Honestly, in the absence of autoimmune conditions that impose dietary restrictions, ANY diet that says that Homo Sapiens Sapiens, a species that is wildly successful in large part because we have spent the last six million or so years evolving to be opportunistic omnivores (and yes, that’s going back before any human species, to our common ancestor with chimpanzees, because chimps are also opportunistic omnivores and we both got that from our common ancestor) is not designed to eat __________, immediately trips my ‘bullshit’ alarms.
We can eat just about any damn thing we can shove in our faces and chew. If it’s toxic, we may be able to cook it so it isn’t and still shove it in our faces and extract nutrition from it. We’ll sure as hell try.
You are absolutely designed by millions of years of evolution to eat plants, animals, grains, fungi, whatever. ‘Original human diet’ my left asscheek. Show a Cro Magnon hunter a burger and fries and he’d be all over that shit.
That said, maybe still avoid things like the insides of stone fruit pits, and manchineel fruit, and live venomous animals.
True. Kill the venomous animals first and de-venom them.
We’d never have known if some poor souls hadn’t the courage to push the limits of human gastronomy.
I always wonder about the stories behind how we figured out which things were poison.
“Oona at that mushroom and died. Don’t eat those. But THAT one…Ayna ate that one and absofuckinlutely tripped balls. Grab more of those.”
One time I asked how anyone first thought to make/eat cheese and was told to “never underestimate the creativity of starving peasants.”
Very true.
Even when something kills people who eat it we still try to play around with it until it stops killing people, like with kidney beans.
Then you get the people who somehow discovered that feeding reindeer certain types of poisonous mushrooms and proceeding to drink the reindeer piss causes you to trip balls and then the discovery of stuff like bread and cheese and alcohol make a lot more sense.
One trait seems to unite all human cultures; every goddamned one figures out some way to get absolutely and totally fucked up.
i’m personally glad that most human cultures also figure out how to deep fat fry things. because getting totally fucked up is that much better with fried chicken.
This is the Truth.
Human 1: Okay, we have this leftover vat of boiling oil. The stuff we throw on people as a siege weapon.
Human 2: I’ma dip my chicken in it.
Human 1: Fred no
Human 2: It cronch
i have spent many a late night hour, in various states of inebriation, considering how the first piece of fried chicken happened. this theory never occurred to me, but i sincerely thank you for sharing it.
fritters have existed in almost any culture that cooks with oil for…. idk as long as cooking with oil has been a thing. It surely wasn’t that big of a jump to frying meat. “well if THESE things taste good with batter and fried…. what about THESE things.”
This Roman cookbook from 4th century CE has a couple recipes that talk about frying chicken.
pan-frying pretty easily becomes deep frying when you fuck up and pour too much oil into the pan.
food fried in olive oil is known from at least 500 BCE in greece. gods know how long non-western cultures had been doing it.
May I present to you, the keluwak.
It’s
a fruit poisonous to human that the only way to make it edible is to
ferment it. (And that tends to be trickier in tropical climate AFAIK).
Adding to the fact that the tree takes so long to mature, it’s not very
popular for cultivation.There literally one dish that we use
this spice for in Java, called rawon. According to the wiki there’s
another dish this is used for in Sulawesi, and another in Malaysia +
Singapore?I thought things fermented faster in the heat? There are yeasts that survive temps up to 115F/45C. Certainly any juice we left out in the heat in Florida would start fermenting noticably within a day.
The “how’d they figure out it’s edible?” question that’s always perplexed me is lobster.
Also pineapple.
But, given some of the other things I’ve learned from this post, maybe they’re not so weird.
Ehn. Lobsters are basically sea bugs, and lots of groups of people eat bugs. We’re kinda weird for NOT eating them, really.
And pineapples smell sweet and edible. Smell is a big thing when you’re trying to figure out what’s edible.
As my Jack points out, figuring out how to make bitter, toxic *olives* work for us was truly a majestic accomplishment – and something that was probably an accident involving seawater.
The generational achievement of making corn from grass is a MUCH bigger deal than some dumb pyramids. (I mean the pyramids are cool but they took GRASS and made CORN that’s amazing)
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