How do people learn to cook a poisonous plant safely?
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
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.
I haven't heard this word since my SAT-prep classes. It means "chew". In case there are English-2nd language people here.
There's an interesting -- understandable but very wrong -- viewpoint that the right way to form sentences that a second-language speaker can understand is to talk in the way you might talk to a toddler.
Reality is pretty much the opposite. A toddler has perfect grasp of their language's grammar and is likely to know common words, less likely to know uncommon words. For best results, you'd communicate with a toddler using complex sentences and "easy" vocabulary.
A foreign learner has a much shakier grasp of the grammar and may have a pretty spotty vocabulary. But they're also likely to have a dictionary. And uncommon words are much easier to understand, given a dictionary, than common words are. The fact that they're uncommon means they don't have the wide variety of meanings and usages[1] that common words do. For best results, you'd communicate with a foreigner using simple sentences and "difficult" vocabulary.
[1] For reference, here are the ABC dictionary glosses for the very common Mandarin word 做:
1. make; produce
2. cook; prepare (food)
3. do; act; engage in
4. be; become
5. write; compose
6. celebrate
7. be used as
8. form/contract a relationship
9. pretend; feign
10. (slang) make love
11. play tricks to punish somebody
> It's the usual way you would explain the action to someone else.
How exactly are you contrasting these? Which words do you think toddlers are likely to know?
For example, "hi, how are you?" Is something you could say to an adult or a child. It's not "speaking to someone like they are a child" though.
Does that make sense?
> For example, "hi, how are you?" Is something you could say to an adult or a child. It's not "speaking to someone like they are a child" though.
The example we have here is more along these lines:
A: Salutations!
A: Oh, I'm sorry -- I meant, "how are you?"
This is an example of speaking to someone like they are a child. You come out with a natural (for you)[1] word choice, and then pre-emptively decide your interlocutor can't handle it, so you adjust to something you believe is simpler. You are speaking differently than you would normally.
[1] http://www.basicinstructions.net/basic-instructions/2009/1/2...
A somewhat related phenomenon is that many fancy words in European languages have Latin or Greek roots, so foreign language speakers can correlate with a similar word in their own language, or, for those of us who wasted some of our youth on this, may even be familiar with the word in the original language.
1. 玩儿；做游戏
2. 扮演；表演
3. 演奏
4. 开玩笑；玩弄
5. 上映；上演
6. 放音
7. 闪动；飘动
8. 发生影响
9. 赌博
"Mastigar" => To chew in pt-br
Mushroom foraging isn't nearly as hard to learn as the general public believes, but you don't do it like this.
Day 1: Eat a small (1/4 tsp) amount and observe for any reaction
Day 2: Repeat
Day 3: Don't eat any. Observe for any reaction.
Day 4: Eat
The explanation was that individuals can have widely varied reactions to species others find edible. Obviously don't do this for something unknown.
If it were just edible it would be labeled edible in the literature. If you consume it in a way or quantity that isn't recommended, well, there's a reason you don't see this stuff in the grocery store.
Big difference. It's not that all medicinal plants can be worse than the condition off the bat, it's that no one can make money by figuring out a dosage and putting it through the proper channels to allow manufacture and utilization for that purpose.
Herbalists have been doing their best to maintain a corpus of knowledge around these procedures for centuries. It isn't their fault that our boner for letting the market arbitrate ever aspect of our lives keeps useful research from being done.
A lot of toxic plants can be washed with clean flowing water for a few days. Chop them up and put them with a net in a clean natural stream if available for three days or so. Test the end result for the same way you would do with other unknown edibles (armpit, lips, etc).
One could probably try all the mentioned ritual techniques.
The simplest solution was throw them in a bag with a string and soak them in a stream for a week or two. The labor intensive solution involves boiling and rinsing them three or more times.
Legumes are good protein, but come on. Lupines do self-sow though, and you can probably get more than a cup per plant, so I expect you could be looking at an entire field of lupines and thinking it would feed your extended family for a week.
If you're going backpacking, tossing one of them in your pack seems like you can shortcut a bunch of the above.
One day I was with David Manise, a survivalist teacher. He pulled out a root, and made us tasted it. Young wild carrots. Pretty funny how small it is compared to our domesticated version, we really did a number on the specie by breeding them.
