How do people learn to cook a poisonous plant safely? (2019)

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-48859333

by Tomte • 4 years ago

66 64 4 years ago

mjh2539• 4 years ago

In the past, put small diluted amounts on an animal's skin, then their tongue, then have the animal eat it, then when you're satisfied you do the same with a person.

ClosedPistachio• 4 years ago

Do you think this is why, perhaps instinctively, dog owners share parts of their meals with their dog? Interesting hypothesis...

samatman• 4 years ago

The more plausible hypothesis there is that dog food is quite the recent invention relative to our symbiosis with wolves.

jamil7• 4 years ago

Just speculating but I could imagine trained dogs used for hunting or guarding camps might have been too valuable to risk experimenting with food on?

BurningFrog• 4 years ago

If they wait 10 minutes for the dogs reaction before eating themselves, sure.

delecti• 4 years ago

I think that's reversing cause and effect. The only reason wolves stuck around long enough for us to turn them into dogs is because we shared food with them. So we were doing it before they would have let us experiment on them.

goda90• 4 years ago

The animal method would definitely not be flawless though. Trying to eat everything a ruminant eats is a path to not feeling great, or if you're checking if something can be safely eaten by your dog, you might miss out on some great food.

hapiri• 4 years ago

I think tastes can be adapted, and culture will defined what is "great" food. But to extend your point, I wonder what happens if they encounter something completely non-toxic to dog, but are toxic to human.

martopix• 4 years ago

It's worth mentioning that Hans Rosling, the "young swedish doctor" mentioned, is famous for many other things, including founding MSF in Sweden, writing a book called Factfulness, being a co-founder of Gapminder, TED talks, cool dataviz, etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Rosling

photochemsyn2• 4 years ago

A large number of people apparently believe that the experimental method was something invented in Renaissance Europe. This has always seemed like ludicrous nonsense to me. Local peoples around the world have certainly conducted experiments for centuries if not millenia before then.

For example, consider pottery, and the invention of glazes. It's generally thought that the invention of the ore -> metal process involved potters experimenting with different glazes and finding lumps of metal after the firing process was complete.

With toxic plants, well, most peoples kept domesticated animals and would probably use them to test the toxicity of potential food sources. Feed it to the chickens, pigs, llamas, etc. and see what happens. Soak the potential food source in water, see what happens. Try adding other substances, like charcoal or clay, and see what happens.

Why don't people recognize this? Simple - infantilization of native peoples as a justification for the ravages of European colonialism.

choeger• 4 years ago

That's a very plausible theory you have there (except for the hit on European colonialism). But there's the question of why someone should sacrifice so many domesticated animals just to discover another food source (after all, they already had animals). Also, some of these steps are so off, that even reasonable experimentation wouldn't explain it.

I mean, how would someone come up with the idea of mixing non-food with ash? There's probably some utility in this step (e.g., making color?) and only later it turned out to yield edible matter.

photochemsyn2• 4 years ago

The history of the potato is instructive. The wild varieties that the first South American human settlers discovered (dates vary but > 14,000 years ago probably) were toxic, but if eaten with a small amount of clay, were discovered to be edible. Andean peoples didn't stop there however: they began breeding less toxic varieties of potato (there are now ~ 4000 cultivars) which also was a process of experimentation and selection of optimal results over a long time period. Breeding of maize followed a similar experiment-and-select process.

As far as why the architects of European colonialism wanted to deny that native peoples had such capabilites, well:

"In a secularizing world, infantilization quickly became a moral posture and a theological necessity. It allowed the main actors in slavery and colonialism to make peace with their own consciences, and the intelligentsia and the Church to produce a powerful mix of justifications for the new world order. It allowed glib talk of the historical necessity to care for the retrogressive, irrational, ignorant savages and the Christian responsibility to guide them towards a better future."

https://newint.org/features/2007/10/01/roots/

TremendousJudge2• 4 years ago

There's right now on the HN front page a thread about people using Excel [0]. I'll quote from some comments in that thread:

Nobody is born knowing what tools to use or how to use them, but Excel is one of the first pieces of software that deal with data for a lot of people, and as such one of the first things they turn to when faced with a new problem.
I’ve done some travel to Africa and am amazed at the ingenuity/batshit workflows that exist to get work done and live life.
I'm continually shocked at how technically incompetent academics can be. Otherwise brilliant people with the most batshit technical workflows I've ever seen.
People are very inventive to get their job done.

