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Comment by bedobi | Hacker News Reader

countless plant and animal species have evolved and died out throughout the history of life on Earth

humans have existed only for a tiny fraction of the duration of the history of complex life on Earth

but somehow

humans managed to co-exist with chocolate, sugarcane, vanilla, bovids (cow milk, steak), coffee and any number of stupidly tasty things

I'm not going anywhere with this comment

but, like, wow, no!?

if humans had evolved a couple of million years earlier, or any of those stupidly tasty things had evolved a couple of million years later, we wouldn't have been able to experience them

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Makes me wonder how many insanely taste things we are not experiencing because they went extinct or have not appeared yet. Defiantly there are way way more than the ones that we happened to overlap with.

for sure, but if you could push a button to make it so, would you really risk giving up chocolate (or whatever you consider to be the tastiest thing in the world) forever for potentially something less tasty? :P

no right or wrong here, just an honest and silly question

I know I wouldn't risk chocolate, coffee, beer and wine for anything

I would be happy if supermarkets stocked more than one or two of the blandest varieties of most foods. There's plenty of existing tasty foods you don't get to experience.

Just had a long conversation about morel mushrooms last night. They fit nicely in this category. Hands down the best mushroom I’ve ever eaten.

Probably because they look like a brain on a stick.

There are thousands of mindblowingly delicious fruits that are simply incompatible with modern supply chains so most people don't even know exist. I recommend "Weird Explorer" on youtube to get a small glimpse.

Nice! Will check that out. I just saw a thing yesterday about nutmeg, the fruit it comes from and the 'mace' which is a beautiful webbing around the pit. Never heard of any of it.

Wow, it is beautiful! [1]

In the US it might be most commonly encountered as a primary constituent of Pumpkin Spice.

[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/63/Nu...

Farmers markets very occasionally will have interesting fruit, often I suspect as a side project for the farmer, sitting at the back of their stall for a couple of weeks only.

In Californian farmers markets and fruit stalls I've been able to get some relatively uncommon fruit with unique flavours: feijoa, persimmon, passionfruit, pomegranate.

Travel is another way to be exposed to new fruit via alternate supply chains. Most Americans have never heard of feijoa but New Zealand in autumn is awash with them! You don't even need to buy them cause everyone has a friend, relative or neighbour with a tree trying to git rid of theirs before they go off!

https://thespinoff.co.nz/society/04-04-2017/in-praise-of-the...

Just to add to your list a couple of delicacies from Mexico. Maguey worms and Escamoles(Ant eggs).

I ate some ants, primate style with a stick, to mess with my kids and some of their friends at a party. They were surprisingly tasty. I don't know if it was the ants or the pine tar that was stuck to them but something gave me horrible gas pains for a day lol.

Maybe fresh woolly mammoth tasted like ambrosia and unicorn spunk. There must have been some reason to hunt them beyond my ken; deer etc, smaller game seems much more viable otherwise.

Sure, if you want to be the wimpy kid in the group that goes for a measly deer while the rest of the group goes after a wooly mammoth, go right ahead. You will rightly deserve all of the flack the rest of the group gives. Peer pressure, boy, I don't know.

I'm all for bringing back the woolly mammoth and finding out.

> if humans had evolved a couple of million years earlier, or any of those stupidly tasty things had evolved a couple of million years later, we wouldn't have been able to experience them

Of course, it's very likely that there were other stupidly tasty things a couple of million years ago, and will be still other stupidly tasty things a couple of million years hence.

no right or wrong here, just an honest and silly question

I know I wouldn't risk chocolate, coffee, beer and wine for anything

Humans develop slowly (long living with few children making long time between generations) than many other things (more rapid generations, more generations in same time) thus things that depend on their seeds to be spread become better more quickly than taste develops also the ones successful in that spread more.

In addition human culture consciously breeds the good fruits etc. just look how some plants have been turned into monocultures. Most bananas we buy are clones of a variant that was deemed good. For other things humans did centuries or even millennia of selection.

Its the other way around. The things we eat don't have a flavour. Flavour is created by our minds. Thus we evolved to find these things delicious, not the other way around - and this way also no surprise that there are tasty things all around us.

That sounds a lot like "Screw it. Insert me back in the matrix."

> if humans had evolved a couple of million years earlier, or any of those stupidly tasty things had evolved a couple of million years later, we wouldn't have been able to experience them

Proof that there is a God! /s

I eat fruit every morning and am consistently blown away by how good these "wild" things taste. Amazing.

but we would have experienced different ones?

If we didn't have cacao we would have learned to get something awesome from carobs, if we didn't have bovids we might have gotten fat deers, etc

There's soooo much stuff outside the usual flavours and ingredients even today.

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