
How do people learn to cook a poisonous plant safely? - gadders
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-48859333
======
sametmax
Some survival teachers will recommand this:

1 - do not do it if you can avoid it

2 - if you really must, then try the folliwing:

* break the plant, put a tiny amount of it on your armpit. If it's not reacting (itching, becoming red, etc) after 10 minutes, continue.

* break the plant, put a tiny amount of it on your lips. If it's not reacting, after 10 minutes, continue.

* break the plant, put a tiny amount of it on your tongue. If it's not reacting after ten minutes, if the taste is not off putting for any reason, and if you don't get any sensation/intuition (for a better word) that something is wrong, continue.

* masticate a tiny amount. Same.

* swallow a tiny amount. Wait for 2 hours. Observe obvious symptoms, but also digestion. It should be easy to process at this amount.

If all that pass (yeah, it's very long), remember this doesn't ensure the
plant is perfectly safe, just lowers the risks.

~~~
dragontamer
> masticate

I haven't heard this word since my SAT-prep classes. It means "chew". In case
there are English-2nd language people here.

~~~
thaumasiotes
> I haven't heard this word since my SAT-prep classes. It means "chew". In
> case there are English-2nd language people here.

There's an interesting -- understandable but very wrong -- viewpoint that the
right way to form sentences that a second-language speaker can understand is
to talk in the way you might talk to a toddler.

Reality is pretty much the opposite. A toddler has perfect grasp of their
language's grammar and is likely to know common words, less likely to know
uncommon words. For best results, you'd communicate with a toddler using
complex sentences and "easy" vocabulary.

A foreign learner has a much shakier grasp of the grammar and may have a
pretty spotty vocabulary. But they're also likely to have a dictionary. And
uncommon words are much easier to understand, given a dictionary, than common
words are. The fact that they're uncommon means they don't have the wide
variety of meanings and usages[1] that common words do. For best results,
you'd communicate with a foreigner using simple sentences and "difficult"
vocabulary.

[1] For reference, here are the ABC dictionary glosses for the very common
Mandarin word 做:

1\. make; produce

2\. cook; prepare (food)

3\. do; act; engage in

4\. be; become

5\. write; compose

6\. celebrate

7\. be used as

8\. form/contract a relationship

9\. pretend; feign

10\. (slang) make love

11\. play tricks to punish somebody

~~~
IanCal
Using "chew" rather than "masticate" is not talking to someone like they are a
toddler though. It's the usual way you would explain the action to someone
else.

~~~
thaumasiotes
> Using "chew" rather than "masticate" is not talking to someone like they are
> a toddler though.

> It's the usual way you would explain the action to someone else.

How exactly are you contrasting these? Which words do you think toddlers are
likely to know?

~~~
IanCal
If I say I'm talking to someone like they're a toddler the point of that is
I'm speaking differently than I would to an adult. Using the word "chew" would
not be something I'd avoid if talking to an adult.

For example, "hi, how are you?" Is something you could say to an adult or a
child. It's not "speaking to someone like they are a child" though.

Does that make sense?

~~~
thaumasiotes
But _correcting_ the original "masticate" to "chew" is an adjustment you make
based on the mentality I described. As multiple comments have pointed out,
"masticate" is not generally more difficult for a second-language speaker to
understand than "chew" is, and in some common cases (Spanish, French...) it's
considerably easier. The correction was targeted at native speakers, on the
theory that they had limited vocabulary, but justified as if it was targeted
at foreigners. If the intention was really to benefit foreigners, that impulse
was misplaced, for exactly the reasons I detailed.

> For example, "hi, how are you?" Is something you could say to an adult or a
> child. It's not "speaking to someone like they are a child" though.

The example we have here is more along these lines:

A: Salutations!

A: Oh, I'm sorry -- I meant, "how are you?"

This is an example of speaking to someone like they are a child. You come out
with a natural (for you)[1] word choice, and then pre-emptively decide your
interlocutor can't handle it, so you adjust to something you believe is
simpler. You are speaking differently than you would normally.

