Oh? Which pepper species and carrier mammal are involved here?
Edit: DERP duh you mean humans. :D Literally made the comparison without recognizing it, too. /Edit
Not challenging you, just curious and not immediately finding the answer myself with a quick search.
The capsaicin receptor is TRPV1, which is a critical protein for thermoregulation and detection of being burned. In other words, it's not just a quick and easy evolutionary path to have a mutation break the receptor for capsaicin and now be immune to the taste. Obviously the animals could evolve behavior or even simply learn as juveniles to tolerate or even enjoy the taste (as many humans do).
I do declare I thought it was a cheeky reference to those tomato plants that grown down by old railroad tracks.
You see a long time ago, someone at a tomato. Could've been a slice in a cold sandwich. Could've been a fresh one, maybe with A little cheese and pepper. But chili just won't do. Neither would spaghetti.
Then, before we had such regulations as we do today, they deposited that tomato seed, post digestion, in the train lavatory toilet. Being back then as it was, the tomato seed and associated fertilizer was dropped from the train car to the track ballast below where it germinated.
It's the same process where researchers deposit tomatoes on new volcanic islands.
You know what they say: when you gotta go, you gotta go.
I mentioned in another comment about growing a Carolina Reaper last summer and trying it with my dad and 13 year old son. My dad and I instantly knew how bad the next half hour or so of our life was about to be. My son also found it hot but no more then 5 minutes later comes out of his room (after we all chewed a pepper and spat it out he went to his room with a slurpee) he casually walks out and says dad is it okay for me to have a shower. He didn't have his slurpee and really did not seemed bothered by the experience at all. Me on the other hand was in insanity pain. Could not stop running water over my tongue or suck on ice and suffered for at least a half hour. I just couldn't believe he took it so well. My only thought was he must not be so sensitive or lacks something like the receptors that detect it.
After writing all that I did a search about people with low TRPV1 receptors and found an interesting study done on a couple people lacking functional TRPV1 channels. They were insensitive to the application of capsaicin to the mouth and skin. Furthermore they had an elevated heat pain threshold as well as an elevated cold pain threshold. Why I found this interesting is because my same son who barely reacted to this insanely hot pepper I can never get to wear a jacket to school. He does not mind the cold at all. He will if we were up a mountain or something but he always complains the car is too hot when I am cold. Anyways not sure he lacks function TRPV1 receptors but still interesting to think about. Article linked below.
> Could not stop running water over my tongue or suck on ice and suffered for at least a half hour.
Capsaicin is a nonpolar molecule that is fat soluble and hydrophobic, so running water over your tongue either has no impact on the problem or makes it worse.
You want to consume anything with fat like milk or sour cream or even pure olive oil which will dissolve the capsaicin and carry it down your digestive tract. For something as strong as a reaper challenge, you’ll want to gargle olive oil because the mechanical action of the bubbles helps break up anything coated on your tongue like soap does when washing your hands. Alcohol based mouth wash also works as does ethanol (Everclear) in general. Edible surfactants and emulsifiers work best but unless you like drinking blended raw eggs or mustard, that might not work for you.
To help when it comes out the other end: drink lots of dairy because the casein helps and eat a bunch of starch (rice, potatoes, bread, etc) and bananas, and stay well hydrated.
Definitely. And I did do thinks like swish milk and wiped my tongue with a paper towel and a cracker and a couple other things. But ultimately the running water and ice was a huge relief but only while I was actively doing it. It didn't lessen the pain if I stopped. Where I am the water is very cold this time of year so it helped.
As for the other end I really didn't want the pain in my throat or other end so I chose to only chew a big chunk briefly and spit it out.
At the end of the day I had to know what it felt like. It is pure pain lol. Will not be doing it again.
If he consistently avoids dressing warm the human body is pretty adaptable to cold conditions so I wouldn't look to deep at that. Both a persons circulatory pattern and metabolism change when exposed to the cold, and people who expose themselves to cold consistently enough respond in far better ways. Their metabolism will shoot up near immediately when someone not adapted will only gain that after they are already cold and shivering. And blood flow is maintained to the extremities but just avoiding more of the skin's surface, where as the unadapted will have just a general decrease in bloodflow to that entire extremity.
If you go extreme enough humans can even walk barefoot through the snow without a problem all day without a real problem, where as someone who wears socks and shoes when it is freezing cold will get serious frostbite on their feet in like 30 minutes or less if they tried it without adapting themselves over time.
For a direct application of this, ice climbers will soak their hands in ice water for 45 minutes every day in the weeks leading up to a climb so that their hands don't freeze and maintain blood flow when on an ice climb, because obviously you can't just stop and warm up your hands by a fire when you are halfway up a frozen waterfall and having stiff or frostbitten fingers makes climbing more difficult/dangerous.
driving down the road I was inspired to taste some fresh wheat grains in a field: tasted a lot like flour. what is that "thing"? an attractive tasty flour nodule? the energy yolk to the seed's egg?
