to the human body. Thiaminase breaks down the body's supply of Vitamin B1 [...] A slightly tortured sentence - B1 is thiamin, so thiaminase is an enzyme that breaks it down by definition, not some sort of (in)convenient coincidence. (Perhaps it's deliberately avoiding using both 'thiamin' and 'thiaminase' for fear of confusing the poor reader, but I might have opted for 'is packed with an enzyme that breaks down the body's supply of thiamin (vitamin B1)' - or just not name it beyond B1 at all. IANAJournalist, though.)
- Scoundreller 7y agoAren’t enzymes proteins that aren’t absorbed? Maybe they’ll break down thiamine in the digestive tract, but they shouldn’t really break down the body’s internal stores, right?
- DanBC 7y agoBody storage of thiamine is minimal. https://www.who.int/nutrition/publications/en/thiamine_in_emergencies_eng.pdf https://www.who.int/nutrition/publications/en/thiamine_in_em... >> Body storage of thiamine is minimal, the liver being the main extra-muscular storage site. In young and healthy non-alcoholic individuals, subjective symptoms appear after 2 to 3 weeks of a deficient diet (Brin,1963). Characteristic early symptoms include anorexia, weakness, aching, burning sensation in hands and feet, indigestion, irritability and depression. After 6 to 8 weeks the only objective signs at rest may be a slight fall in blood pressure, and moderate weight loss. After 2 to 3 months apathy and weakness become extreme, calf muscle tenderness develops with loss of recent memory, confusion, ataxia and sometimes persistent vomiting (Anderson et al,1985).
- Scoundreller 7y agoGotcha. And it won’t help you absorb what you ate if you’re eating it everyday.
- elmar 7y agoPeople that defend the Carnivore diet, argument that plants don't want to be eaten and because they lack locomotion to run away but are excellent at chemistry, have developed toxins to protect themselves from predators.
- tiborsaas 7y agoI'm really happy they've developed capsaicin :D
- oh_sigh 7y agoAnd caffeine, which is an insecicide
- inimino 7y agoAnd don't forget--nicotine.
- abruzzi 7y agoAs I understand it birds are not sensitive to capsaicin, and unlike mammals who will eat the entire fruit, seeds and all, passing it through their digestive tract, birds are careless eaters and will drop half their food while eating, effectively spreading seeds.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- donalm 7y agoIf the carnivore wants food, something will have to eat the plants.
- superpermutat0r 7y agoAnd these toxins might bioaccumulate in the flesh of the animal that gets eaten, poisoning the carnivore even more.
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- 4mpm3 7y agoThis article is interesting but somewhat misleading, to the point that I don't know what information to trust. Yes, it does take many steps to turn cassava into a refined flour for baking, but cassava is easily eaten--just peel and boil it, as I do often (it's readily available in many grocery stores in Canada, and a staple of Latin American culture). Cooking is the same basic process used to make many borderline or poisonous foods edible, from bitter almonds to kidney beans. The author appears to conflate some specialized regional cooking techniques with simply making food safe to eat.
- 9nGQluzmnq3M 7y agoYou're presumably eating cyanide-less "sweet" cassava, which is different (and far less toxic) than the "bitter" varieties eaten in Africa and South America. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassava#Potential_toxicity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassava#Potential_toxicity
- lucaslisboa 7y agoThe author appears to conflate some specialized regional cooking techniques with simply making food safe to eat. Agreed. I'm from Brazil and cassava is a pretty common thing to eat. Where I live, especially, it's usually deep fried and we eat it like french fries, for example.
- simlan 7y agoYou are buying and eating the so called sweet variety which is safe to eat after proper cooking. The ones used for making flour is called bitter and way more toxic thus the elaborate process. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassava https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassava
- 4mpm3 7y agoAh, thanks for that. You are of course right, and I didn't realize there was a difference.
