“Try the liver, it’s not bad.”
Nope, don’t think so. It tastes horrible and it’s bad for you. That’s all you need to know.
How did cave people decide certain foods were edible or tasty? They had to try stuff somehow. People must have died. How would they correlate the fact that they eating hemlock leaves caused Justavious to convulse, vomit and die on the cave floor instead of it being leaves of the rhubarb plant? If hemlock was the salad and rhubarb dessert, they’d have to find some other to test each item separately on another unsuspecting cave dweller to determine which was the culprit.
There sure must have been a lot of trial and error back on those days. Many human descendants croaked before food standards rose and cooking became a knowledge-based industry fueled by safety and testing.
Sometimes in books, you read about hunters still eating fresh livers from the game they kill. Does this really still happen? You have to wonder how that practice started: A bunch of animal worshippers eating organs. “Gustav, the liver has a fresh tang to it. Here, try a bite. Believe me.”
Probably not. If you’re like me, you gag when it comes to liver. We were forced to eat it as kids growing up. Mom bribed us with bacon as a side dish to make it palatable. It didn’t. It still tasted horrible, meaty, gamey, strong, forcing the esophagus closed. “It doesn’t want to go down the trap, mom.”
‘Take a bite or you can forget about that chocolate cake and ice cream for dessert.”
“Uh, okay.” Nibble. “Is that enough?” Us three brothers would take a taste then hide the rest under our baked potato skin.
Back in the day, cave people tried everything – dirt, grass, sassafras bark (“mmmm, good”), porcupine, alligator shells, whatever. They had to figure out what was edible and what would sustain them.
I want to know though who figured out if you boiled pistachio nuts they went from poisonous to edible. Ha ha, not true, but like the cashew, pistachios are a member of the Anacardiaceae family, meaning they, too, naturally contain the chemical urushiol that makes poison ivy and others in the family so irritating. So if your stomach starts itching later, you know where to scratch and why.
For that matter, who figured out you couldn’t eat poison ivy? “Ugggg, me tastum something bad on shiny leaf. Me not eatum anymore.”
Maybe if they figured out that they broke out in a rash from touching poison ivy, then you shouldn’t ingest it. Who knows?
Maybe Neanderthal man was just tougher than us. They probably consumed a ton of dirt, ash, bark and bacteria and that could have driven their immune system strength off the charts. To survive, their digestive system needed to improvise and break down stuff that today sends us to the emergency room or worst.
Still, it would be amusing to have a game show, “What’s This Taste Like,” for people from thousands of years back. Contestants would taste and smile, grimace or keel over. The audience could then learn what made sense to put in their mouths and what to avoid. “Too bad ‘ol Thor passed away, he would have loved this liver stuff.”
Nope, don’t think so. It tastes horrible and it’s bad for you. That’s all you need to know.
How did cave people decide certain foods were edible or tasty? They had to try stuff somehow. People must have died. How would they correlate the fact that they eating hemlock leaves caused Justavious to convulse, vomit and die on the cave floor instead of it being leaves of the rhubarb plant? If hemlock was the salad and rhubarb dessert, they’d have to find some other to test each item separately on another unsuspecting cave dweller to determine which was the culprit.
There sure must have been a lot of trial and error back on those days. Many human descendants croaked before food standards rose and cooking became a knowledge-based industry fueled by safety and testing.
Sometimes in books, you read about hunters still eating fresh livers from the game they kill. Does this really still happen? You have to wonder how that practice started: A bunch of animal worshippers eating organs. “Gustav, the liver has a fresh tang to it. Here, try a bite. Believe me.”
Probably not. If you’re like me, you gag when it comes to liver. We were forced to eat it as kids growing up. Mom bribed us with bacon as a side dish to make it palatable. It didn’t. It still tasted horrible, meaty, gamey, strong, forcing the esophagus closed. “It doesn’t want to go down the trap, mom.”
‘Take a bite or you can forget about that chocolate cake and ice cream for dessert.”
“Uh, okay.” Nibble. “Is that enough?” Us three brothers would take a taste then hide the rest under our baked potato skin.
Back in the day, cave people tried everything – dirt, grass, sassafras bark (“mmmm, good”), porcupine, alligator shells, whatever. They had to figure out what was edible and what would sustain them.
I want to know though who figured out if you boiled pistachio nuts they went from poisonous to edible. Ha ha, not true, but like the cashew, pistachios are a member of the Anacardiaceae family, meaning they, too, naturally contain the chemical urushiol that makes poison ivy and others in the family so irritating. So if your stomach starts itching later, you know where to scratch and why.
For that matter, who figured out you couldn’t eat poison ivy? “Ugggg, me tastum something bad on shiny leaf. Me not eatum anymore.”
Maybe if they figured out that they broke out in a rash from touching poison ivy, then you shouldn’t ingest it. Who knows?
Maybe Neanderthal man was just tougher than us. They probably consumed a ton of dirt, ash, bark and bacteria and that could have driven their immune system strength off the charts. To survive, their digestive system needed to improvise and break down stuff that today sends us to the emergency room or worst.
Still, it would be amusing to have a game show, “What’s This Taste Like,” for people from thousands of years back. Contestants would taste and smile, grimace or keel over. The audience could then learn what made sense to put in their mouths and what to avoid. “Too bad ‘ol Thor passed away, he would have loved this liver stuff.”