I picture your ancestors impulsively tasting mushrooms, and figuring out which ones were not poisonous enough to kill them. Thank you for your lineage!
In Mexico, our ancestors cultivated corn despite not knowing fungicides to prevent mycotoxin contamination. Somehow they discovered nixtamalization, which is boiling corn in an alkaline solution that destroys mycotoxins and improves nutritional value. Guess they really loved corn.
If you have a few 100 people in an area literally spending their waking hours worrying about having enough food. Areas without enough of the right nutrients are pretty common. People are pretty good at figuring out what makes them feel better/healthier.
Some places are iron poor, some even resort to eating dirt, especially when pregnant when you need more iron. Some areas are salt poor and animals will go to extreme measures to get to salt. Some areas have poor bioavailability and require crushing, special cooking, soaking, or a narrow range of acidity to be available, which of course becomes the norm for cooking in those areas. Some even become religious standards, things like fish on fridays or avoiding pork (before trichinosis was controlled).
>Somehow they discovered nixtamalization, which is boiling corn in an alkaline solution that destroys mycotoxins and improves nutritional value.
that one always amazes me. How did they figure it out? it's not exactly intuitive, especially when they wouldn't have known about the chemistry underneath.
It would probably take weeks or months to notice if doing A instead of B was making people sick or not
It might not be that the process was discovered so much as the method of cooking pot production happened to suit the food being cooked.
In particular, lots of civilizations learned to strengthen the basic clay pot by the addition of lime-y things, eg burnt mussel shells. If all your pots are made in this manner then you dont so much discover nixtamalization as experience it only by its absence when you meet settlers that have pellagra and dont use your style of pot.
See [0] for a technical write up on this and many other pot themes.
Maybe some people with sensitive stomachs are able to detect things like this quicker than others. Further, maybe the gene for a sensitive stomach confers a survival advantage not just to the individual, but to relatives of the individual (who can ‘free ride’ on their relative’s discerning stomach).
Sure, there _are_, but also don't underestimate humans...
> Nine young backpackers were rushed to hospital in the west Australian city of Perth after snorting a drug they mistook for cocaine. Three remain in critical condition after *ingesting the mystery white powder which arrived in the post addressed to someone else*
> The bystander states that the older man is a “death with dignity” patient who invited loved ones to be present while he consumed the [Medical Aid in Dying] medication. After his first swallow, he remarked, “Man that burns!” The younger man said, “Let me see,” and then also took a swallow.
It's been nine days, and I've been thinking sporadically about your comment. The two links you provided are great to make your point. Specially the second.
> She remarks that the older man “should be dead” and the younger one “should be alive.”
I was in Cape Cod for a wedding late last year with some friends, and came across what we later learned was a Yew. Some of us had popped into an ice cream shop, and one of the members of my party apparently decided to eat a sweet berry while they waited.
When we came out, we were initially incredulous but they clarified that the flesh of the berry was sweet, but the seed was disgustingly bitter. Which prompted the rest of us to quickly do some research on what this plant was. The mood was initially somewhat light-hearted, however articles with titles like “Why is the Yew Berry sometimes called the Death Berry?” had us on the phone with poison control pretty quickly.
Poison control was very professional, and once they confirmed that it was indeed a Yew Berry that had been ingested, things got pretty serious. Apparently even small doses can quickly cause irreversible heart failure, with death the earliest “symptom” in some cases.
My friend didn’t die— just experienced some terror and gastric distress— the latter likely exacerbated by the terror). No drugs or alcohol or involved, just an impulsive decision, and a sobering reminder about the fragility of life.
One of the other replies in this thread mentions mushrooms. Which reminds of the aphorism: _There are old mushroom foragers, and bold mushroom foragers, but there are no old AND bold mushroom foragers._
Oh wow that was a journey. As soon as I saw "yew" I started internally screaming.
The route that my kids walk to school took us underneath a large yew tree, and the road underneath is often covered in hundreds of delicious-looking pink berries. Since they were tiny they have had to know all about how yew berries look lovely but even one can kill you. What I didn't ever tell them is how apparently the flesh is actually not toxic and is tasty, and it's the seed that will kill you.
The aril (the red flesh of the “berry” surrounding the seed) is tasty, and not toxic. But the leaves, stems, roots, and seeds are poisonous. Our elementary school has evergreen yew bushes growing around it and I taught my children not to eat the seeds. A fellow parent advised use not to eat them because other children might not be so careful.
Are yew rare where you are? Here in Ireland (and also in Britain), they're traditionally found in churchyards (where grazing livestock cannot get at them) and are well known to be poisonous. (Agatha Christie used yew as a poison in one of her novels.)
I read this and thought; I sure hope so if I’ve made it this far in life not knowing. I believe someone’s rectangle plant-identified this particular one as European Yew (Taxus baccata). None of us had encountered it before and this particular plants arils (thanks drjason) were quite strikingly pink.
Apparently, there are others in North America, but mostly not in the Southwest. I lived in the Pacific Northwest about a decade ago which also has a yew (Taxus brevifolia) but I don’t recall if I ever saw the berries.