Then 10 meters away, he harvested another one. Looked the same. Only it was young hemlock. It's what Seneca used for killing himself.
The lesson here, is that eating wild plants is always risky, no matter what protocol or book you use.
I still love the idea, romantically, of going in the wood and finding my food with the help of some kind of Junior Woodchucks' Guidebook.
The critical word here is survival - it's better than dying from starvation.
Which is also why a lot of training will tell you to straight up avoid mushrooms. There's very little caloric value, and there are much safer ways to get nutrients.
Chickling peas taste fine, but gradually and permanently paralyze your legs. They affect birds the same way.
According to Wikipedia, this is only if you eat them for a long period. Otherwise the first sentence in its article makes no sense:
> Lathyrus sativus, also known as grass pea, blue sweet pea, chickling pea, chickling vetch, Indian pea, white pea and white vetch, is a legume (family Fabaceae) commonly grown for human consumption and livestock feed in Asia and East Africa.
People carry on about cyanide in peach pits, but as a youngster I ate them like almonds and never suffered for it.
Imagine the process that led to the discovery of this process.
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.
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.
There's a theory out there that 'bitter tasters' are an evolutionary adaptation by our Eastern European forebears who lived in an area where alkaloid levels were high in soils. If you avoided alkaloid-embittered foods your liver lasted longer, and so your genes were better represented.
Not really related to food, but urine was used in leather tanning etc. I read about this in the book "Eskimo Life" [1893] by Fridtjof Nansen, the famous explorer. [2] It is not unusual to have used animal urine and excrement for various purposes.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kopi_luwak
[2] https://www.gutenberg.org/files/46972/46972-h/46972-h.htm
http://www.unofficialtonyrobinsonwebsite.co.uk/pages/worst_j...
> In the coffee industry, kopi luwak is widely regarded as a gimmick or novelty item.[18] The Specialty Coffee Association of America (SCAA) states that there is a "general consensus within the industry ... it just tastes bad".
Acorns are high in tannins, which, among other things, make foods astringent (painfully chalky). Repeated soakings in water reduces them and you can make a flour.
But now you have a bunch of water high in tannins, which work as a preservative. I'm not sure how someone figured out you could soak leather in it. But I know that walnut colored stain can be made from walnut husks, so decoration may have lead to observation of improved durability. If it works for walnuts why not acorns?
I think this is why pottery was such an important step in human technology. After pottery, the process of boiling the shit out of things to make them palatable, safe to eat, or useful for crafts expanded our resources tremendously. There are cultures that simmered things without ceramics but it's complicated work to keep from damaging your container. Imagine doing all the detailed work to weave a water-tight basket and then your child manages to burn a hole into the damn thing.
Though I'd like your version too be true. Given we are well aware of drug and the influence of inspiration for many forms of art that have been zeniths in many areas of that. The influence upon science has not been as well looked into that I'm aware of. But odd articles: https://allthatsinteresting.com/amazing-drug-discoveries (though not sure that last one can be counted) with the discovery of DNA having some credit to recreational drugs.
Consider these folks: https://ambrosiasociety.org/
Who believe (among many other surprising things) that the legend of Santa Claus involves reindeer for this reason and point out that he wears red and white because so does that mushroom.
The bits of their ebook that I've read are less kooky than their website would make it seem.
There's also a video showing how to remove the neurotoxic component so that the other psychoactive component can be enjoyed. No urine or reindeer necessary.
"This change (to the red suit) is often mistakenly attributed to... the Coca-Cola Company...the red suit was shown on the covers of Harper's Weekly at least forty years before".
Coca Cola can however probably be given a fair amount of credited for making this the ubiquitous look.
"Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm" by Buhner is an eye opening and thoroughly researched book in this area if you felt inclined to explore.
edit: missed the part about aminita muscaria. stick with psilocybin. tried and true.
It's the discovery that drinking the shaman's urine gives a trip that concerns me, but lanted ales exist, so maybe it was just a process of elimination to discover who was spiking the booze supply?
"Whatcha up to Bob? Going hunting?"
"Kinda. I'm gonna go trap a reindeer!"
"Oh good, for dinner?"
"Nope; I'm going bring it here to feed it mushrooms"
"To make it fatter to eat?"
"No, so I can drink it's urine afterward. It's powerful stuff after they eat the mushrooms"
"..."