[1] [http://www.basicinstructions.net/basic-
instructions/2009/1/2...](http://www.basicinstructions.net/basic-
instructions/2009/1/26/how-to-use-your-words.html)

------
nabla9
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.

~~~
sn41
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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kopi_luwak)

[2]
[https://www.gutenberg.org/files/46972/46972-h/46972-h.htm](https://www.gutenberg.org/files/46972/46972-h/46972-h.htm)

~~~
huntertwo
> "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".

~~~
sn41
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.

------
WalterBright
It's like sword making in Japan. The process was ritualized and copied, long
before there was understanding of the underlying chemistry and why it worked.

Most of what we know how to do, like cooking, is learned by copying, not by
understanding.

Despite bow and arrow being refined for millenia, the compound bow wasn't
invented until 1966, when the inventor realized that nobody had applied modern
engineering principles to bow design.

~~~
vanderZwan
> _the compound bow wasn 't invented until 1966_

Err.. doesn't the Mongol bow count? I distinctly recall reading how the fact
that it was made of multiple materials made it a lot more lightweight and
efficient than bows made out of one piece.

EDIT: NVM, I confused "compound" for "composite"

EDIT2: And this passage on Wikipedia explains my confusion

> _In literature of the early 20th century, before the invention of compound
> bows, composite bows were described as "compound".[2] This usage is now
> outdated._

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compound_bow](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compound_bow)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Composite_bow](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Composite_bow)

~~~
perl4ever
"The last recorded use of the longbow in war was by British Lt. Col. Jack
Churchill, who used it to kill a German soldier in World War II"

That sounds distinctly like something from a Neal Stephenson novel...

------
Razengan
Most of discoveries like these fall under the "enough monkeys + enough time"
rule.

That is one of the biggest reasons I'm excited about the possibility of
meeting an alien species; imagine all the things they must have discovered in
_their_ millions of years of trial and error.

Even if they're not godlike in terms of technology, the simple difference in
perspective must have yielded at least a few discoveries that could
potentially change human civilization.

~~~
aeternum
The crazy thing is, we are extremely close to becoming those godlike aliens.

We can now simulate most biological processes, and the technology to simulate
even more is quickly approaching. What will be world be like when we can
execute centuries of trial and error in milliseconds?

~~~
Razengan
We would still have to solve the politics of applying those technological
advances uniformly rather than the benefit of a relatively small percentage of
the species.

> _The crazy thing is, we are extremely close to becoming those godlike
> aliens._

Yes, I also actually worry about the possibility that the first alien
civilization we meet may be less advanced than us, and the greedy fucks among
us will exploit them the same way they do their fellow humans.

~~~
lewaldman
> We would still have to solve the politics of applying those technological
> advances uniformly rather than the benefit of a relatively small percentage
> of the species.

This is solved already... Capitalism makes it work across time.

(What is discovered now will with most certainty be available specie-wide in a
couple of decades... and it's accelerating).

~~~
aeternum
Capitalism is the best we have so far, and I am very pro-capitalist, but it is
far from an ideal solution.

There is lots of unfairness and non-uniformity in the system, for example
where you are born matters much more than it should.

------
unwind
Being Swedish, it's a bit weird that they don't acknowledge that the "young
Swedish doctor named Hans Rosling" then went on to become quite famous for
other things, too [1]. Usually things like that are pointed out in texts like
these.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Rosling](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Rosling)

EDIT: Fixed a typo.

~~~
noneeeed
I think it's might have been a knowing ommission. This piece is pretty much a
transcript of Tim Harford's series "50 Things That Made the Modern Economy".
The episodes for that series are only 8 minutes long, so there isn't much time
for extra biographical info without sacrificing the main story of the piece. I
wouldn't be surprised if this article wasn't just written up by a scribe from
the show's script and Harfords byline slapped on it.

Harford also presents the excellent series More Or Less, which is all about
numbers and statistics in the news. Rosling gets mentioned fairly often, and
is clearly something of a personal hero (and friend I think) of Tim's. He
knows exactly who he was and what he did. I just don't think there was the
time in the programme to cram that in.

~~~
Tomte
> Rosling gets mentioned fairly often, and is clearly something of a personal
> hero

"was", unfortunately.

