sholio | (no subject)

Crossposts: https://sholio.livejournal.com/999018.html

(no subject)

The nonfiction book I'm reading had a few chapters on Çatalhöyük, one of the earliest proto-cities and a place I've always been weirdly fascinated by, and this led to me looking up a bunch of websites about early cultivation of grains and fruits last night before bed. And THIS led to learning that almonds are only edible because of a random mutation a few thousand years ago that turns off the production of deadly cyanide-containing chemicals. But it's a dominant mutation, which means the recessive DEADLY gene is still around, and any new almond cultivar could be poisonous or not, they just don't know until it starts making fruit. (Well, they've sequenced the genome now, so they can tell by sampling a leaf from the young plant rather than testing the fruit.) But anyway, the almond grower's answer to ALMONDS or DEATH is apparently "We just don't know! ¯\_(ツ)_/¯"

I also like the implied corollary that people in the ancient world must have just kept trying to eat the toxic pit of this incredibly toxic fruit, again and again, until they happened to hit on the version that was nontoxic. Guys.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Suddenly, almond cake (one of my favs) is looking a little more potentially deadly than it did, but I'd still eat it!!

As for the ancient people, well, I guess if you're hungry enough...

Cashews are still poisonous if raw and you have to bake them in high heat to get rid of the toxin, so I'm not even surprised.

If you have BBC access, episode 3 of Season 2 of Raiders of the Lost Past was about the excavation of Çatalhöyük, which might be interesting from a meta perspective.

That sounds so very human of us.

I loooooooove reading about Çatalhöyük! One of the sections of a space station in Ninefox Gambit is modeled after it (although it's mentioned in like two lines so blink and you miss it).

I'm so fascinated by all the weird-ass TOXIC foods that you can only eat if they're prepared a special way or whatever. It always makes me wonder how many people died figuring out how to prepare them (or got lucky with a non-toxic version, etc)!!

*fistbump of Çatalhöyük fandom solidarity*

It's just a really fascinating place.

Aren't the sweet ones around in the wild too? Presumably people who first gathered these noticed some were good for eating and others only as one of the many dubious medical experiments we did on ourselves... Much less weird than trying to eat toxic pufferfish or some of the other deranged culinary adventures. I still marvel how we found which mold makes salami tasty rather than just being a meat spoiling mold. Though I guess with enough lifespans of hungry humans trying to still salvage their spoiled food it shouldn't be surprising that we discovered *all* forms of taste improving rot food could possibly develop, from fermented vegetables to molds, to mite or fly infested cheeses, though I genuinely find it weird that we are now looking into ways to maybe to raise flies cleanly so their maggots can infest cheese without a problem for food safety (actually I'm not sure how far *that* project has come, I just remember a news article a few years back about disgruntled Sardinians bemoaning some cheese falling victim to EU regulations against living fly maggots in food, who wanted some way to get an exception for the "delicacy".)

At least almond trees flower prettily and they don't need grafting like apples, so I'm not surprised it got cultivated early.

That is amazing. And scary.

But anyway, the almond grower's answer to ALMONDS or DEATH is apparently "We just don't know! ¯\_(ツ)_/¯"

That is very human.

Guys.

I was part of a conversation some years ago where we concluded that at least one toxic-edible food had to have been discovered by a very frustrated poisoner. ("What do you mean, it's only poisonous until it ripens? That's cheating!")

A large amount of our culinary knowledge can only be explained by starvation. I mean, how else do you explain surstromming?

Look, starvation is starvation! We tried EVERYTHING. and also, everything + mashing, grinding, boiling, drying, steaming, anything to get edible food! 🤣

I also feel as if quarantine is giving me a brand new understanding of why you'd be willing to eat a poisonous fruit when you're on day 9,999 of eating nothing but goat. 😂

This, so much this.

The Incas had over 4000 varieties of potato (which is also poisonous in all parts except for the roots). Because that was basically all their peasant farmers ate, so they were damn well going to breed as many different kinds as possible.

Also, the Andes are literally microclimates stacked on top of each other.

ROFL.

This. Maybe it only poisons you a LITTLE but it has a bunch of calories! Etc.

I once watched my BFF shell and devein fresh shrimp (bought right on the docks) to take to her grandmother. I don't like shrimp anyway... and seeing her handle those multi-legged, ugly things led me to the same conclusion. I literally said, "The first person who looked at those and said, 'Hey, maybe they're good to eat," must have been mighty hungry!"

And isn't it also weird that food then becomes part of privilege. Once lobsters were 'sea insects' and eating for the poor, so much so that servants would protest if their employers fed them too much (cheap) food.

Yes! The weird and complicated metric of how food becomes high-status food or low-status food is so interesting to me, especially with things that have changed over time like that.

There's an odd, personal example with homemade bread. I used to bring my lunches to work as sandwiches on homemade bread when I was college-age and first working in a white-collar workplace, and felt very self-conscious about it. I've heard from other people that it's not just me, they had the same experience - making your own bread was a rural/working-class/poor-person thing in the early 90s. These days, of course, homemade bread or bread from trendy bakeries that looks rustic and handmade is trendy!