In a similar way, I've wondered how many times someone discovered how to make cheese, and failed to sell the idea to others. "You left milk in a sheepskin bladder for how long, and you want us to eat it? No thanks, pass the chicken"
I used to think about cheese and yogurts as strange, but honestly the "discovery" that mold is edible is more fundamental.
Anyone who has eaten a good sourdough bread knows that the secret to good sourdough is... to leave it out until the good tasting natural molds start to grow on it.
I think it is a relatively natural leap to go from natural-mold bread (wheat + sugar + water + time) to natural-mold cheese and yogurts (milk + time).
So, no, mold isn't edible. And it isn't part of bread. If your starter shows mold, you have seriously messed up. (Some cheeses do use mold, though. Blue cheese, Brie, Camembert,...)
Yeast is a fungus. Sourdough bread has always been described to me as "natural yeast", which I assumed was a fungus microorganism.
EDIT: Seems like Sourdough Type I has Saccharomyces exiguus, Candida milleri, or Candida holmii as its fungus. Perhaps it isn't "Mold", but those aren't bacteria either. In any case, the ancient, or even middle-ages cook, wouldn't have known about these different microscopic microorganisms when they created sourdough, cheese, or yogurt.
The growth of Lactobacillus is still important apparently for sourdough. In any case, the idea of micro-organisms changing the taste (for the better) of various recipes would have been discovered by the first baker of leavened bread, a truly ancient discovery. Yogurt and Cheese are simple extensions of the principle.
When you feed your sourdough starter, you discard most of it and supply fresh flour and water. This sets up ideal conditions for growth. The yeast is faster to grow than the bacteria, so the ratio of yeast to bacteria is higher immediately after feeding. Thus, you can control the sourness of the dough through those feedings and their timing relative to preparing the final bread dough.
The microorganisms should be invisible. You just see their effects on the mixture. Your starter is probably good if it doubles in size within a few hours of feeding (due to carbon dioxide production by the yeast). If there's visible mold, that's very bad. The yeast should be strong enough to defeat any stray mold long before it can grow enough to be visible. I would just throw that batch out and start from scratch.
Second, modern lactose-intolerant humans can drink on average about a cup of milk without major issues - so even before widespread lactose tolerance, some amount of milk would still be useful. Further, wouldn't children have been tolerant of lactose even before adults gained that ability? Human milk is more lactose dense than that of any dairy animal (especially the sheep and goats we probably domesticated first).
On Food And Cooking (my source for everything here) puts domestication of sheep and goats between 9000 and 8000 BCE, milk consumption known to exist between 5000 and 4000 BCE, and cheese production around 2500.
Some of our older holidays in the West trace their histories to feast-or-famine cycles.
I sometimes joke about 'how did they figure out this was edible' and suggest that they gave some village criminal the choice between banishment or eat this piece of fruit. If you survive you can stay. But it's probably more a combination of observing dogs eating things, and utter desperation during a drought.
Which if you think about it is extra scary because a lot of foods that we list as poisonous cause digestive distress. You don't want diarrhea when you're starving, and definitely not if you are dehydrated.
There are other ways to prepare Fly Agaric (Amanita Muscaria) to reduce toxicity. Baking at a low temperature with lemon juice simulates the digestive process enough to help.
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.
If your food supply is plentiful there probably wouldn't be the same incentive. But for most people, for most of human history food has not been that plentiful, so any extra source would have been welcome.
This is probably also true of all the ways we've found to preserve food. When you know the winter is going to be lean it's worth experimenting with things to see if you can eek out out supplies of that little bit longer.
Experience with other foods where proper prep can make them safe suggests that it can be done. And if a plant is in plentiful supply, that provides motivation.
And you can experiment on animals and captives, it's not necessary to kill your family.
Or feed it to animals and observe.
Sounds more efficient that way. If it works, it works, if we required understanding first progress on such matters would be much slower!
There's plenty of people who are okay at following basic directions for cooking - but the moment anything goes astray or they want to do something that's not exactly in the recipe (say, substitute one ingredient for another), they don't understand what is happening and how to fix it.
A lot of cooking is about knowing general rules and how to apply them, but if you've never learned them, you can end up with inedible messes. This is where those who arn't terribly confident can decide that it's all too difficult and give up.