~~~
noneeeed
Ineed, sadly. Rosling is one of the people on my "fantasy dinner-party" list.

~~~
Tomte
If I were POTUS I would have weekly dinners with three to four people I
admire. From different fields, but some connecting subject. Presumably the
guest would find that stimulating, as well. Everything off-the-record, in an
informal atmosphere (some chairs by a fire maybe). Afterwards, the guest list
is published (for transparency – but not the subjects that we talked about).

I mean, you can have anybody! Nobody declines such an invitation.

Do presidents actually do this? I feel it would be the greatest perk.

~~~
SEJeff
Quite a few people have declined for the current POTUS, but then again, would
you want cold fast food and rhetoric shouted at you in the Whitehouse?

~~~
whenchamenia
Lets put petty political posturing aside. If you have any issue you care
about, the opportunity is singular. It would be a great waste to decline, no
matter the dinner faire.

~~~
SEJeff
Oh I agree with you, but it seems to be a matter of principals.

------
inimino
Something I didn't see in the article or mentioned in comments here, much to
my surprise, is the simple fact that "the dose makes the poison" as the saying
goes. In hunter-gatherer societies they would have consumed a wide variety of
foods in moderation, with any of them potentially toxic if consumed to excess.
As they learned how to prepare the toxic but plentiful food (plentiful because
toxic, naturally) they would have, step by step, developed the techniques all
without the need for anyone getting killed by poisoning. I think we tend to
miss this because we are obsessed with logical puzzles and poisons that have
binary action, but almost nothing in the plant kingdom is like that. This
obviously has some corollaries for modern diets and fad diet obsessions as
well.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
I'm not sure they had the luxury of a variety of foods in moderation. I think
in early societies they fasted and then gorged when food became available.

~~~
inimino
Hunter-gatherer societies hunted and gathered by definition. They had no such
luxury of a choice of meats, just "what was killed today" or "nothing". They
would have had no such luxury of being picky about which of the edible plants
they ate, except for not eating too much of the poisonous ones. It's only
after a long time of mutual adaptation that any society can become so
dependent on a single foodstuff like cassava or nardoo. And that gives plenty
of time to develop the process of preparation, step by step.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
I don't get it. If it's poisonous, and the ones mentioned in the article are
_very_ poisonous raw, then how does the first step ever happen?

The article professes to explain "How do people learn..", then doesn't provide
any plausible route to that happening.

~~~
bsder
Cassava is also bitter as hell to start. Most things that reduce that
bitterness _also_ reduce the toxicity.

As long as it doesn't become a primary foodstuff such that it will build up in
your system, you don't need to get all the hydrogen cyanide.

However, any group that can get _all_ the HCN out, will also be much better
off when the famine comes. They will survive; the other groups will not.
That's a powerful force.

~~~
inimino
Or even more powerful: the other groups will _learn_ , and the cultural
practice will spread faster than genes ever could.

------
Dove
I suspect the question reveals a blind spot in perspective. Food, by its very
nature, is dangerous and fights back. Modern society insulates us from this
risk; with a secure, safe, food supply, risking one's life to try something
new seems insane and it's hard to imagine enough people have ever done it to
learn significant secrets and what would be the point anyway? If the food
supply is neither secure nor safe, risking one's life to give the community a
new option seems much more reasonable and even heroic, and an area in which
people would try extreme things for a shot at glory.

Do people get injured or even killed hunting wild game? Of course. That's
expected, and it's just how you get food. Do people get injured or even killed
learning the secrets of wild plants? I would expect that's expected, too.

So my suspicion is that this question is a lot like asking, "How did 18th
century humans learn to defeat smallpox?" Well. It was hard. And the stakes
were high. And a lot of people died while we tried stuff that didn't work. But
in the end, humans are brave and resourceful especially when the need is
great.

------
joantune
Those are quite complex and evolved processes to learn in the first place to
start with. It must be something more than trial and error, right? Am I the
only one thinking that if a plant killed me, or slowly made my legs paralyzed,
more likely one would abandon that process rather than say: let's try to roast
it and/or leave it outside for a couple of days. Unless they were desperate
and had no other food source.

The case with the cake is even more mesmerizing, it slowly blocked overtime
their ability to process B1. How could people tell that it was from that
food?? And how do they go, yeah, we just forgot to do X

~~~
jakobegger
> How could people tell that it was from that food? And how do they go, yeah,
> we just forgot to do X

There's no need for people to understand what is going on. People have a
tendency to try random stuff without any reason. The folks who accidentally do
the right thing survive, while the others die.

