Milk from Cows?

[Shemeska]

I think people are perhaps missing the obvious, the members of our species didn't just go around carefully testing various materials to determine their edibility out of curiosity; they did it out of desperation.

Mmmmm.... cassava/manioc/tapioca. Yay for staple crops that if you don't prepare them right have compounds that convert to cyanide

 

[Dog Moon]

Originally posted by Ambrus
I think people are perhaps missing the obvious, the members of our species didn't just go around carefully testing various materials to determine their edibility out of curiosity; they did it out of desperation. We are so blessed with an abundance of food nowadays that I think we often forget that, for the majority of our species' existence, our ancestors were often running around desperately trying to find their (and their offspring's) next meal.

Hmm, that's a good point. About 5000BC when milk was discovered, most people were probably still Hunter-Gathers, I THINK. My history isn't the best since I haven't had any for a while. Since most of them tried to use as much of the animal as possible, as was said earlier, they probably killed the cow [Since they were wild at the time], saw a big airy thing with white liquid inside it and tried it. It proved to taste somewhat good and didn't kill them. They then probably learned how to milk the cow without actually killing it.

And occasionally, I do wonder how some things came to be, this just happened to be the most recent thought which came to mind.

 

[Jdvn1]

If an animal can eat it, the logic goes, a human can. A calf suckles, says our distant ancestor, I bet I can too.

Sounds like a bad pickup line. "Hey, babe, can I suckle you?"

 

[Dog Moon]

That so reminds me of Look Who's Talking where the kid sees this woman's large breasts and is like 'Yum, lunch' meaning something not perverted at all.

 

[Ambrus]

Since they were wild at the time], saw a big airy thing with white liquid inside it and tried it. It proved to taste somewhat good and didn't kill them. They then probably learned how to milk the cow without actually killing it.

Exactly. It's not a matter of curiosity or boredom but rather necessity and practicality. The danger, energy, uncertainty and ressources needed to acquire another animal to eat is what has lead people to make use of every part of the dead animal they already have. Muscles are the most obvious source of meat but getting milk from female mammals is fairly obvious as well. After that it becomes a matter of figuring how to make the rest edible. Soft tissues? Chop em up and pack them into the intestines and you've got sausage. Bones? Boil em and you've got beef soup. Hooves? Boil em up and you get gelatin. Brains?... Turn em into head cheese. Blood? Blood pudding. Really, the only thing you can't usually eat are the animal's bodily waste; those you use for fertilizer to help your crops grow.

It's said that necessity is the mother of invention. During a famine there is no greater necessity than the need to find food wherever you can. I'd venture to say that if something can fit in the human mouth some human being, at some point, has tried to eat it and/or has tried to find some way to make it edible.

 

[RangerWickett]

Milk is easy. Gelatin isn't so hard, because by the point it was discovered we already had lots of weird food. Most foods were invented with a thought process like, "Take parts of different animals and plants that haven't killed us yet, and toss them together in different ways. See if it tastes good."

What confuses the hell out of me is bread.

Once you know how to make it, it's not so hard. But I can't help but imagine that bread was the most difficult food item to invent. You take wheat, ground it up into flour, and it ain't so tasty by itself. You set it on fire and get nothing. You bake it and get crisp flour. You mix it with eggs and fat, and you end up with a weird sludge that's maybe palateable. You bake that sludge, and you get a cracker. And people like crackers.

Then, some day, some poor sod finds out his wheat-egg sludge is moldy, but he bakes it anyway. Miraculously, it smells good, and when he actually tries to eat it, it's a hell of a lot better than a cracker.

Don't get me started on pasta.

 

[Ambrus]

Ditto what RangerWickett said. I've often tried to figure out the steps involved to go from long dried grass to flour to bread. It sure doesn't seem intuitive. It's amazing really that bread is the most common human staple. Figuring out how to drink milk is a walk in the park by comparison.

 

[Jdvn1]

Oh, bread isn't hard. It grows spontaneously in deserts, even.

 

[reveal]

What confuses the hell out of me is bread.

Who knew there was a breadinfo.com?

http://www.breadinfo.com/history.shtml

 

[Ambrus]

Who knew there was a breadinfo.com?

Nowadays I simply assume there is a at least a half dozen websites for even the most obscure bit of lore. The internet is a truly miraculous thing. Thanks for the link.