How The Hell Did It All *Begin*?

[tryska]

like cheese?

[Mabelline]

Sure. But with cheese I think it was yoghurt first, and was the way nomadic Arabians still do.

[andiesenji]

i'm still wondering about the first guy to eat cheese.

how the heck did that come about?

It is true that the first cheese seem to have been accidentally produced by nomads who carried milk (mare's milk) in skins and then some enterprising nomad made bladders from a stomach, probably from a sheep or goat and slung it behind his saddle and at the end of the trek he didn't have milk but a thin liquid with clumps of solid stuff that, when tasted, turned out to be pretty good.

This budding Einstein probably figured out that since this only happened when a stomach was the container so it was something in the stomach that made it happen. Rather than use just one stomach to one batch of milk he began scraping the lining of one stomach and adding it to several batches of milk in other containers and got the same results. Cheese!

And it probably stank to high Heaven but the nomad was probably so stinky he didn't notice any additional aroma. (I have been on a backpacking trip to the High Sierras when it wasn't feasable to bathe a whole lot because the water available was right off the snow and was darn cold. After a few days Limburger would have smelled like perfume when compared to some of us.

On the way home we had all the windows in the station wagon wide open in spite of the near freezing temperatures outside. Finally we stopped in Bishop, rented a motel room and took turns showering. The only way we could handle the 4 hour trip home. .......

Edited July 30, 2004 by andiesenji (log)

[tryska]

well that explains the part i've been having difficulty figuring out. i mean we all know spoiled milk is chunky and nasty tasting, so i'm surprised someone even thought to try the "curdled" milk.

[andiesenji]

When food is scarce, when starvation is the only alternative, people will eat some pretty nasty things, will eat things that are only marginally edible. Having flour containing weevils is a luxury to no flour at all and spoiled milk, as long as it doesn't make you sick, still has some nutritional value. Having a diversified source of food is necessary to life. Think about the potato famine in Ireland. Too much dependence on one food source can be a disaster.

[caroline]

I don't think that raw milk goes bad nearly as nastily as the pasteurized, homogenized, vitamin D added variety. It can ripen rather nicely to a kind of yogurt.

Now getting the animal to let down milk! that's something else,

Rachel

[KatieLoeb]

Oysters!!!  How in the hell did someone ever figure out that there is something inside of these rocks?  And then have the courage to eat it.

This one's easy. Watching the gulls drop them onto rocks or the sea otters pounds them against their chests with rocks.

I don't find it too far of a stretch that humans observed this, and emulated it, and then brought it full circle by processing the fruits into wine.

This too was a happy accident. Storage of grapes or grape juice in closed amphorae with ambient yeasts doing their thing. The resultant "juice" was kicked up, stored longer and had wonderful psychotropic properties. Fermented beverages were preferred over the contaminated water in most places. Those that consumed these fermented beverages had better resistance to disease and lived long enough to reproduce. The trade of this wondrous substance gained popularity in the religious enclaves that perfected viniculture in the early Middle Ages (see Cistercian Monks for reference). The very word "Divine" has it's roots in "the vine".

[alacarte]

Oysters!!!  How in the hell did someone ever figure out that there is something inside of these rocks?  And then have the courage to eat it.

This one's easy. Watching the gulls drop them onto rocks or the sea otters pounds them against their chests with rocks.

That's a good point -- why didn't we come up with this earlier in the thread?

I bet most of the earliest food items were "discovered" by watching animals consume them first. Humans must have watched animals who knew by instinct (or experience) which mushrooms were edible and which were poisonous. Animals of prey were already there preying on smaller animals and consuming meat. We likely just followed, and (thank goodness) improved on these concepts, generation by generation, and invention by invention, starting with fire and tools.

But I still have no explanation as to how someone struck on the concept of cheese. Sorry tryska.