And it's also important to note that probably not a single person came up with
the whole procedure. People might use a recipe that worked for a similar
plant, and adapt it. A lot of people probably died or became ill. They likely
never realized their mistake. It's just that over the years the people who did
it right had an evolutionary advantage and survived, and now we wonder how
they figured it out, when it was all just an accident.

~~~
AnIdiotOnTheNet
> There's no need for people to understand what is going on. People have a
> tendency to try random stuff without any reason.

You're not giving people very much credit. The things they try may seem random
to an outside observer, but they made sense to the person trying them. They
had some mental model of how it works, and applied that model. Sometimes even
a very inaccurate model is good enough.

~~~
jakobegger
I think you are giving people too much credit. I feel like most of the time
the mental model only comes after the fact, in an attemp to rationalize
whatever ridiculous things people do.

Look at people who flock to homeopathy, or those who buy "water vitalisation"
devices, or other ridiculous gimmicks. There's no rational reason why people
would come up with ridiculous things like that. Unless you look at it from an
evolutionary perspective. These ridiculous ideas are just people randomly
exploring the search space, and natural selection picks the ones who got
something right.

~~~
AnIdiotOnTheNet
> Look at people who flock to homeopathy, or those who buy "water
> vitalisation" devices, or other ridiculous gimmicks. There's no rational
> reason why people would come up with ridiculous things like that.

What are you talking about? Those things absolutely have a model behind them.
It's an incredibly bad model that doesn't stand up to any serious scrutiny,
but it is a model none the less.

> These ridiculous ideas are just people randomly exploring the search space,
> and natural selection picks the ones who got something right.

I think you might be giving the word "model" too much weight. It doesn't have
to be a mathematical proof or anything. "God won't let me die because I'm too
pretty" is a model.

------
weeksie
Nice to see the PR campaign for Secret of Our Success getting some traction.
It's a fantastic book and Joe Henrich's stuff is super interesting, his thesis
is that humans are pretty dumb on our own and culture is like an enormous
shared brain that allows us to adapt to hostile environments. Lots of
traditions don't make any sense at all, but they're important.

Don't spend as long processing your cassava and you won't notice the effects
of the poisoning until a lot later. To you it just seems like you're saving an
hour or so per day. If you think about it, being extremely conservative when
it comes to tradition has been one of the very best strategies for staying
alive up until relatively recently in the human timeline.

~~~
tlynchpin
ha I was gonna comment this sounds like a book I read recently (since I didn't
read TFA because who even does that).

I'm unsatisfied with the cassava and acorn stuff. I get that metabolism is
externalized and I get that once it is a cultural practice then that's just
how it is. I struggle with envisioning the part in between where the
processing is newish and becoming a practice, especially in regards to
something like the cassava toxin that doesn't happen until decades later. How
does a processing strategy sustain in those early iterations? Versus the
animal husbandry practices, they have more immediate results that seem less
vulnerable to biases making false causation. I think I struggle with the
making sense part of it, what I got from the book is that considering cause is
a luxury won by doing it "because I said so".

~~~
weeksie
I'm 100% with you on that, and I have no idea how you'd go about assembling
that kind of forensic data.

------
OJFord
> Nardoo, a type of fern, is packed with an enzyme called thiaminase, which is
> toxic to the human body. Thiaminase breaks down the body's supply of Vitamin
> B1 [...]

A slightly tortured sentence - B1 is thiamin, so thiaminase is an enzyme that
breaks it down by definition, not some sort of (in)convenient coincidence.

(Perhaps it's deliberately avoiding using both 'thiamin' and 'thiaminase' for
fear of confusing the poor reader, but I might have opted for 'is packed with
an enzyme that breaks down the body's supply of thiamin (vitamin B1)' \- or
just not name it beyond B1 at all. IANAJournalist, though.)

