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.
Cheese was said to be invented by accident. Animal stomachs were often used as containers for liquid, including milk. Animal stomachs also contain rennet, the enzyme that coagulates milk into cheese. It’s like putting milk in a jar and then opening the jar later to find cheese inside. And rather than throwing out the milk, someone decided to try eating it.