I find the wonder is in the explanation.
I was talking about airplanes with a woman once, and it became apparent she didn't know how they flew. I offered to explain it, and she declined, saying she wouldn't feel safe if she knew the mechanics of it.
For me, it was different. Knowing all about airplanes made me feel safer in them.
For instance, knowing that certain ingredients release a lot of liquid when cooked, or that fresh ingredients often behave quite different to dried, canned or preserved variants.
I know I'm not the only one to have used fresh pineapple with meat, and come back to find that the pineapple's enzymes have started to digest the meat and all you have left is some meat paste.
Those things mean you either need to know what's going on, or be willing to experiment (and suffer the failures).
Also, on the subject of wonder/deep magic aspect - I think you can still know precisely how something works and still be amazed at it. Knowing that it's billions of microorganisms eating sugars and farting CO2 causing your bread to rise is still incredibly cool.
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.
That sounds distinctly like something from a Neal Stephenson novel...
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?
I usually see the phrase "ways to attain knowledge" in the context on anti-scientific woo, so it makes me a bit wary. Thus far I haven't seen a single "alternative" that holds water, but I've seen some that lead people to wrong conclusions, sometimes with dire consequences.
We're really good at figuring out why we're right, even when we are patently wrong. It takes training to overcome that even partially, and before people take too many Science Triumphalism laps, I wouldn't rate us as being all that great at it today, either. Fortunately, you don't have to be perfect at it to obtain advantage.
(This also merges well with the general Chesterton's Fence idea; instead of assuming that you're right in the act of tearing down the fence and finding all kinds of reasons why you're right, you need to seek the reason why you are wrong. No amount of piling up the reasons why it's OK to tear down the fence matters, because it only takes one solid reason why you shouldn't to tip the balance. This is mostly because, alas, benefit in general is often bounded and at a not-that-large value, but harm is not well-bounded. It's a lopsided distribution of value.)
A companion to that is the idea that the universe can be modeled. Rules that work for the model work for the universe. As obvious as that sounds to us, it is a revolutionary concept.
I suspect most traditions are more about the collective belief that a shared social ritual is rock-solid and unchanging, and people taking comfort in that, than whether or not it really is.
http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2007/03/08/2041341.ht...
Cooking is a common way of de-toxifying food, making it taste better, making it more nutritious, etc. It's not a big stretch to discover this.
> A safe processing method known as the "wetting method" is to mix the cassava flour with water into a thick paste and then let it stand in the shade for five hours in a thin layer spread over a basket. In that time, about 83% of the cyanogenic glycosides are broken down by the linamarase; the resulting hydrogen cyanide escapes to the atmosphere, making the flour safe for consumption the same evening.
> . The traditional method used in West Africa is to peel the roots and put them into water for three days to ferment. The roots then are dried or cooked.
How easy are either of those to discover? Especially since low levels of cyanide consumption doesn't have immediate health effects.
Across a thousand years, it starts becoming likely.
Biff: "Didn't you know you're not supposed to eat Cassava?"
Awk: "No. What's the problem? I did a couple weeks ago, and I'm fine."
Biff: "It's deadly. What did you do?"
Awk: "I mixed the paste with water to make dumplings, then Thag came by wanting to show me his new club. So I let it sit in the shade for the afternoon."
Biff: "Interesting. Let's try that again and feed it to Grep and see what happens."
So the feedback loop isn't "weeks" it's "years" or "decades".
Doesn't that directly contradict your previous post?
Even chemistry itself is derived from alchemy and observations made during decades/centuries of experimentation and reporting. There are still some reactions that we do not fully understand while we know they actually work.
Probbably part of why it took so long for the scientific method to take hold, you can just poke at a lot of things and try a lot of things and get a lot of success.
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.
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?
> 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.
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).
There is lots of unfairness and non-uniformity in the system, for example where you are born matters much more than it should.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Rosling
EDIT: Fixed a typo.
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.
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.
"was", unfortunately.
I mean, you can have anybody! Nobody declines such an invitation.
Do presidents actually do this? I feel it would be the greatest perk.
The article professes to explain "How do people learn..", then doesn't provide any plausible route to that happening.
As new cooking techniques were unlocked, they could've combined them to make things even less poisonous.