These crazy uses for manipulating something that isn't really understood by its users (Excel) happened only in one generation. In only that short amount of time, many people came up with a lot of ideas the original designers didn't even dream of. Why do you say that over a timeline of thousands of years, people couldn't come up with some ideas that you would never think of? I have no idea why somebody would think that mixing non-food with ash would yield something edible, but I'm not surprised that somebody came up with the idea at some point. Other people always seem have a knack for coming up with stuff you never could've imagined.

[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30986329

StanislavPetrov• 4 years ago

But there's the question of why someone should sacrifice so many domesticated animals just to discover another food source (after all, they already had animals).

You aren't necessarily sacrificing the animals, you are putting them at risk with the hope that they will be okay. Discovering more food sources was absolutely critical for subsistence living. The more potential sources for food the more able you were to stave off starvation (or stockpile extra food for hard times or trading).

I mean, how would someone come up with the idea of mixing non-food with ash?

There are a variety of ways, even if it wasn't done spontaneously. Maybe the bucket of ash next to the fireplace spilled on some food. Rather than throwing the food away, why not try feeding it to the pig and see if its palatable? Maybe there was a forest fire that left a layer of ash over all the food, and there was no choice but to try to eat some. Over the course of time and the multitudes of people incidents like this were inevitable.

imtringued• 4 years ago

But there's the question of why someone should sacrifice so many domesticated animals just to discover another food source (after all, they already had animals).

Cassava will paralyze your legs, not kill you. A paralyzed person or animal can still continue experimenting until the food is safe.

I mean, how would someone come up with the idea of mixing non-food with ash?

By dropping their food on ash or by using an earth oven...

barry-cotter• 4 years ago

Scientific method. The explicitly reasoned about scientific method involving observation, hypothesis, prediction, testing, is new. The hypothesis is the important bit, the thing that’s new. Trying things and seeing what happens was not new in the 1500s or 1600s. The scientific method was. No doubt there were people who had similar ideas before Francis Bacon but they didn’t write them down and explain them in any way that we’d recognize as the scientific method.

dgellow• 4 years ago

Yes, it's the formulation, formalization, generalization of the whole concept that is new.

culi3• 4 years ago

The indigenous group whose land I'm on rn are the Cahuila. In Cahuila culture the doctors/shamans were basically botanists. They would claim certain patches of land where a particular plant was growing and study it for many years and everyone respected that and would avoid foraging that plant. There was a lot of knowledge built up, some of which was only passed down to people in their lineage or the apprentices that would study under them. Their folk taxonomy had a name for every species of oak that modern botany names. Which is an incredible feat in that area especially since those oak species hybridize very readily

Similar aspects of cultures can be seen across the world. Like with variolation techniques in China

dissent2• 4 years ago

I don't get this constant acknowledgement of which peoples' land we're on. If you feel this is a bad thing, would you not simply get off the land? If you feel that it is a good thing, are you not gloating about your conquest? Question asked in good faith.

marginalia_nu• 4 years ago

Interrogating the consequences of hypotheses goes at least as far back as Plato in the Parmenides. It wasn't a scientific experiment with beakers and test tubes, but the chain of logic behind such an experiment is all there.

Why don't people recognize this? Simple - infantilization of native peoples as a justification for the ravages of European colonialism.

To be fair most people have only a Hollywood idea of history. In fact, painting this as an European mindset ignores the fact that most cultures in history have engaged in brutal expansionist warfare when given the opportunity.

Ultimately I think this point sort of trips on its own shoelaces. The same infantilization of native peoples prevents you from seeing that if the west wasn't doing this, someone else would have come and done the same at the first opportunity.