Bread is an excellent metric. Wholemeal bread --> white bread --> wholemeal bread. The cost of producing flour from wheat and changes in processing and suddenly nutritionally poor white bread is the favoured and the norm, then perceptions shift again.

I was on a university course in a Scandinavian country and had 'endured' weeks of seeded nutritionally rich bread, and whilst at lunch, I looked at my very healthy sandwich and--basically--whined out loud that I wanted some proper, white bread.

Cue a raft of yelling from my schoolmates from Norway, Sweden, Netherlands, Germany, and the US, which rapidly became everyone fighting that their preferred bread was the best bread. Anton from Germany had just received actual tin can of the densest black bread known to man in a care package from his mother--this was the Best Bread^TM.

Everyone was right and everyone was wrong *g* the cultural tone of that discussion was fascinating.

Yes, I've read that. As Sholio said, the ups and downs of what's considered "classy" as regards food has a really tangled history.

There were even laws regulating how often you could force your servants to eat the stuff - they'd protest and get results, because ew.

To be fair, lots of what we consider food is now culturally dependent. Plenty of places eat insects. Some people are extremely offended by organ meats or what have you, while it's customary elsewhere. We're just really flexible as a species in what we eat!

That is very interesting. Thanks for sharing.

Ahhh, humans.

We're very determined that way! If the calories are locked inside a hard or spiny casing, we'll smash it open. If the calories are laced with poison, we'll ripen/boil/roast/ferment the poison out. (If the calories are capable of running very fast or attempting to eat us instead, we'll gang up on it, put our weapons on the ends of sticks, and rearrange our pectoral girdle to throw things incredibly fast and accurately.)

I learned years ago that cassava - the third most common carbohydrate source for our species after rice and corn - contains enough cyanide that can't be eaten raw. Half a billion people rely on a food that has to be processed so it won't poison them! Humans really are amazing when it comes to finding a way to eat things. :D

Yes! Cassava is crazy! And then there are common foods like tea and chocolate - or wheat, come to think of it - where the raw natural state of it is not inedible but bears very little resemblance to the final, processed food product.

Humans are so weird and amazing.

Coffee is like that. Whoever looked at this little green berry thing and thought, 'I bet if I strip all the actual berry part off, dry the beanlike bit the middle, roast it till it turns black, and then pour boiling water over it it'd be pretty good?' :D

Or, y'know, let a civet do the berry-removal part for you. :P

So much processing for the end result we think of as a simple thing! "That's coffee; it grows on bushes" - technically, yes, but if you walked by a fruiting coffee bush today you probably wouldn't recognise it!

Not only does it have to be processed so it won't kill you, but there's like a bajillion steps you need to take, none of which are clear and intuitive, so it doesn't kill you at all. If you take just the first step, it only won't kill you today, but eventually you'll die of cumulative cassava poisoning.

Yep!

I'm also amazed at whatever humans first looked at a member of the nightshade family - e.g. tomatoes, potatoes - and went through the process of finding out that every single part of this thing is deadly, except for this one part that we can eat! Like, wouldn't you just give up after the leaves killed people? Nope, apparently not. :D

Tomatoes make a little more sense in that they're a fruit and they're red, which are often safety signals, but potatoes? This whole plant will kill you except the weird lumpy bits you have to DIG UP out of the dirt; how did you even find out they were there? You dug up an inedible toxic plant just on the off chance that there might be a secret food part underground? XD

omg this comment made me laugh so much! As did the post.

:D

Humans are just so dedicated to eating things! It looks like a rock and it's growing on the roots of a plant chock-full of solanine, which makes you vomit, hallucinate, and die. Obviously we should test whether it's edible, right? :D

Of course, we also eat fruits laced with amounts of capsaicin that would deter any other mammal; we just decided that nope, actually 'Ouch Ouch Burning Mouth Pain' is a flavour and we're fine with it.

"Pain is a flavor" lololollllll. That's just such a good way to sum up the human condition right there.

Hee, yep, going by our approach to food pain is a flavour and so is extreme amounts of effort. :)

Plant: I only want birds to eat my fruit because they go further and my seeds can survive inside them, but dumb mammals keep eating it instead. Time for CHEMICAL WARFARE! This is a birds-only diner now.
Other mammals: Ow ow ow, just smelling this fruit hurts! No way I'm not gonna eat it.
Humans: *crying and chugging water* I'M GONNA EAT IT.

TBH, honestly the first potato-eating humans may not have tried eating the toxic aboveground parts first. The root, where starches are stored, is the densest source of digestible food in many plants--even when the green parts are not toxic, they're usually a poor source of calories compared to seeds, fruits, and roots. Once prehistoric human figured that out, they may well have gone round digging up everything to see if it was one of the ones that had a tasty root, and not bothered about the aboveground parts at all unless they had a really noticeable fruit or seed to try first -- which potato doesn't.

For their sakes, I certainly hope so. :D

For something like almonds or other fruit, spotting an animal safely eating a non-toxic specimen might have been enough to get it started, perhaps.

Plus, once you're used to using fire to process food, I would assume that it's a normal thing to do with new items.

I am constantly curious about how humans came by the knowledge we have. From what plants are poisonous to which aren’t to “this is how you make a macaron but stir one time too many or too little and you get not a macaron”

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only