The first time you see how cashew nuts grow, youâre gonna think somebodyâs posting a joke picture or a weird art installation.
ok but you say thisâŚ.then donât give us picturesÂ
LOOK AT THESE RIDICULOUS THINGS
And it gets even weirder!
The shell of the nut itself:
contains a resin thatâs so toxic just touching it causes burns to the skin, similar to poison ivy. Which is why cashews are never sold unshelled, because processing them requires safety measures like this:
How humanity ever figured out to eat this nut is beyond me.
In case you ever wondered why cashews are so expensive. Now you can wonder why they arenât more expensive.
what iâm wondering now is how anybody ever found out that you could eat cashews
OK but you seem to underestimate how scarce food could get for people, and how desperate they become to try anything. If eating it raw kills you? try cooking it because weâre gonna starve to death anyway. Cooking it kills you? Try cooking it a different way. Touching it is painful? Try washing it, or extracting the inner bit and washing that.
Thereâs this plant thatâs eaten by aboriginal people of australia around where I live. Only certain parts of this plant can be eaten, and even then only if those parts are cooked exactly right, kept at a certain temperature for a certain amount of time. And it has to be exactly that amount of time as both undercooking it AND overcooking it are deadly.
The history of food is a history fraught with countless, terrible deaths because we are so stubborn that when faced with starvation, we will fucking eat poison again and again until itâs not poison anymore.
Some Paleolithic chef âI know like five people died already, but I think I got it this time.â
Some different, starving, Paleolithic person âfuck it bro. Gimme the nut.â


