~~~
Scoundreller
Aren’t enzymes proteins that aren’t absorbed? Maybe they’ll break down
thiamine in the digestive tract, but they shouldn’t really break down the
body’s internal stores, right?

~~~
DanBC
Body storage of thiamine is minimal.

[https://www.who.int/nutrition/publications/en/thiamine_in_em...](https://www.who.int/nutrition/publications/en/thiamine_in_emergencies_eng.pdf)

>> Body storage of thiamine is minimal, the liver being the main extra-
muscular storage site. In young and healthy non-alcoholic individuals,
subjective symptoms appear after 2 to 3 weeks of a deficient diet (Brin,1963).
Characteristic early symptoms include anorexia, weakness, aching, burning
sensation in hands and feet, indigestion, irritability and depression. After 6
to 8 weeks the only objective signs at rest may be a slight fall in blood
pressure, and moderate weight loss. After 2 to 3 months apathy and weakness
become extreme, calf muscle tenderness develops with loss of recent memory,
confusion, ataxia and sometimes persistent vomiting (Anderson et al,1985).

~~~
Scoundreller
Gotcha. And it won’t help you absorb what you ate if you’re eating it
everyday.

------
winchling
For people to learn to cook poisonous plants safely, a lot of other people
must have died from food poisoning. So why did they eat bad stuff? Well, if
you're hungry enough, you'll eat anything. And people frequently got very
hungry in history. The clever part is where somebody remembers who died or got
ill and passes on the information.

~~~
inimino
Someone has to know what other people ate, know what of what they ate killed
them, remember that, pass it on, and be believed for that to work. It's easier
if the person gets sick and doesn't die, and then they themselves can tell the
story.

~~~
winchling
_> Someone has to know what other people ate, know what of what they ate
killed them, remember that, pass it on, and be believed for that to work._

Yes, this is the tricky part. Per the article, such knowledge is passed on
culturally, i.e. by people imitating their betters. But that's not the whole
story. My guess is that occasionally, in unusual circumstances, some wise
person would step in and say, 'No, don't do that!' (without necessarily being
able to explain why).

An important clarification is that, contra the article, people can't literally
imitate other people. Rather, they guess the _meaning_ of other people's
behaviour. Again, without necessarily being able to explain it or even state
it in words. See Chapters 15,16 of _The Beginning of Infinity_ , by David
Deutsch.

------
BurningFrog
This is basically the sound argument for conservatism.

A lot of traditions and systems don't seem to make any sense, but you need to
be very careful before tearing them out, because they were often formed
through generations of hard won experience ("written in blood"), and if you
lose them, you have to start that process over.

~~~
perlgeek
On the other hand, those things were found out by trying many different
things.

I think societies benefit from having a relatively large body of somewhat
conservative folks, and some more experimentally minded people to come up with
new, improved stuff.

The optimal ratio likely depends on how quickly the environment around you
changes, how safe it is etc.

------
elmar
People that defend the Carnivore diet, argument that plants don't want to be
eaten and because they lack locomotion to run away but are excellent at
chemistry, have developed toxins to protect themselves from predators.

~~~
superpermutat0r
And these toxins might bioaccumulate in the flesh of the animal that gets
eaten, poisoning the carnivore even more.

~~~
raverbashing
Depends on the toxin. I can't think of any example off of the top of my head,
and it's a bit hard.

Toxins that bioaccumulate either are produced outside and don't work well
inside a biological system (heavy metals, etc) or are fat-soluble

Easiest for plants to do is make neurotoxins as they don't have a nervous
system to get bothered by it. But those are usually water-soluble.

~~~
elmar
Oxalates sometimes stay on the animal.