So now the descendants of those survivors can transfer that knowledge (i.e. that a poisonous plant can be made edible) the next time a food shortage occurs and all that is available is poisonous plant B. Rinse and repeat over and over again through the centuries.
Over time, the substances that no viable process was discovered for get labeled as poisonous. So now your 'culture' has a list of safe foods, a spectrum of unsafe foods that can be made safe (and how), and unsafe foods.
As long as it doesn't become a primary foodstuff such that it will build up in your system, you don't need to get all the hydrogen cyanide.
However, any group that can get all the HCN out, will also be much better off when the famine comes. They will survive; the other groups will not. That's a powerful force.
All of these also provide means of refining food processing techniques to reduce toxicity. If after cooking, the root is less irritating to the gums, or tastes less bitter, then maybe cooking it some more will do better.
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.
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
Keep the information about ill effects as part of the cultural package alongside the prep rituals? That way you can kinda sorta notice that the ill effects still occur and cooks can try to add new preparation methods.
Alternatively, simple evolutionary process: cooks semi-randomly add new steps (whether because luck or opportunity), some tribes push back deadly effects further back and thus have better survival rates, leading to their preparation methods spreading. Nardoo occurs throughout Australia, so native populations would have tried using it for a very long time (tens of thousands of years).
lots of cultures carry knowledge which is 'strange' for them to have or carry. how they came about it is often a mystery at best.
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.
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 ...
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.
People are not 100% rational, and being 100% rational is not evolutionarily optimal.
Look at people who flock to homeopathy, or those who buy "water vitalisation" devices, or other ridiculous gimmicks. There's no rational reason why people would come up with ridiculous things like that. Unless you look at it from an evolutionary perspective. These ridiculous ideas are just people randomly exploring the search space, and natural selection picks the ones who got something right.
What are you talking about? Those things absolutely have a model behind them. It's an incredibly bad model that doesn't stand up to any serious scrutiny, but it is a model none the less.
> These ridiculous ideas are just people randomly exploring the search space, and natural selection picks the ones who got something right.
I think you might be giving the word "model" too much weight. It doesn't have to be a mathematical proof or anything. "God won't let me die because I'm too pretty" is a model.
It took people literally millenia to figure out pretty obvious things. That blood letting probably wasn't such a hot idea for most ailments. Or that the awesome cadaverous smell of your hands that you took such professional pride in basically meant that your obstetric services massively decreased both mother and child's survival chances compared to no outside help at all.
[Edit: I wonder if the difference can be purely explained by people being much better at figuring out what increases their and their kin's survival chances compared to those of others]
A woman doctor wrote to a friend in June 1933 that she had not yet become a cannibal, but was "not sure that I shall not be one by the time my letter reaches you." The good people died first. Those who refused to steal or to prostitute themselves died. Those who gave food to others died. Those who refused to eat corpses died. Those who refused to kill their fellow man died. Parents who resisted cannibalism died before their children did.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor
With that kind of reality all sorts of experimenting will be happening.
Honor has been collectively adaptive often enough to have arisen in many places, despite local failings.
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.
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".
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.)
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).
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.
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.
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.
Toxins that bioaccumulate either are produced outside and don't work well inside a biological system (heavy metals, etc) or are fat-soluble
Easiest for plants to do is make neurotoxins as they don't have a nervous system to get bothered by it. But those are usually water-soluble.
Carnivore stomach is short and very acid to be able to dissolve bones and horns. Most complex molecules wouldn't survive to be dipped in acid two times in two different stomachs and be taken in the intestine by the blood vessels later.
Terrestrial mammals are safe to eat normally if not rotten (not so much safe to kill them). Plants are unsafe to eat by default, except domesticated species and some wild species. Ripped fruits like 50/50, often safe to eat but not always.
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
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.
The whole Amazon was heavily populated and orcharded before Columbus and his ilk spread measles, yellow fever, smallpox, etc. Pop. estimates range up to 100M. Amazon trees are very different from their wild origins.
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.
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.
"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!
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.
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.
(1970s advertising, channeling racial memory.)
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...
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-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-co...
>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.
I haven't read the book, but now that I think of it, maybe I should.
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!"
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.
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.
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.
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".
It could be generation of breeding them selectively in Europe that made them safe to eat raw.
Potatoes have a similar origin and also have poisonous leaves for the same reason (nightshade plants often contain solanine)