Doug Freyburger wrote:
>
> jmcquown wrote:
> >
> > I suspect people first decided to eat crabs because they saw sea-birds (or
> > maybe even bears in certain areas) cracking them open on rocks and plucking
> > out the meat. Probably the same with oysters, clams, mussels, etc.
> > Berries and fruit I can also understand; watch the birds and the deer, they
> > eat them so they must be pretty much okay.
>
> Those have been standard food for so long the first ones to try them
> weren't yet human. Fruits were eaten by primates long before they
> were even monkeys or apes.
>
> > Drinking milk is rather a given; human women have always breast fed and so
> > do goats, cows, sheep. Naturally it would follow, milk the cow.
>
> The radical part is figuring out that those animals should be kept
> deliberately. They were hunted. Some genius figured out the
> small ones could be kept behind a fence and bred for food. It
> was as amazing an invention is figuring out to plant seeds to
> invent farming. Once you have a herd of cows, it's easy to notice
> that baby cows drink milk and want to try it.
>
> > So many nightshades are deadly. What wild critters were they watching
> > to determine this one was okay and that one wasn't?
>
> I suspect that the nightshades that grow in EurAsia all have
> toxic fruit, so no one there ate them. But potatoes, tomatoes,
> eggplants and peppers are native to the Americas.

Don't think aubergines/eggplants are exclusively native to the US. They
have been cultivated in India and China since before any Europeans set
foot in the new world.



>The folks
> who originally moved to the Americas did it from the far north.
> Maybe over a land bridge from Siberia maybe on sleds over the
> ice like Inuits, the exact method is not relevent here. What
> is relevant is they would have been far enough north for enough
> generations that no one remembered what a nightshade was. So
> when humans moved south into America some ate the fruits or
> tubers and lived, other ate the leaves and stems and got sick
> or died. Ever since, Americans have eaten nightshade fruits
> but not eaten the stems and leaves.
>
> When Columbus brought back hot peppers, those who knew what
> nightshades were must have freaked out at eating the fruit of
> a plant obviously related to a nightshade. But you'll always
> find someone willing to eat about anything.