- jonplackett 7y agoI wondered about this too, having seen it on sale in the local supermarket. Thought it was strange people weren't mistakenly dropping dead all over the place!
- nabla9 7y agoShamans eat mushroom (Amanita muscaria) to get hallucination trip. Multiple toxins in the mushroom cause severe side-effects that spoil the trip, including severe headaches that last 10 hours. Instead of eating the mushroom directly, they fed it to reindeer and then drank its urine reducing the amount of toxins. Imagine the process that led to the discovery of this process.
- elcomet 7y agoWouldn't all the toxins be concentrated in the urine? That's very strange !
- glormph 7y agoThey possibly undergo some reaction in the reindeer's liver to break them down, before excreting them in urine.
- TheSpiceIsLife 7y agoThe liver can make some things more water soluble to be excreted via the kidneys, or more fat soluble to be excreted via the gallbladder > stomach > bowel. I haven’t looked in to it, but I’d hazard a guess that, if this story is true, some of the toxins are excreted via the second route mentioned above, thereby rendering the urine less toxic. Everyone I’ve known who has consumed amanita muscaria has said something to the effect of “I won’t do that again”. Two mates ended up in hospital for a bit. Not an extreme sport I’d recommend.
- meschi 7y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amanita_muscaria#Toxicity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amanita_muscaria#Toxicity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibotenic_acid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibotenic_acid Amanita Muscaria contains muscimol and ibotenic acid. Ibotenic acid is neurotoxic and a prodrug to muscimol, which has the desired psychoactive effect.
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- WalterBright 7y agoIt's like sword making in Japan. The process was ritualized and copied, long before there was understanding of the underlying chemistry and why it worked. Most of what we know how to do, like cooking, is learned by copying, not by understanding. Despite bow and arrow being refined for millenia, the compound bow wasn't invented until 1966, when the inventor realized that nobody had applied modern engineering principles to bow design.
- vanderZwan 7y ago> the compound bow wasn't invented until 1966 Err.. doesn't the Mongol bow count? I distinctly recall reading how the fact that it was made of multiple materials made it a lot more lightweight and efficient than bows made out of one piece. EDIT: NVM, I confused "compound" for "composite" EDIT2: And this passage on Wikipedia explains my confusion > In literature of the early 20th century, before the invention of compound bows, composite bows were described as "compound".[2] This usage is now outdated. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compound_bow https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compound_bow https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Composite_bow https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Composite_bow
- swsieber 7y agoIt's a pity that's how the naming went. I would kept "Compound Bow" for the multiple materials bows and called the new bows "Pully Bow"s...
- perl4ever 7y ago"The last recorded use of the longbow in war was by British Lt. Col. Jack Churchill, who used it to kill a German soldier in World War II" That sounds distinctly like something from a Neal Stephenson novel...
- dalbasal 7y agoI think with the success of systematic scientific understandings, we look past other, previous ways of knowing things. Medicines (eg antibiotic containing "witches brews," pain & fever relieving tree bark, etc.) existed prior to scientific medicine. People arrived at this knowledge somehow. Ritualized copying is how knowledge was transferred, not attained. A lot of knowledge of complex processes to utile nutritional and medicinal resources probably predates our species... The knoweldge was possibly attained by means that we don't understand anymore. In any case, compound bows are bows. Bows were invented, reinvented and refined, & spread many times. The composite bow (made of wood, horn & sinew) is a complex design using ancient materials, each with different properties. Even the simplest wooden bows, if important, usually embed quite a lot of knowledge about material selection, treatment, and construction. High powered crossbows and such utilizing spring steel were the last "prescientific" burst of innovation, taking advantage of newly abundant materials. It's not really all that different from the modern incarnation of that particular type of machine. When that guy was doing it in the 1960s, we know how he invented. He used knowledge of physics to calculate force, stored energy and designed for specific optimization. What was the Scythian bowmaker doing as he selected glue to attache sinew to his radical new bow design?
