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Comment by choeger | Hacker News Reader

That's a very plausible theory you have there (except for the hit on European colonialism). But there's the question of why someone should sacrifice so many domesticated animals just to discover another food source (after all, they already had animals). Also, some of these steps are so off, that even reasonable experimentation wouldn't explain it.

I mean, how would someone come up with the idea of mixing non-food with ash? There's probably some utility in this step (e.g., making color?) and only later it turned out to yield edible matter.

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The history of the potato is instructive. The wild varieties that the first South American human settlers discovered (dates vary but > 14,000 years ago probably) were toxic, but if eaten with a small amount of clay, were discovered to be edible. Andean peoples didn't stop there however: they began breeding less toxic varieties of potato (there are now ~ 4000 cultivars) which also was a process of experimentation and selection of optimal results over a long time period. Breeding of maize followed a similar experiment-and-select process.

As far as why the architects of European colonialism wanted to deny that native peoples had such capabilites, well:

> "In a secularizing world, infantilization quickly became a moral posture and a theological necessity. It allowed the main actors in slavery and colonialism to make peace with their own consciences, and the intelligentsia and the Church to produce a powerful mix of justifications for the new world order. It allowed glib talk of the historical necessity to care for the retrogressive, irrational, ignorant savages and the Christian responsibility to guide them towards a better future."

https://newint.org/features/2007/10/01/roots/

The cited source - a socialist magazine that got started with features on Castro, Mao, and Guevara - may, perhaps, be slightly biased in its interpretative lens.

Absolutely

Objectivity in journalism is awareness of biases, not a lack of them.

An example of poor objectivity is corporate media not disclosing that they don't report potentially damaging information about companies because they share parent companies, the owning and operating families are closely tied with the outlets, or they share members across boards.

Another example would be showing that they're perfectly capable of critical reporting of a presidency but not applying that neutrality to all presidencies.

Your link doesn't say anything about spuds and/or clay, something I'd consider deeply dubious. AFAK tater toxins take considerable heat to denature. A reference would be very interesting, thanks.

This whole spiel is a just-so story. I've learned not to expect much from communists in terms of argumentation, but this is really embarrassingly bad

There's right now on the HN front page a thread about people using Excel [0]. I'll quote from some comments in that thread:

>Nobody is born knowing what tools to use or how to use them, but Excel is one of the first pieces of software that deal with data for a lot of people, and as such one of the first things they turn to when faced with a new problem.

>I’ve done some travel to Africa and am amazed at the ingenuity/batshit workflows that exist to get work done and live life.

>I'm continually shocked at how technically incompetent academics can be. Otherwise brilliant people with the most batshit technical workflows I've ever seen.

>People are very inventive to get their job done.

These crazy uses for manipulating something that isn't really understood by its users (Excel) happened only in one generation. In only that short amount of time, many people came up with a lot of ideas the original designers didn't even dream of. Why do you say that over a timeline of thousands of years, people couldn't come up with some ideas that you would never think of? I have no idea why somebody would think that mixing non-food with ash would yield something edible, but I'm not surprised that somebody came up with the idea at some point. Other people always seem have a knack for coming up with stuff you never could've imagined.

[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30986329

> But there's the question of why someone should sacrifice so many domesticated animals just to discover another food source (after all, they already had animals).

You aren't necessarily sacrificing the animals, you are putting them at risk with the hope that they will be okay. Discovering more food sources was absolutely critical for subsistence living. The more potential sources for food the more able you were to stave off starvation (or stockpile extra food for hard times or trading).

>I mean, how would someone come up with the idea of mixing non-food with ash?

There are a variety of ways, even if it wasn't done spontaneously. Maybe the bucket of ash next to the fireplace spilled on some food. Rather than throwing the food away, why not try feeding it to the pig and see if its palatable? Maybe there was a forest fire that left a layer of ash over all the food, and there was no choice but to try to eat some. Over the course of time and the multitudes of people incidents like this were inevitable.

>But there's the question of why someone should sacrifice so many domesticated animals just to discover another food source (after all, they already had animals).

Cassava will paralyze your legs, not kill you. A paralyzed person or animal can still continue experimenting until the food is safe.

>I mean, how would someone come up with the idea of mixing non-food with ash?

By dropping their food on ash or by using an earth oven...

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