It's easy to cry western colonization and then brush over the Umayyad caliphate colonizing the Iberian peninsula and a hefty chunk of Northern Africa, and a number of other similar historical events across the world.

Singling out European colonialism as worse than the millennia of ceaseless warfare it displaced has a quiet assumption that western europe isn't just another civilization, that it is somehow to be held to a superior moral standard to the βάρβαροι; the reason it's especially bad is because Europe is the hero in the story. That is a colonialist mindset indeed.

terryf2• 4 years ago

The article explains well how the knowledge, once learned, is carried on. It's also a reasonable explanation for things that have an immediate feedback loop. Like fire - you start it and boom, you're not cold any more. Great, let's do that again!

But it doesn't explain cassava, or some other foods (lots of mushrooms for example and some nuts) where you have to take n steps, during all of which it's still poisonous and that are completely non-obvious and after that there is a distinct change in the "is poisonous" property.

It especially doesn't explain the "if improperly prepared, will maim you over a long period of time" types of things (cassava!)

Of course there really isn't another option - someone somehow figured it out after all - but the search space is so large it feels like there should be something more to it.

throwawayffffas3• 4 years ago

It's probably applying and combining analogous processes.

I.e Food A is toxic and we don't know how to treat it. Food B is toxic and we know it takes n-1 steps to make safe. Someone comes along and applies n-1 steps to Food A and its still toxic. Someone else comes along and applies n-1 and then an nth step and there's progress.

But yeah, the article does not come near to examining the way cultures discover things nor in general nor in the case of the cassava.

terryf2• 4 years ago

Sure, that makes sense, but not for cassava!

The article even says that the natives had no idea why they were getting sick! How did they connect the "can't use legs" to the cassava they ate?

Again, I realize that it must have been the way you describe, but it's still amazing.

ncmncm7• 4 years ago

One new thing we know is that Amazonians were actively breeding plants at least 10,000 years ago. (The Amazon basin did not experience the Ice Ages the way temperate places did ... which is not to say nothing happened.) Five hundred years ago, the Amazon supported a population of at least tens of, and as many as a hundred, million people, mostly wiped out in a stroke by European diseases.

This was a society that had time and numbers to develop deep sophistication. Did they use our scientific method? Obviously not. But that does not mean they could not have come up with their own, perhaps more-or-less equally effective and reliable system. (Ours is far from perfect; the best that can be said is that it often works.) Theirs certainly established facts ours cannot, and vice versa.

Use of curare embodies a similar mystery, and ayahuasca. Certainly hundreds or thousands more secrets are forever lost. We will never know a hint of what almost all held. It is a loss easily rivalling the fabled Library of Alexandria.

bsder• 4 years ago

It especially doesn't explain the "if improperly prepared, will maim you over a long period of time" types of things (cassava!)

Sure it does.

All you need is for the toxic foodstuff to be sufficiently non-toxic for some amount of time while it prevents you from dying because you don't have better food.

Someone starving may know something isn't good but not have an alternative. Some people perform the standard steps up to step "n". A few people perform an extra step because they know the food is bad for you anyhow--this is step "n+1". If more of the "n+1" people survive, the standard becomes "n+1".

Go through a dozen of such crises and you can get a lot of steps built up one at a time.

carapace3• 4 years ago

Some people are really friendly with plants, and the plants tell them how to do these things.

ncmncm7• 4 years ago

It is hard to understand this, but it appears well-attested by individuals who had no other way to learn what they demonstrate knowing. As described, the individual plant is not the friend, but rather the spirit of its species.

I have no way to properly apprehend any of this.

carapace3• 4 years ago

As described, the individual plant is not the friend, but rather the spirit of its species.

Aye.

I have no way to properly apprehend any of this.

Sure you do! You're a living being too, eh? :) You've got all the hardware, you just need to learn the protocols. It's not that hard to learn, the hardest part is "letting your hair down" so to speak.

Check out the recent scientific advances from Michael Levin's lab's work, e.g. "What Bodies Think About: Bioelectric Computation Outside the Nervous System" - NeurIPS 2018 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjD1aLm4Thg https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18700328 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18736698

In a nutshell, whatever "thought" is, the biomolecular machinery that supports it is common to all cells (not just neurons.) In other words, all cellular life "thinks".