- unwind 7y agoBeing Swedish, it's a bit weird that they don't acknowledge that the "young Swedish doctor named Hans Rosling" then went on to become quite famous for other things, too [1]. Usually things like that are pointed out in texts like these. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Rosling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Rosling EDIT: Fixed a typo.
- sambeau 7y agoI'm British and I had exactly the same thought. It's also surprising that they failed to mention sword-swallowing—any other British news outlet would have shoe-horned that into the pictures no matter how orthogonal (or inappropriate) to the story.
- noneeeed 7y agoI think it's might have been a knowing ommission. This piece is pretty much a transcript of Tim Harford's series "50 Things That Made the Modern Economy". The episodes for that series are only 8 minutes long, so there isn't much time for extra biographical info without sacrificing the main story of the piece. I wouldn't be surprised if this article wasn't just written up by a scribe from the show's script and Harfords byline slapped on it. Harford also presents the excellent series More Or Less, which is all about numbers and statistics in the news. Rosling gets mentioned fairly often, and is clearly something of a personal hero (and friend I think) of Tim's. He knows exactly who he was and what he did. I just don't think there was the time in the programme to cram that in.
- shmageggy 7y agoIt's interesting that the same ideas are finding their way into AI lately. The AlphaStar Starcraft 2 agent was trained first using imitation learning to mimic human games, then was evolved using a sort of cultural evolution whereby different agents competed and the best were saved for the next generation.
- pure-awesome 7y agoThere's a book called "The Secret of Our Success" which covers this topic. https://www.amazon.com/Secret-Our-Success-Evolution-Domesticating/dp/0691178437 https://www.amazon.com/Secret-Our-Success-Evolution-Domestic... I have not read the book, but I've read a pretty good summary and blog post about it here (~7'700 words): https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/04/book-review-the-secret-of-our-success/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/04/book-review-the-secret... I found the arguments fascinating. Especially surprising was the argument that e.g. using bones to divine where to hunt can serve a useful role despite the apparent uselessness of divination. In this case, the argument goes, it serves as a randomizing tool to prevent over-hunting in one spot by independent groups (though of course the tribes themselves could not provide that reasoning). --- Follow-up blog posts: A list of excerpts chosen by the blog author: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/05/list-of-passages-i-highlighted-in-my-copy-of-the-secret-of-our-success/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/05/list-of-passages-i-hig... Comments on the previous blog posts (useful particularly because some comments point out potential errors in the book): https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/11/highlights-from-the-comments-on-cultural-evolution/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/11/highlights-from-the-co...
- lookACamel 7y agoThe author of that book is referenced in the article. >No single person does, according to Joseph Henrich, an evolutionary biologist. >He argues this knowledge is cultural. Our cultures evolve though a process of trial and error analogous to evolution in biological species. Like biological evolution, cultural evolution can - given enough time - produce impressively sophisticated results.
- pure-awesome 7y agoAh, you're right; I didn't make the connection, thanks.
- proto-n 7y agoI recommend reading the blogpost to everyone. It's very interesting and very well written IMO, and its contents keep coming up in my thinking ever since I've read it (several months) so it's had quite an impact on me. I haven't read the book, but now that I think of it, maybe I should.
- feintruled 7y agoFascinating stuff! "But overall we apparently did better by copying without question than by assuming, like the chimps, that we were smart enough to tell which steps we could safely ignore." In defense of the cargo cult, perhaps!
- masklinn 7y agoExplanation rather than defense. The process of cargo-culting makes a lot of sense over evolutionary timescale, because only very recently have people started to discover and achieve the means of not working by trial and error (and falling prey to ritualised processes and local maxima).
- LoSboccacc 7y ago> falling prey I mean, it's fine for people not to dedicate all the brain to all the things all the time, some level of cargo-culting makes us way more efficient in more pressing / important task trough the day. like, shaking a tv remote usually helps getting some life into it. there's some reason to it, it scrapes a little the oxidation between the batteries and the contacts, but for most people is cargo-culting, imagine everyone having to do a research on it before accepting shaking as the methodology, and this for all the daily tasks we do because we saw our parents do before us.
