I’m imagining that no one showed the first humans (or other animals) what was edible and what wasn’t. So how did we discover that the things that we consider food are indeed food and not end up munching on random things and wondering why it wasn’t satisfying? Was it trial and error or do we have something built in us that helps us recognize things as food?
In: Biology
Humans and other species didn’t just show up one day with no parents or grandparents or older community members to show them what to eat. We are from a long long line of many species that all kind of fade gradually from one species into a new one, branch off, come back together, and transmitted knowledge from one generation to the next throughout time.
That doesn’t mean that there was no room for innovation. Humans and other animals learn from watching each other, they learn by looking for similarities to things they already eat, through trial and error, and sometimes just out of sheer desperation.
Our bodies have also evolved some ways to help us figure out things that are good for us vs things that are poisonous. Usually things that taste good to us are things that won’t be poisonous. Things that taste bitter or disgusting tend to be things that will make us sick. Sometimes, someone ate the wrong thing and it tasted gross and they spit it out and told everyone to avoid it, or it made them a little sick but there isn’t a lot of other stuff to eat so they keep trying to figure out different ways to prepare it-boiling, roasting, drying, fermenting, until it stops making them feel sick. Sometimes it just killed them, and everyone else knows to stay away.
Humans have a pretty wide diet, fortunately, and can eat a lot of stuff in a lot of different environments. We, as in Homo sapiens, also evolved alongside cooking. Cooking foods with heat and/or preparing them in other ways like fermentation can make a lot of things that are poisonous while raw into safe delicious cooked foods to enjoy!
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