That said, most folks I know were raised with a baseline of “don’t eat random berries you don’t recognize.”
They're common in landscaping throughout the US. We had some in our front yard, but us kids knew better than to eat random berries. It's painful for me to think that there are people out there without the common sense not to eat random plants they don't recognize.
Folks visiting the desert and distractedly running straight into octillos is just good entertainment. There's not much on the east coast that prepares you for a random shrub to be so hostile. Poisonous berries though, they're everywhere. I'm surprised your fellows made it to adulthood without basic suburban survival skills.
Except for grass and most trees, suburban foliage is often quite toxic. A lot of your ornamental plants are poisonous. Think lilies, foxglove, Solomon's seal, and all the excitement of morning glories. The basic understanding that you don't eat anything you can't identify as edible is important in the suburbs too.
I don't disagree, but I'd say there's not really a big problem with people or kids trying to eat flowers. Foxglove and solomon's seal are dangerous but they also don't grow where I'm at. Lilies and morning glory do grow here, and they are also not terribly dangerous to humans (without eating a lot of them.)
Where I'm at, particularly in the suburbs, there's a distinct lack of things that are tempting to eat (like a berry) and also poisonous.
The berries (but not the seeds!) are apparently edible, and I have myself eaten one without noticing any ill effect. IIRC it was indeed the berries that were used in the Agatha Christie novel, so apparently a mistake.
This is an example that mushrooms unfairly get a bad rap - there are much nastier things in the plant kingdom. Some of them you don't even have to eat to get seriously hurt by, and they're not even that rare (e.g. giant hogweed)
I'd add hemlock in there in too. Both are plants you'll see in parks in town. A toddler died here a few years ago because his parent allowed him to play in the big plants with the pretty white flowers. They don't look dangerous and don't have to be eaten to be deadly. Breathing too much pollen is enough, especially for a child.
I'm pretty confident with berries as I've got plenty of experience, but I don't mess with wild carrot or even elderberry as I don't feel I have the knowledge at this point to make it worth the risk. There are just too many lookalikes.
> driving down the road I was inspired to taste some fresh wheat grains in a field
Fun fact: The danger in eating raw cookie-dough isn't primarily from fresh eggs (though they can have problems too) but rather from the raw flour, which before cooking may have a bunch of bacterial nastiness in it.
I feel like dividing the outcomes into just two buckets of "direct cause of permanent death" versus "everything else" isn't the ideal way to approach routine decisions about what to eat. :p
("This cardboard is unlikely to kill me, sooooo...")
microwaves cook eggs, throw some scrambled eggs in a glass and into the microwave you get a very smooth scrambled egg. Unpleasant generally but a lot of coffeeshops do this for breakfast sandwiches.
You can pasteurise eggs with a basic sous vide setup. Take any of those home sous vide circulators, set it to 140 F, and once it's up to temperature put the eggs in for 4 minutes...
At least where I live, only a minority are advertised as "ready to eat". It's more common to see the opposite, an explicit warning that it must be cooked.
Wild potatoes look pretty close to some domesticated potatoes I had.
Also I had lots of wild berries (of various species) in forests, and they look pretty much like the berries you can find in a garden. (Though probably not like the berries you can get in a supermarket?)
Wild grass also looks pretty much like some of the domesticated variety. (Well, some varieties do.)
My understanding is that most berries weren’t farmed until recently because they couldn’t be domesticated like other plants, rather they were typically foraged. I remember reading that initially wild blueberry bushes were simply dug up and replanted. Not certain of the veracity of this, however.
Wheat still generally looks like wild grasses, but like maize its seeds are much larger than you’ll find on wild grasses.
THC from the cannabis plant. It is a very long list though, plants go to a great deal of effort to deter pests so the list would be more limited by the subset of plants that humans find useful to cultivate.
side note: It kills you by making all your muscles tense so strongly that you can't breath any more. The muscles in your face tense in a way that it gives you whats called a "Strychnine Smile".
Being delicious to humans is a pretty good evolutionary advantage. Although, not necessarily good for the longevity of individuals of that species, see, for example, cattle.
Though you're right, in kimchi the primary preservative is initially the saltiness and then later the low pH caused by lactobacilli producing lactic acids.
I don't dispute that. My understanding is that the introduction of chili allowed a reduction in salt content, which was important in an era where salt was expensive to produce.
Whatever it is, I'm absolutely certain that it can be launched in a few seconds on archive.org, with no special software requirements besides the JavaScript interpreter that a web browser already has, and that all of this can happen even on your standard-issue pocket supercomputer.
(Every couple of years I fire up an Apple ][ version of Oregon Trail on archive.org because even though we had a PC at home way back when, that's the version I remember playing in school. That game is still hard and I'm not sure exactly what it is that it is supposed to teach except that dysentery is evil.)
Chilli was introduced to Kimchi during the Imjin War. The Portuguese had brought them to Japan perviously, as far as I've seen all kimchi recipe prior to that is only garlic heavy, I like that style of kimchi better personally.
