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Comment by nabla9 | Hacker News Reader

Shamans 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.

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Seems like the kind of process you'd come up with while tripping on hallucinogenic mushrooms.

Or maybe it was originally conceived as a cure for headaches and the deers would naturally eat those mushrooms. But more than likely born out of somebody doing something initially that other people would class as stupid, turned out it worked better than intended and caught on from that.

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.

Even in the present day, civet coffee [seeds from the excrement of civets who had eaten coffee berries] is used for its milder taste. [1]

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

I learned that from Tony Robinson's "Worst Jobs in History"

http://www.unofficialtonyrobinsonwebsite.co.uk/pages/worst_j...

> "The civets are taken from the wild and have to endure horrific conditions. They fight to stay together but they are separated and have to bear a very poor diet in very small cages. There is a high mortality rate and for some species of civet, there's a real conservation risk. It's spiralling out of control. But there's not much public awareness of how it's actually made. People need to be aware that tens of thousands of civets are being kept in these conditions. It would put people off their coffee if they knew"'.

> 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".

I agree. Industrial scale exploitation of animals for gourmet items of dubious taste abound, and should be discouraged. I was just pointing out that the practice mentioned by OP was not as rare as it sounded.

Why is this relevant?

Tanning and tannins share a common root.

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.

Not only the discovery process, but convincing others that it was a good idea too...

"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"

> 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).

fwiw: Both cheese and sourdough require lactobacillus, not molds. (And lactobacillus has actually antifungal properties - mold being a fungus, that doesn't bode well for "natural mold")

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,...)

Interesting.

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.

You allude to this, but it's been explained to me that the sourness of sourdough comes from the (wild) bacteria, while the rise of the dough comes from the wild yeast.

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.

Your terms have already been corrected below, but eating moldy bread is a good way to get ergot poisoning.

People ate cheese before they drank milk. I can't look up the source right now, but the gist of it was that cheese and yogurt are older than lactose tolerance in humans.

This is surprising for a couple reasons. It's easy to imagine the invention of cheese or yogurt if you assume people were already consuming milk. Wine and malting were invented under similar circumstances - fermentation of something already consumed. If humans weren't drinking milk, why'd they have it sitting around in containers?

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.

Adult lactose tolerance might be relatively new, but at what age is the intolerance switch usually flipped in humans that lack that specific gene? If it's more in the puberty range than toddler age then pre-mutation groups would have plenty of use for animal milk despite every individual eventually growing out of it. "Certain storage/transport containers make the child-drink palatable for old persons" would be very discoverable.

It's harder for us to rationalize it in an era where 'food security' is something only fringe groups had to wrestle with.

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's quite a lot to be said about the cultural significance of that particular mushroom.

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.

but didn't santa claus used to be green until sponsored by coca cola? Or is that some kind of myth?

Not a myth but true - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_suit

The site you link to even claims that it is a myth:

"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.

Aha, my bad - though fair to say, it was born out of marketing and darn good marketing at that (worked on me).

The Coca Cola bit is a myth. There are a lot of depictions of Santa in a red suit before Coca Cola used it in advertising: https://publicdomainreview.org/collections/a-pictorial-histo...

Other people then drink the shaman's urine to share in the trip, with even fewer toxins. The same hallucinogenic molecules get recycled several times. It isn't that difficult for the shamans to extrapolate this process backwards one step to let the reindeer get their asses kicked by the mushroom, and then the shamans only have to handle once-through urine.

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?

Elimination, heh.

I've spent quite some time with a Shipibo master in the Peruvian Amazon. Master's like him will explain that the plants "talk" to them and tell them what they're good for healing and how they should be prepared and dosed.

Of course, the masters who "heard wrong" are now dead

Or they're just in a higher reality. Trumaster

Very obvious case of survivorship bias in its most direct sense.

Certainly a reasonable opinion and one that I'd have shared before living with these people, but now I'm not so sure. There's a peculiar and wonderful connection between a shaman and nature (particularly a shaman from unbroken ancestral lines dating back hundreds of years). It's certainly something special to witness.

"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.

It was a joke.

I believe that shaman originally drank their own urine to have repeated trips and discovered the reduced toxicity. I suspect using reindeer came later as a way to outsource the toxicity reduction.

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.

What in this jar you ask? It's, uh, "reindeer" urine, yeah.

I've always heard this story and have never seen any evidence of it. I'd be curious to read a source that could actually confirm this as true.

While I don't know any shamans, I suggest you find a new mushroom dealer.

edit: missed the part about aminita muscaria. stick with psilocybin. tried and true.

Wouldn't all the toxins be concentrated in the urine? That's very strange !

They possibly undergo some reaction in the reindeer's liver to break them down, before excreting them in urine.

The 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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amanita_muscaria#Toxicity

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.

Amanita Muscaria can be consumed safely (with no tripping) by parboiling for 10 minutes and discarding the water. Repeat this process at least twice. It's got a lovely nutty flavour.

Don't know why you're being downvoted -- this is accurate.

Alkaloids. I can't remember if the heat denatures them or they are solluble, I think it's a mix of both.

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.

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