- joantune 7y agoThose are quite complex and evolved processes to learn in the first place to start with. It must be something more than trial and error, right? Am I the only one thinking that if a plant killed me, or slowly made my legs paralyzed, more likely one would abandon that process rather than say: let's try to roast it and/or leave it outside for a couple of days. Unless they were desperate and had no other food source. The case with the cake is even more mesmerizing, it slowly blocked overtime their ability to process B1. How could people tell that it was from that food?? And how do they go, yeah, we just forgot to do X
- jakobegger 7y ago> How could people tell that it was from that food? And how do they go, yeah, we just forgot to do X There's no need for people to understand what is going on. People have a tendency to try random stuff without any reason. The folks who accidentally do the right thing survive, while the others die. And it's also important to note that probably not a single person came up with the whole procedure. People might use a recipe that worked for a similar plant, and adapt it. A lot of people probably died or became ill. They likely never realized their mistake. It's just that over the years the people who did it right had an evolutionary advantage and survived, and now we wonder how they figured it out, when it was all just an accident.
- pbhjpbhj 7y agoNot only trying random stuff but being subject to random events -- you have to flee camp, you come back a couple of days later to find your porridge has 'grown', you leave it by the fire, get distracted, come back later and you've got some leaven 'bread'. You carry milk in a gourd, the end of the journey and it's separated, you try to make the same again but go too far end up with butter ...
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago> There's no need for people to understand what is going on. People have a tendency to try random stuff without any reason. You're not giving people very much credit. The things they try may seem random to an outside observer, but they made sense to the person trying them. They had some mental model of how it works, and applied that model. Sometimes even a very inaccurate model is good enough.
- tus88 7y agoNot by trial and error methinks.
- scarejunba 7y agoWow, one of the characters in the story, Hans Rosling, is the same fellow famous for his application Gapminder and the TED talks where he tells us about our misconceptions of the world (that are frequently more negative than they should be).
- Grue3 7y agoIn the current culture where people are afraid even of safe things like GMO or vaccines, it would be impossible to grow stuff like cassava, or even potatoes and tomatoes. The mere fact that they're poisonous when unprepared would be enough to prevent people from even trying it.
- bloak 7y agoI've not met anyone who is "afraid" of GMO, though anyone with a severe allergy should be very careful of GMO: you just don't know what foreign proteins might be unexpectedly present. Lots of people are opposed to GMO for various reasons to do with patents, economics, power, ... I think people are quite used to the idea that some parts of an edible plant may be poisonous: rhubarb is another well-known example. A plant requiring special treatment to not be poisonous is a bit more scary, but red kidney beans are not an exotic food in the UK.
- gurkendoktor 7y agoPeople who oppose "safe but artificial" things like GMO and vaccines, and people who oppose "unsafe but natural" things like poisonous plants (or for example, unpasteurized milk) are not necessarily the same group. In my experience, they've actually been opposite camps.
- Ensorceled 7y agoYet people die every year from improperly prepared fugu, improperly chosen mushrooms, unripe ackee, and other dangerous foods. And that's just food-related risks.
- yesenadam 7y agoAs far as I know, it's not known whether (all) GMOs are safe. That's the problem people have with them.
- JoeAltmaier 7y agoBut random genetic experiments in Grandma's backyard are assumed safe. With less reason and less evidence. The GMO fear is FUD, plain and simple.
- winchling 7y agoFor people to learn to cook poisonous plants safely, a lot of other people must have died from food poisoning. So why did they eat bad stuff? Well, if you're hungry enough, you'll eat anything. And people frequently got very hungry in history. The clever part is where somebody remembers who died or got ill and passes on the information.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- inimino 7y agoSomeone has to know what other people ate, know what of what they ate killed them, remember that, pass it on, and be believed for that to work. It's easier if the person gets sick and doesn't die, and then they themselves can tell the story.