Combine that insight with the "Law Of Regulatory Models" from Cybernetics, to wit: "every good regulator of a system must be (contain) a model of that system." and it seems to me that we have a solid basis to talk about "nature spirits", eh?

pmoriarty• 4 years ago

Many mystery foods were probably first tested on slaves and prisoners.

wahern2• 4 years ago

Only empires have slaves or prisoners. And prisoners weren't even a thing until very recently--past couple of centuries. Unless they were royalty, it made zero sense to expend resources imprisoning someone. Rather, you killed them (e.g. criminals), enslaved them (a broad category of practices), or let them go.

ncmncm7• 4 years ago

Exile was popular. And often crueler than execution.

Romeo wasn't overreacting.

yardie2• 4 years ago

Every time I eat ackee[0] I wonder how this toxic fruit turned into something edible.

If you eat it raw you might die and will be very sick.

If you roast or boil it you still might die and still be very sick.

No, intrepid reader, you have to boil it at least twice to remove the toxins. And I'm curious to find out who was curious enough to keep going after boiling the first time and failing.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blighia_sapida

_nhynes• 4 years ago

No, you just need to wait for it to become ripe and open on its own. Parboiling is to get the right texture. If you just fry it, it’ll taste like the raw fruit: good but not deliciously fatty.

yardie2• 4 years ago

Ok. I was told not to eat it raw because it was toxic.

Carioca4• 4 years ago

Even more interesting than cassava is Maniçoba, a traditional dish of the Amazon made with cassava leaves, which are more toxic than the root and less nutritious. The leaves are boiled for a full week before adding other ingredients and serving.

People from the region are absolutely loathe to skip any steps in the traditional preparations, even though it has been shown that the same result can be achieved with a few hours in a pressure cooker.

nobodyandproud2• 4 years ago

Why are they loathe? Is the margin for error in pressure cooking low?

Is there the cost of making a mistake very high?

Carioca4• 4 years ago

It's very deeply embedded into their psyche as “this is the only way to do it, anything else will kill you.” And I'm not talking just about older or more rural people either, I know young hip professionals from Belém (pop 1.5m) who will not touch maniçoba made in anything different from the traditional way.

Carioca4• 4 years ago

Forgot to mention, it's also a festive dish, eaten on special occasions. A typical person would eat it a handful of times in a year, so there isn't much incentive to streamline the process

mageofpanthera3• 4 years ago

It's actually quite straightforward. Use the Eye to detect if a plant is [poisonous]. Process the plant until the [poison] is neutralized.

For instance, Monk's hood is extremely [poisonous], Datura is mildly [poisonous], and Rose thorns are deceptively [poisonous].

With Rose thorns, the process is relatively straightforward. [Boil] the thorns and let the water cool and set. The [poison] settles on the top. Pour out the top until the residue becomes nutritiously [clear].

culi3• 4 years ago

The thing people don't understand about "poisonous" plants is there are very very few plants in the world that exist where a bite can just straight up kill you. And many others that are classified as "poisonous" are barely so. Spinach is so full of oxalates and some legumes we commonly are so high in saponins that there are other "wild" plants that we've classified as poisonous because of having similar amounts of oxalates or saponins

Also poison usually has a taste. Obviously this varies widely by the specific phytochemistry, but anyone who's foraged enough can tell you that you can always tell when you've misidentified a plant or a plant has tasted "off". It's really unsurprising then that people are able to experiment in this way

Lastly, I also wanted to point out that many of the compounds that make something poisonous can also give it medicinal uses. Like how chimpanzees will chew Vernonia amygdalina leaves to treat parasitic infections

TL;DR: dosage, yo

ncmncm7• 4 years ago

Just for the record, spotted water hemlock root smells and tastes delicious, but kills with greater agony than almost anything. It looks a little like wild carrot or queen anne's lace.

There is no known safe dose.

How do people learn to cook a poisonous plant safely? (2019)

Related Stories