How did people know what foods were edible and which ones weren’t?
In: Other
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.
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