------
raverbashing
A lot of plant toxicity is not just "you die" but get sick and is able to
recover

That helps with trial and error and some standard processes (like cooking)
help reduce toxicity

Now, how did indigenous people figured out the nixtamalization process beats
me

------
4mpm3
This article is interesting but somewhat misleading, to the point that I don't
know what information to trust. Yes, it does take many steps to turn cassava
into a refined flour for baking, but cassava is easily eaten--just peel and
boil it, as I do often (it's readily available in many grocery stores in
Canada, and a staple of Latin American culture). Cooking is the same basic
process used to make many borderline or poisonous foods edible, from bitter
almonds to kidney beans. The author appears to conflate some specialized
regional cooking techniques with simply making food safe to eat.

~~~
simlan
You are buying and eating the so called sweet variety which is safe to eat
after proper cooking. The ones used for making flour is called bitter and way
more toxic thus the elaborate process.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassava](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassava)

~~~
4mpm3
Ah, thanks for that. You are of course right, and I didn't realize there was a
difference.

------
mtrovo
There's another dish made from manioc leaves in Amazon region called Maniçoba
and I have a hard time understanding how it exists.
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mani%C3%A7oba](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mani%C3%A7oba)

It's made by boiling the plant leaves a whole week to remove the toxins.

Doing it by on a stove today is extremely time consuming, imagine doing this
in the middle of the forest with heavy rain falling every couple of hours.

------
Iv
Well, first, you make a lot of kids...

Joke aside, this article is... incomplete at best:

> "Toxic plants are everywhere. Sometimes simple cooking

> processes are enough to make them edible. But how does

> anyone learn the elaborate preparation needed for cassava

> or nardoo?

> No single person does, according to Joseph Henrich, an

> evolutionary biologist.

> He argues this knowledge is cultural.

...

> In South America, where humans have eaten cassava for

> thousands of years, tribes have learned the many steps

> needed to detoxify it completely: scrape, grate, wash,

> boil the liquid, leave the solid to stand for two days,

> then bake.

> Ask why they do this, and they will not mention hydrogen

> cyanide. They will simply say "this is our culture".

Never ask a scientist something outside their specialties. Evolutionary
biology and sociology are differenent. This article misses the fact that these
cultures also do know that the food is unsafe without these steps. In Japan,
where they eat fugu, the poisonous fish, they know why they remove the toxic
parts. In France, where we do tons of cheese from raw milk, we know why we
need fresh milk to do that: otherwise you get sever food poisoning. My mom
used to grow rhubarb and do jam, she explained to me that the leaves are
toxic.

I agree that there may be or have been useless steps in the process and that
it was not as well understood 100 years ago as it is now, but this is not just
pure dumb imitation.

------
feintruled
Fascinating stuff!

"But overall we apparently did better by copying without question than by
assuming, like the chimps, that we were smart enough to tell which steps we
could safely ignore."

In defense of the cargo cult, perhaps!

~~~
masklinn
Explanation rather than defense. The process of cargo-culting makes a lot of
sense over evolutionary timescale, because only very recently have people
started to discover and achieve the means of _not_ working by trial and error
(and falling prey to ritualised processes and local maxima).

~~~
LoSboccacc
> falling prey

I mean, it's fine for people not to dedicate all the brain to all the things
all the time, some level of cargo-culting makes us way more efficient in more
pressing / important task trough the day.

like, shaking a tv remote usually helps getting some life into it. there's
some reason to it, it scrapes a little the oxidation between the batteries and
the contacts, but for most people is cargo-culting, imagine everyone having to
do a research on it before accepting shaking as the methodology, and this for
all the daily tasks we do because we saw our parents do before us.

------
hinkley
I remember a documentary years ago with a cool redemption story in it. They
followed a primate troupe around for a couple of years.

One of their newest members was a young male that had been ousted from his
birth troupe. He had trouble integrating but they let him be. Let's call him
George.

Next year was a drought year. Food is getting scarce. Distress is building.
One day, some of the troupe find George eating some fruit. Fruit that the
troupe had never been observed eating. WTF George, you can eat those? So they
watch him, and watch him, and nothing bad happens. Pretty soon the whole
troupe is eating this new food source that has been under their noses the
whole time.