[tryska]

it's alright alacarte - i'm gonna go with the hypothesis of nomads with milk stored in sheeps stomach for accidental discovery.

but then what of blue cheese. who said, "ah damn the cheese has gone moldy, let's eat it anyway"?

[andiesenji]

it's alright alacarte - i'm gonna go with the hypothesis of nomads with milk stored in sheeps stomach for accidental discovery.

but then what of blue cheese. who said, "ah damn the cheese has gone moldy, let's eat it anyway"?

Well sure. The cheese was stored in cool caves during the summer because it kept longer. Probably most cheese became moldy and they were used to eating it in whatever condition. This mold just happened to taste better. And so an industry was born....

[KatieLoeb]

That's a good point -- why didn't we come up with this earlier in the thread?

Because I'm a freakin' genius??? Really - sometimes I scare myself...

[andiesenji]

cheese, how it came about.

in the beginning.....

[origamicrane]

how about fugu?

So some japanese guy was lazy one day and served the fish raw and they liked it.

So then they went into the sea and decided to chop up more fish.

Then they picked up the puffer fish chopped it up , ate it , and died.

So what do they do?

hey!! lets go back and try it again!???

Now the starvation theory i can understand but i can't believe that this would be true of fugu as its not something you can just pick up in the forest.

Someone had to have set out to sail and caught a load of fish chopped it up and fed it to some unlucky sod.

[markk]

Coffee, by a mile!  Someone decided to: pick the berries, let 'em rot in the sun, wash off the rotted goo, remove and dry the remaining seed, roast that seed, grind it, pour boiling water over it, and drink the resulting brown liquid.  Boggles the mind every time.

THANK YOU !!!

I've been saying this / asking this for years. But the way I ask it is even more troubling (to me). It's not just that they do all of that to extract the liquid, but the fact that they knew that the liquid contains caffeine (or at least they knew it contains a stimulant, if they didn't know its name). So how did they know that? And though it's not food, think about tobacco. How did they know that it has a calming agent, and that the best way to extract that is to dry the leaves, burn them, and inhale the smoke?

My point is, it's not only astounding that mankind discovered the that the coffee plant has a bean that contains a stimulant that needs to be extracted with a water-brewing process to be available to humans, it also discovered that the tobacco plant has leaves that have a calmative that acts through absorption by the lungs! How was all this disovered and refined ???? Why isn't it that we eat the leaves of the coffee plant or smoke them? Why isn't it that we burn the coffee bean and inhale its smoke, and why don't we roast the tobacco leaves and brew them instead? I've been asking these questions for years, and nobody ever gives me an answer how this can possibly have been discovered! Even when they say "trial and error" it still boggles my mind as well. Did we at one point dry, roast, grind, brew, and smoke every plant on earth to see which things had an effect of one kind or another on us?

(edited for clarity)

Edited August 3, 2004 by markk (log)

[Adam Balic]

Coffee, by a mile!  Someone decided to: pick the berries, let 'em rot in the sun, wash off the rotted goo, remove and dry the remaining seed, roast that seed, grind it, pour boiling water over it, and drink the resulting brown liquid.  Boggles the mind every time.

THANK YOU !!!

I've been saying this / asking this for years. But the way I ask it is even more troubling (to me). It's not just that they do all of that to extract the liquid, but the fact that they knew that the liquid contains caffeine (or at least they knew it contains a stimulant, if they didn't know its name). So how did they know that? And though it's not food, think about tobacco. How did they know that it has a calming agent, and that the best way to extract that is to dry the leaves, burn them, and inhale the smoke?

My point is, why don't we dry coffee beans, light them on fire, and inhale the smoke when we need a pick-me-up, and at the same time roast the tobacco leaves, pour boiling water over them to extract something, and drink that liquid when we need to relax??!! I've been asking these questions for years, and nobody ever gives me an answer!

