Well, first, you make a lot of kids... Joke aside, this article is... incomplete at best: > "Toxic plants are everywhere. Sometimes simple cooking > processe

Well, 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.