Pineapple Express: Someone Is Wrong on the Internet?

[dragoner]

 

[Scribe]

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You essentially post about 2 things.

I like those two things less, every time.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Project management.

That’s an interesting response depending on how you pronounced the first word.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Who looked at a mussel and thought "seems edible enough to me"? lol

The guy watching an otter or gull eat one.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

I imagine if I were really hungry and saw another animal eating it, I might have tried it. Of course now I know there are various things birds eat in my yard, for example, that would be poisonous for me (know by reading, not trying).

There were definitely sci-fi stories that addressed that issue somewhat.

The first one to mind was an old short story whose name I unfortunately can’t recall. The astronaut is issued a parrot as a companion on his exploratory mission because almost anything they could eat, a human could, and with their eyesight and flight, would probably be excellent foragers. (And alarms.)

The second was the movie Robinson Crusoe of Mars, in which the hero is given a monkey for similar reasons.

Of course, with only one pet- and one astronaut- this scheme doesn’t have much wiggle room before resulting in debilitating illness or death. (Which almost happened in the movie.)

Of course, it’s also better than nothing.

 

[TiQuinn]

In other news, I see everyone woke up pissy and cynical again this morning.

 

[Willie the Duck]

The guy watching an otter or gull eat one.

Who proceeded to think, "man, I'd really like to eat that otter or gull..."

I always come back to mushrooms. How many people died trying the different varieties of mushrooms and why would they keep on trying to find the edible ones? I guess it's a bit of "We're going to die anyway, might as well risk it." But still.

As mentioned upthread, there might have been some 'nibble and see if you get sick' action instead of 'eat and see if you die.' Still, it's an amazing risk for very little sustenance. I guess a given prehistoric community only has to learn once for each variety. Of course, it's not really that far from the learning process of figuring out which snakes to run towards and which to run away from.

And once agriculture is discovered, all the selective breeding over generations to get edible plants. Then in some cases all the processing involved to make the result edible. Like maize and nixtamalizaiton. Look at wild corn and compare that to cultivated corn. It's nuts. Then all that goes into making corn digestible.

This is similarly discussed with lutefisk. I guess a thing to remember is that most pre-industrial cultures would have ready (almost involuntary) access to alkali solutions in the form of fire-ash lye. Some ash is left in a pot and gets wet and people discover it's good for cleaning things (separately, or by treating fats with it). Next have _____ soaking in the thing (looking at wild corn, I can even imagine they were using it as a scrub brush) and realizing that it gets softened up. First time it happens, you swear a bit and throw your ruined corn brush to the pigs -- but then they eat it and look happy. Couple generations later you are cultivating plots of the stuff and looking for larger scale supplies of alkali and your fried over at the limestone quarry is complaining about wet days...

 

[RealAlHazred]

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You essentially post about 2 things.

I like those two things less, every time.

I get that you like Damage on a Miss each time less, but I will keep banging on until it is universally accepted as the only logical way to correctly simulate reality.

But why do you like Gnome Bards less each time? They're awesome! I don't know why anybody would play anything else!

 

[Thomas Shey]

There were definitely sci-fi stories that addressed that issue somewhat.

The first one to mind was an old short story whose name I unfortunately can’t recall. The astronaut is issued a parrot as a companion on his exploratory mission because almost anything they could eat, a human could, and with their eyesight and flight, would probably be excellent foragers. (And alarms.)

The second was the movie Robinson Crusoe of Mars, in which the hero is given a monkey for similar reasons.

Of course, with only one pet- and one astronaut- this scheme doesn’t have much wiggle room before resulting in debilitating illness or death. (Which almost happened in the movie.)

Of course, it’s also better than nothing.

While true, I suspect the premise was the animals also likely had better intuitions about these things than we do. Though, that said, the fact humans actually have a pretty good sense of taste is true for an evolutionary reason...

 

[Maxperson]

Ooof. Hoisted by their own petards.