Today, I grabbed a can of mixed nuts to snack on, and as I was eating them, I noted that whenever you buy a can of mixed nuts, cashews are a standard component. However, if you buy mixed nuts still in the shell, the cashews are mysteriously unaccounted for. I was reasonably certain that this discrepancy was not the result of a bizarre nut conspiracy, so I looked up cashew harvesting online. Turns out, cashews are a hard nut to crack, so to speak. There is not one shell, but two, one of which must be boiled off, and in between the two shells is a toxic liquid which causes a rash similar to poison ivy. The toxin is destroyed when the cashews are roasted, but the resulting smoke is fatal if inhaled. So my question is, just how hungry was the person who figured all that out? I'm fairly certain that even if my food choices were extremely limited, at some point I would have been deterred from this particular dining experience. Most likely when I couldn't get the first problematic shell off, I would have opted for the nearby berries instead. But not this guy. He rallied through all of these obstacles, finding inventive ways of getting through both shells, ignoring the itchy blisters on his hands and down his throat, and even sacrificing friends who forgot to hold their breath during the roasting process. All in the name of pallet variety.
There are other things that we ingest that the origins intrigue me. Oysters, for example. I love oysters, but someone else had to convince me to try them first. Part of the argument my friend used to get me to try them was that she had not wanted to try them at first either, but someone else had convinced her and now she loved them. Who was the first person who did not need to be convinced? Who popped open that shell, saw the mucous-looking grey blob inside and said, “Now that looks like dinner”?
Some food confuses me just because of how many steps it takes to get it to an edible state. Next time you're in the grocery store, take a look at the price of a can of fava beans. They are about three times more expensive than any other bean. Know why? Because if you bought them dried and tried to prepare them yourself, you would never eat them again. Each little bean has a shell that has to be individually removed. I can't imagine the first woman preparing these beans NOT getting pissed off at her husband. “Remember those beans you found last year that didn't have shells on them? Get those again next time.”
Bread is a food with a lot of steps that always has me guessing, too. Have you ever made bread? There are a lot of very specific steps to go through in order to get a decent finished product. Yet every single society independently came up with a recipe for some kind of bread. It makes you wonder if there wasn't some Johnny Appleseed equivalent wandering around with a recipe and a bowl of yeast.
And then there are the lobsters. Like the oyster, I wonder who gazed upon this beady-eyed, claw-wielding creature and deemed it food. But at least with oysters, I can imagine that someone spotted a bird eating one or some similar scenario where sustenance would occur to him. But I doubt there was a bird perched atop a lobster having a snack when a hungry human happened by. Lobsters do not hang out seaside. They don't crawl up onto the shore at all. Did someone run out of food and decide to drag the bottom of the ocean to see what came up?
And, of course, blow-fish are a big question mark. You can only cut that fish one way and survive its digestion. How many ways did they try it to figure out the right way? And why wasn't there some voice of reason chiming in? “Hey, guys, that's the fifth death this week. Maybe we should skip this fish.”
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