- winchling 7y ago>Someone has to know what other people ate, know what of what they ate killed them, remember that, pass it on, and be believed for that to work. Yes, this is the tricky part. Per the article, such knowledge is passed on culturally, i.e. by people imitating their betters. But that's not the whole story. My guess is that occasionally, in unusual circumstances, some wise person would step in and say, 'No, don't do that!' (without necessarily being able to explain why). An important clarification is that, contra the article, people can't literally imitate other people. Rather, they guess the meaning of other people's behaviour. Again, without necessarily being able to explain it or even state it in words. See Chapters 15,16 of The Beginning of Infinity, by David Deutsch.
- jonnycomputer 7y agopeople don't always die after eating something poisonous, and you don't need more than tummy ache or bad headache to reconsider eating the food.
- raverbashing 7y agoA lot of plant toxicity is not just "you die" but get sick and is able to recover That helps with trial and error and some standard processes (like cooking) help reduce toxicity Now, how did indigenous people figured out the nixtamalization process beats me
- major505 7y agoWell, I guess someone had to die first to find out. I mean, if people are starving, and the poisonous plant are the only alternative, I guess, is worth the risk....
- major505 7y agoalso there are ways of discovering if something gonna be poisonous for you. You first put in contact with the skin, wait for reaction, than a small portion on tong. If no reaction was observed, then ingest a small quantity. An so go one. with that at least, you would have a less dangeours reaction with the poison, until you find out a safe way to consume the plant.
- JoeAltmaier 7y agoI'm thinking ancient peoples were not experimental scientists. The idea that an organized process will produce good data, was not really current until the Renaissance? Anyway, I'm favoring the 'folks got sick or died' version.
- dalore 7y agoSurvivorship bias. Those that discovered a way lived on to tell about it. Those that did not, died.
- inimino 7y agoSomething I didn't see in the article or mentioned in comments here, much to my surprise, is the simple fact that "the dose makes the poison" as the saying goes. In hunter-gatherer societies they would have consumed a wide variety of foods in moderation, with any of them potentially toxic if consumed to excess. As they learned how to prepare the toxic but plentiful food (plentiful because toxic, naturally) they would have, step by step, developed the techniques all without the need for anyone getting killed by poisoning. I think we tend to miss this because we are obsessed with logical puzzles and poisons that have binary action, but almost nothing in the plant kingdom is like that. This obviously has some corollaries for modern diets and fad diet obsessions as well.
- JoeAltmaier 7y agoI'm not sure they had the luxury of a variety of foods in moderation. I think in early societies they fasted and then gorged when food became available.
- inimino 7y agoHunter-gatherer societies hunted and gathered by definition. They had no such luxury of a choice of meats, just "what was killed today" or "nothing". They would have had no such luxury of being picky about which of the edible plants they ate, except for not eating too much of the poisonous ones. It's only after a long time of mutual adaptation that any society can become so dependent on a single foodstuff like cassava or nardoo. And that gives plenty of time to develop the process of preparation, step by step.
- JoeAltmaier 7y agoI don't get it. If it's poisonous, and the ones mentioned in the article are very poisonous raw, then how does the first step ever happen? The article professes to explain "How do people learn..", then doesn't provide any plausible route to that happening.
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- weeksie 7y agoNice to see the PR campaign for Secret of Our Success getting some traction. It's a fantastic book and Joe Henrich's stuff is super interesting, his thesis is that humans are pretty dumb on our own and culture is like an enormous shared brain that allows us to adapt to hostile environments. Lots of traditions don't make any sense at all, but they're important. Don't spend as long processing your cassava and you won't notice the effects of the poisoning until a lot later. To you it just seems like you're saving an hour or so per day. If you think about it, being extremely conservative when it comes to tradition has been one of the very best strategies for staying alive up until relatively recently in the human timeline.