Hypothesis: primates do not instinctively know what is edible any more than we
do. It's learned behavior picked up from observation. If one social group eats
a food it doesn't mean that all of them do, and in this case bringing in an
outsider brought new ideas.

~~~
ncmncm
"Let Mikey try it, he'll eat anything. He likes it! Hey Mikey!"

(1970s advertising, channeling racial memory.)

------
pure-awesome
There's a book called "The Secret of Our Success" which covers this topic.
[https://www.amazon.com/Secret-Our-Success-Evolution-
Domestic...](https://www.amazon.com/Secret-Our-Success-Evolution-
Domesticating/dp/0691178437)

I have not read the book, but I've read a pretty good summary and blog post
about it here (~7'700 words): [https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/04/book-
review-the-secret...](https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/04/book-review-the-
secret-of-our-success/)

I found the arguments fascinating. Especially surprising was the argument that
e.g. using bones to divine where to hunt can serve a useful role despite the
apparent uselessness of divination. In this case, the argument goes, it serves
as a randomizing tool to prevent over-hunting in one spot by independent
groups (though of course the tribes themselves could not provide that
reasoning).

\---

Follow-up blog posts:

A list of excerpts chosen by the blog author:
[https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/05/list-of-passages-i-
hig...](https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/05/list-of-passages-i-highlighted-
in-my-copy-of-the-secret-of-our-success/)

Comments on the previous blog posts (useful particularly because some comments
point out potential errors in the book):
[https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/11/highlights-from-the-
co...](https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/11/highlights-from-the-comments-on-
cultural-evolution/)

~~~
lookACamel
The author of that book is referenced in the article.

>No single person does, according to Joseph Henrich, an evolutionary
biologist.

>He argues this knowledge is cultural. Our cultures evolve though a process of
trial and error analogous to evolution in biological species. Like biological
evolution, cultural evolution can - given enough time - produce impressively
sophisticated results.

~~~
pure-awesome
Ah, you're right; I didn't make the connection, thanks.

------
shmageggy
It's interesting that the same ideas are finding their way into AI lately. The
AlphaStar Starcraft 2 agent was trained first using imitation learning to
mimic human games, then was evolved using a sort of cultural evolution whereby
different agents competed and the best were saved for the next generation.

------
scarejunba
Wow, one of the characters in the story, Hans Rosling, is the same fellow
famous for his application Gapminder and the TED talks where he tells us about
our misconceptions of the world (that are frequently more negative than they
should be).

------
newnewpdro
"Nardoo, a type of fern, is packed with an enzyme called thiaminase, which is
toxic to the human body. Thiaminase breaks down the body's supply of Vitamin
B1, which prevents the body using the nutrients in food.

Burke, Wills and King were full, but starving."

It's interesting how resistant people often are to accepting that the contents
of what you eat significantly matters rather than just the caloric content,
when discussing diets and weight management.

Yet in the context of people starving to death while eating food chock full of
calories, nobody seems to be up in arms shouting "Heresy! Calories in,
calories out!"

~~~
dragonsngoblins
Firstly calories in, calories out is still in effect there. The toxin
inhibited the calories in part. "In" doesn't mean "in your mouth" it means
metabolised.

Secondly, obviously none of these people are referring to eating poison when
they say where you get calories doesn't matter in terms of weight management.
They are talking about people eating things that are plausibly going to be
eaten by someone in a modern society, not people wandering the outback with no
idea what they are doing. For similar reasons they also don't append "for
individuals with something approximating normal metabolic function" every time
they say say it.

Using the above story as evidence against calories in/calories out for weight
management is missing the forest for the trees.

------
isseu
Societies are full of random stuff we learned just by trial and error and we
don't even know why we do it. Can't recommend enough this book The Secret of
Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our
Species, and Making Us Smarter
([https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25761655-the-secret-
of-o...](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25761655-the-secret-of-our-
success))

------
lsferreira42
I think the information about cassava is wrong, i eat it since i was a child
only boiling and deep frying. Also here in Brazil we have a plant called
Maniçoba that has to be cooked for at least 4 days to release all hydrogen
cyanide that it contais:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mani%C3%A7oba](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mani%C3%A7oba)

~~~
EinsDueTresFour
AFAIK, there are two different types of cassava: the one we eat, and the one
that's poisonous (which I think they called _mandioca braba_ ) and is only
used to make _farinha_.

------
grawprog
The one I've always wondered about is fugu fish. How on earth did anyone
figure out that one small part could be eaten, only if prepared in a way that
takes something like 8 years to learn before you are ever allowed to serve
anyone?