Take some ground coffee put it in a pipe and smoke it. I doubt the effect will be as pleasant as a cup of coffee (I think caffeine would be heat labile at these temperatures). Even now some types of coffee are not filtred as such, so it is simply a slurry of ground beans. The decision to roast or not isn't carved in stone either. So at the basic level, you have a been which you eat and it makes you feel perky. The development from this to Starbucks, didn't happen all at once so think of little steps. Finally, I bet that if it wasn't for some cultures/religions probition of alcohol, we wouldn't be drinking coffee so much.

[caroline]

I'm with Adam. He's given us a set of rules for how to decide whether things are edible that produce pretty good results. Not infallible of course but that's life. And he's started on a set of rules for how to make the inedible (too poisonous, too tough) edible. Try:

water (rinsing, boiling)

heat (drying, grilling)

freezing

alkalis (lots of natural salts, ashes)

acids (fruit juices)

grinding/pounding/chopping

sprouting

clay (kaopectate effect)

natural "ripening" ie fermentation

Test. Then begin again.

Try every imaginable combination of the above.

It's amazing what you can do. And what you could have done even prior to agriculture. That adds a new set of techniques.

And I think you can go on to dig out rules that we have had (again not infallible nor eternal but very handy) for producing new dishes and even new cuisines.

Rachel

[FunJohnny]

it's alright alacarte - i'm gonna go with the hypothesis of nomads with milk stored in sheeps stomach for accidental discovery.

but then what of blue cheese.  who said, "ah damn the cheese has gone moldy, let's eat it anyway"?

Well sure. The cheese was stored in cool caves during the summer because it kept longer. Probably most cheese became moldy and they were used to eating it in whatever condition. This mold just happened to taste better. And so an industry was born....

Or maybe it was just some color-blind Frenchman

[alacarte]

it's alright alacarte - i'm gonna go with the hypothesis of nomads with milk stored in sheeps stomach for accidental discovery.

but then what of blue cheese. who said, "ah damn the cheese has gone moldy, let's eat it anyway"?

Tony Bourdain's ancestor, perhaps? The first caveman to say, "what the f*ck?"

[Adam Balic]

it's alright alacarte - i'm gonna go with the hypothesis of nomads with milk stored in sheeps stomach for accidental discovery.

but then what of blue cheese. who said, "ah damn the cheese has gone moldy, let's eat it anyway"?

I would think that issues with mould are a modern idea. Proberly didn't cross their mind when the cheese got mould, not to eat it. Especially considering how much effort and resources are tied up in a chunk of cheese. Infact they could have equally though "Good, the cheese has got that blue stuff on it that means that it will not go all slimy and stinky, the like that stuff little Urga ate just before she died".

More curious then the origins of cheese are the origins of yogurt. Many yogurt bacterial cultures are also vaginal flora.

[tryska]

yeah - i've heard that too Adam. i always thought it came possibly from tantric hindu ritual. that is a curious one isn't it?

[Adam Balic]

yeah - i've heard that too Adam. i always thought it came possibly from tantric hindu ritual. that is a curious one isn't it?

I don't think that it would involve anything exciting. Microbiologists tend to think of everything waist down as been 'contimated' with faecal flora. The same would be true with vaginal flora. Don't wash your hands for a few weeks, dip them in a bowl of milk in a warm climate and Eureka, you have invented Persian Milk (yogurt). Or something like it. I imagine that mostly it wa just nasty, but once in a while the culture present would have ended up producing something tasty.

[tryska]

it would have to have been someplace dry and dusty with little water to be had, for the hands to be dirty like that. is yogurt a product of the middle east?

[Adam Balic]

Your hands don't have to be 'dirty' to have a healthy bacterial population. Scratch and itch and you have a nice innoculum, just waiting to invent yogurt. I would think that yogurt and similar products were invented independently several times in different places, but older Arabic recipes refer to it as "Persian Milk" indicating that they knew of it via another culture.

[tryska]

yeah, but hindu custom would definitely hinder the process of getting a nice innoculum. persia would work tho. bagdhad's pretty dry and dusty.