- inimino 7y agoAnd for all we know, it still is.
- deanstag 7y agoA big part of where I come from, the state of Kerala have been consuming the root for atleast a century. It was our main carbohydrate source. And the process is mostly boiling it in water. I am curious if I am not aware of people getting sick because of this, or the particular variant that was imported in the old times did not have the toxin.
- tlynchpin 7y agoha I was gonna comment this sounds like a book I read recently (since I didn't read TFA because who even does that). I'm unsatisfied with the cassava and acorn stuff. I get that metabolism is externalized and I get that once it is a cultural practice then that's just how it is. I struggle with envisioning the part in between where the processing is newish and becoming a practice, especially in regards to something like the cassava toxin that doesn't happen until decades later. How does a processing strategy sustain in those early iterations? Versus the animal husbandry practices, they have more immediate results that seem less vulnerable to biases making false causation. I think I struggle with the making sense part of it, what I got from the book is that considering cause is a luxury won by doing it "because I said so".
- josemanuel 7y agoSocietal trial and error.
- hamilyon2 7y agoI am more interested in how igunak [1] was invented. It is poisonous, but not to who eat it. 1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Igunaq https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Igunaq
- viach 7y agoThey could feed it to captives or slaves cooked differently each time and observe results. Sort of prehistoric cooking competition.
- grawprog 7y agoThe one I've always wondered about is fugu fish. How on earth did anyone figure out that one small part could be eaten, only if prepared in a way that takes something like 8 years to learn before you are ever allowed to serve anyone?
- Matticus_Rex 7y agoThere's a delicious mushroom I regularly pick/eat and that is very popular throughout most of the world (Amanita sec. caesarae) that requires five different significant criteria to identify. If any of those criteria are different, the mushroom you're seeing is going to make you sick or kill you. Who figured this out? It was fairly easy for me to learn in the age of the Internet, but who were these generations of people who figured that out? Seems insane.
- your-nanny 7y agoUseful proxies like bitterness or stomach aches after consumption offer degrees that can covary with food preparation. If you cook it and it's less bitter, then cook it some more.
- chasd00 7y agothe only winning move is not to play
- Razengan 7y agoMost of discoveries like these fall under the "enough monkeys + enough time" rule. That is one of the biggest reasons I'm excited about the possibility of meeting an alien species; imagine all the things they must have discovered in their millions of years of trial and error. Even if they're not godlike in terms of technology, the simple difference in perspective must have yielded at least a few discoveries that could potentially change human civilization.
- aeternum 7y agoThe crazy thing is, we are extremely close to becoming those godlike aliens. We can now simulate most biological processes, and the technology to simulate even more is quickly approaching. What will be world be like when we can execute centuries of trial and error in milliseconds?
- Razengan 7y agoWe would still have to solve the politics of applying those technological advances uniformly rather than the benefit of a relatively small percentage of the species. > The crazy thing is, we are extremely close to becoming those godlike aliens. Yes, I also actually worry about the possibility that the first alien civilization we meet may be less advanced than us, and the greedy fucks among us will exploit them the same way they do their fellow humans.
- lewaldman 7y ago> We would still have to solve the politics of applying those technological advances uniformly rather than the benefit of a relatively small percentage of the species. This is solved already... Capitalism makes it work across time. (What is discovered now will with most certainty be available specie-wide in a couple of decades... and it's accelerating).
- aeternum 7y agoCapitalism is the best we have so far, and I am very pro-capitalist, but it is far from an ideal solution. There is lots of unfairness and non-uniformity in the system, for example where you are born matters much more than it should.