~~~
Matticus_Rex
There's a delicious mushroom I regularly pick/eat and that is very popular
throughout most of the world (Amanita sec. caesarae) that requires five
different significant criteria to identify. If any of those criteria are
different, the mushroom you're seeing is going to make you sick or kill you.
Who figured this out? It was fairly easy for me to learn in the age of the
Internet, but who were these generations of people who figured that out? Seems
insane.

------
hamilyon2
I am more interested in how igunak [1] was invented. It is poisonous, but not
to who eat it.

1\.
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Igunaq](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Igunaq)

------
asimpletune
I wonder how this idea relates to things like masonry, where free masons are a
highly ritualized organization but at the same time I’d imagine that they have
a first principles understanding of their trade.

------
neves
Remember that a poison food is a great adaptive advantage for the humans that
dominate it. Your food will come with its own pesticide and you don't have to
compete with other animals or pests.

------
your-nanny
Useful proxies like bitterness or stomach aches after consumption offer
degrees that can covary with food preparation. If you cook it and it's less
bitter, then cook it some more.

------
major505
Well, I guess someone had to die first to find out. I mean, if people are
starving, and the poisonous plant are the only alternative, I guess, is worth
the risk....

~~~
major505
also there are ways of discovering if something gonna be poisonous for you.

You first put in contact with the skin, wait for reaction, than a small
portion on tong.

If no reaction was observed, then ingest a small quantity.

An so go one. with that at least, you would have a less dangeours reaction
with the poison, until you find out a safe way to consume the plant.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
I'm thinking ancient peoples were not experimental scientists. The idea that
an organized process will produce good data, was not really current until the
Renaissance? Anyway, I'm favoring the 'folks got sick or died' version.

------
carapace
The plants _tell_ the people how to prepare them.

------
viach
They could feed it to captives or slaves cooked differently each time and
observe results. Sort of prehistoric cooking competition.

------
ChefboyOG
Genetic Algorithms: Extreme Edition.

------
tus88
Not by trial and error methinks.

------
josemanuel
Societal trial and error.

------
chasd00
the only winning move is not to play

------
xaedes
Thank you for sharing this! But even on desktop its hard to read, must be hell
on mobile. So I will just cite you:

1 - do not do it if you can avoid it

2 - if you really must, then try the folliwing:

* break the plant, put a tiny amount of it on your armpit. If it's not reacting (itching, becoming red, etc) after 10 minutes, continue.

* break the plant, put a tiny amount of it on your lips. If it's not reacting, after 10 minutes, continue.

* break the plant, put a tiny amount of it on your tongue. If it's not reacting after ten minutes, if the taste is not off putting for any reason, and if you don't get any sensation/intuition (for a better word) that something is wrong, continue.

* masticate a tiny amount. Same.

* swallow a tiny amount. Wait for 2 hours. Observe obvious symptoms, but also digestion. It should be easy to process at this amount.

If all that pass (yeah, it's very long), remember this doesn't ensure the
plant is perfectly safe, just lowers the risks.

~~~
dang
We fixed the formatting of
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20877657](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20877657)
and detached this comment.

~~~
sexisfun
Shadow banning is unethical. Why aren't you displaying notice to the users?

~~~
dang
When an account has been around for a while, we tell the user we're banning it
and why. But shadowbanning is useful in other cases, such as for spammers, or
for accounts connected with a history of abuse on HN.

------
dalore
Survivorship bias. Those that discovered a way lived on to tell about it.
Those that did not, died.

------
EucalyptusGrove
The tomato was considered dangerous to eat in Europe because of its
relationship to the Nightshade family, so no one ate it. One day, some Italian
<unpublishable> <unpublishable> decided to cook it into a sauce and give it to
a woman, so she would get drugged and he could take advantage of her.

She didn't get poisoned, and he invented what we currently know as Italian
cuisine.

So, my guess is going to be "by less than ethical ways".

~~~
Ensorceled
Tomatoes were domesticated, and eaten, in South America long before being
imported to Europe so I'm guessing the story is, at best, apocryphal.

Potatoes have a similar origin and also have poisonous leaves for the same
reason (nightshade plants often contain solanine)

