How did people know what foods were edible and which ones weren’t?
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Trial and error. “Well, Jim ate the pufferfish and died, so I guess we should eat it two more times to see if it was just a fluke”.
More seriously – desperation accomplished much of our culinary feats. Sometimes there’s so little to eat that you have no choice but to cook the poisonous thing and just hope you don’t die. Then when you don’t die, you realise maybe cooking it made it stop being poisonous.
We also have our tongues and our eyes to guide us. Poisonous things are often brightly coloured to warn us not to eat them – because the goal of poison in an animal is not to get the last laugh if you do get eaten, but to stop you being eaten in the first place. Poison is useless if you can’t tell your predators not to eat you first. Furthermore, our tongues have evolved to be highly sensitive to poisonous chemicals – when something tastes bad, it’s usually because something in it is poisonous and the trial and error of our ancestors has resulted in us developing tongues capable of detecting that poison. So, often you can just lick something and if it tastes bad, you know you shouldn’t eat it.
Then of course humans end up eating things that taste bad anyway because we’re fucking insane.
A lot of it was trial and error
There are some natural defenses we have against eating poisonous plants. A plant that tastes bad, causes itching and burning, or indigestion, diarrhea etc isn’t a good idea to eat.
But much of it was built up knowledge over time.
Krug ate that plant and got indigestion, but at least he didn’t eat the red berries that killed his Mom.
Human tribes became acclimatized to certain regions and tended to stay in those regions. For example living in a sub-tropical forest requires a completely different set of skills and knowledge than living in a Savannah.
Humans would rarely leave the kind of habitats that they were comfortable living in, only doing so if they absolutely had too because adapting to new conditions is extremely difficult.
The answer to the age old question to “Why didn’t the Inuit just go south where it was warmer” is because they adapted to living in those conditions. They honestly didn’t know how to survive down south, and that area was already populated by Native’s that would have killed them.
Once a tribe adapted to living in those conditions they would pass on those skills an knowledge to the following generations. Learning which plants were safe to eat was a key knowledge skill that would be passed onto your kids.
We kinda take it for granted today that we can eat basically anything at the super market. We’ve stopped teaching our kids these basic survival skills.
Trial and error was certainly a part of it, this is not so bad as one might think at first, given that many poisonous plants are not directly deadly in small amounts, they will just make you sick, and if one have access to water and safe foods along with people to take care of you many are survivable (note some are deadly)
I’d assume trial and error. I just recently read that rats also sort of do this. They will watch how a fellow rat reacts after eating something skep and when Shredder keels over, they know that shit is bad for the the body.
There are some tests you can do to learn if an unknown thing is dangerous to eat. It’s a gradual process of trying something, waiting to see if there is a response, and if not, try a little bit more. In this case, you start off simply rubbing it against your skin. If it forms a rash or has some other negative reaction, you probably shouldn’t put it down your throat. If nothing bad happens, you put a little on your lips. Nothing bad, then hold it in your mouth for a bit then spit it out. Nothing bad, swallow a tiny piece. Nothing bad, try a larger piece. Nothing bad, it’s likely at least safe to eat. If at any point something negative happens, you’ve learned not to eat that thing. And if part of a community, you can teach others not to eat that thing.
Now there is some trickiness in that many foods aren’t edible until cooked or processed in some way. The same technique can be applied to cooking stuff then trying small to larger portions to see if anything negative happens.
Some of the weirder stuff is likely to have been discovered in more desperate times. Without the modern abundance of food, communities could face difficult times if something eliminated their typical source of food. In which case they may have to try all sorts of different things to find something which can provide nourishment.
Trial and error.
Most human taste is actually smell. If something smells good, someone tried to eat it.
In western history, people just discovered tomatoes weren’t poison. Italian cuisine as we know it didn’t exist until the 20th century. Possibly because tomatoes have no real odor. They taste horrible on their own.
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