- sametmax 7y agoSome survival teachers will recommand this: 1 - do not do it if you can avoid it 2 - if you really must, then try the folliwing: * break the plant, put a tiny amount of it on your armpit. If it's not reacting (itching, becoming red, etc) after 10 minutes, continue. * break the plant, put a tiny amount of it on your lips. If it's not reacting, after 10 minutes, continue. * break the plant, put a tiny amount of it on your tongue. If it's not reacting after ten minutes, if the taste is not off putting for any reason, and if you don't get any sensation/intuition (for a better word) that something is wrong, continue. * masticate a tiny amount. Same. * swallow a tiny amount. Wait for 2 hours. Observe obvious symptoms, but also digestion. It should be easy to process at this amount. If all that pass (yeah, it's very long), remember this doesn't ensure the plant is perfectly safe, just lowers the risks.
- 0b0001 7y agoMost modern food does not pass.
- infecto 7y agoWhere do you live? lol
- jbigelow76 7y agoBeen rubbing a lot of Big Macs on your armpits?
- Infernal 7y agoTo be fair, it would definitely cause a reaction. Especially if you're still inside the McDonald's.
- commandlinefan 7y agoOr if you work there.
- dragontamer 7y ago
- mtrovo 7y agoThere's another dish made from manioc leaves in Amazon region called Maniçoba and I have a hard time understanding how it exists. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mani%C3%A7oba https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mani%C3%A7oba It's made by boiling the plant leaves a whole week to remove the toxins. Doing it by on a stove today is extremely time consuming, imagine doing this in the middle of the forest with heavy rain falling every couple of hours.
- lsferreira42 7y agoI think the information about cassava is wrong, i eat it since i was a child only boiling and deep frying. Also here in Brazil we have a plant called Maniçoba that has to be cooked for at least 4 days to release all hydrogen cyanide that it contais: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mani%C3%A7oba https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mani%C3%A7oba
- EinsDueTresFour 7y agoAFAIK, there are two different types of cassava: the one we eat, and the one that's poisonous (which I think they called mandioca braba) and is only used to make farinha.
- BurningFrog 7y agoThis is basically the sound argument for conservatism. A lot of traditions and systems don't seem to make any sense, but you need to be very careful before tearing them out, because they were often formed through generations of hard won experience ("written in blood"), and if you lose them, you have to start that process over.
- perlgeek 7y agoOn the other hand, those things were found out by trying many different things. I think societies benefit from having a relatively large body of somewhat conservative folks, and some more experimentally minded people to come up with new, improved stuff. The optimal ratio likely depends on how quickly the environment around you changes, how safe it is etc.
- ChefboyOG 7y agoGenetic Algorithms: Extreme Edition.
- Dove 7y agoI suspect the question reveals a blind spot in perspective. Food, by its very nature, is dangerous and fights back. Modern society insulates us from this risk; with a secure, safe, food supply, risking one's life to try something new seems insane and it's hard to imagine enough people have ever done it to learn significant secrets and what would be the point anyway? If the food supply is neither secure nor safe, risking one's life to give the community a new option seems much more reasonable and even heroic, and an area in which people would try extreme things for a shot at glory. Do people get injured or even killed hunting wild game? Of course. That's expected, and it's just how you get food. Do people get injured or even killed learning the secrets of wild plants? I would expect that's expected, too. So my suspicion is that this question is a lot like asking, "How did 18th century humans learn to defeat smallpox?" Well. It was hard. And the stakes were high. And a lot of people died while we tried stuff that didn't work. But in the end, humans are brave and resourceful especially when the need is great.
- isseu 7y agoSocieties are full of random stuff we learned just by trial and error and we don't even know why we do it. Can't recommend enough this book The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25761655-the-secret-of-our-success https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25761655-the-secret-of-o...)
- asimpletune 7y agoI wonder how this idea relates to things like masonry, where free masons are a highly ritualized organization but at the same time I’d imagine that they have a first principles understanding of their trade.
- carapace 7y agoThe plants tell the people how to prepare them.
- xaedes 7y agoThank you for sharing this! But even on desktop its hard to read, must be hell on mobile. So I will just cite you: 1 - do not do it if you can avoid it 2 - if you really must, then try the folliwing: * break the plant, put a tiny amount of it on your armpit. If it's not reacting (itching, becoming red, etc) after 10 minutes, continue. * break the plant, put a tiny amount of it on your lips. If it's not reacting, after 10 minutes, continue. * break the plant, put a tiny amount of it on your tongue. If it's not reacting after ten minutes, if the taste is not off putting for any reason, and if you don't get any sensation/intuition (for a better word) that something is wrong, continue. * masticate a tiny amount. Same. * swallow a tiny amount. Wait for 2 hours. Observe obvious symptoms, but also digestion. It should be easy to process at this amount. If all that pass (yeah, it's very long), remember this doesn't ensure the plant is perfectly safe, just lowers the risks.
- dang 7y agoWe fixed the formatting of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20877657 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20877657 and detached this comment.
- sexisfun 7y agoShadow banning is unethical. Why aren't you displaying notice to the users?
- dang 7y agoWhen an account has been around for a while, we tell the user we're banning it and why. But shadowbanning is useful in other cases, such as for spammers, or for accounts connected with a history of abuse on HN.
- sexisfun 7y agoYou've shadow banned accounts because of the name of the account. You left that part out.
- newnewpdro 7y ago"Nardoo, a type of fern, is packed with an enzyme called thiaminase, which is toxic to the human body. Thiaminase breaks down the body's supply of Vitamin B1, which prevents the body using the nutrients in food. Burke, Wills and King were full, but starving." It's interesting how resistant people often are to accepting that the contents of what you eat significantly matters rather than just the caloric content, when discussing diets and weight management. Yet in the context of people starving to death while eating food chock full of calories, nobody seems to be up in arms shouting "Heresy! Calories in, calories out!"
- dragonsngoblins 7y agoFirstly calories in, calories out is still in effect there. The toxin inhibited the calories in part. "In" doesn't mean "in your mouth" it means metabolised. Secondly, obviously none of these people are referring to eating poison when they say where you get calories doesn't matter in terms of weight management. They are talking about people eating things that are plausibly going to be eaten by someone in a modern society, not people wandering the outback with no idea what they are doing. For similar reasons they also don't append "for individuals with something approximating normal metabolic function" every time they say say it. Using the above story as evidence against calories in/calories out for weight management is missing the forest for the trees.
- presidentscroob 7y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sago https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sago https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acorn#As_food https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acorn#As_food https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kidney_bean#Toxicity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kidney_bean#Toxicity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhubarb#Food https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhubarb#Food https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cashew https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cashew https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mango#Potential_for_contact_dermatitis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mango#Potential_for_contact_de... It also depends on an individual's allergies and sensitizations. Furthermore, nearly all foods contain varying amounts of innumerable antinutrients that are also altered (increased/decreased) depending on processing method(s).
- hinkley 7y agoI remember a documentary years ago with a cool redemption story in it. They followed a primate troupe around for a couple of years. One of their newest members was a young male that had been ousted from his birth troupe. He had trouble integrating but they let him be. Let's call him George. Next year was a drought year. Food is getting scarce. Distress is building. One day, some of the troupe find George eating some fruit. Fruit that the troupe had never been observed eating. WTF George, you can eat those? So they watch him, and watch him, and nothing bad happens. Pretty soon the whole troupe is eating this new food source that has been under their noses the whole time. Hypothesis: primates do not instinctively know what is edible any more than we do. It's learned behavior picked up from observation. If one social group eats a food it doesn't mean that all of them do, and in this case bringing in an outsider brought new ideas.
- ncmncm 7y ago"Let Mikey try it, he'll eat anything. He likes it! Hey Mikey!" (1970s advertising, channeling racial memory.)
- neves 7y agoRemember that a poison food is a great adaptive advantage for the humans that dominate it. Your food will come with its own pesticide and you don't have to compete with other animals or pests.