h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Having just cooked (and consumed) a great deal of tapioca, I am struck by a thought. It doesn't happen that frequently, so listen to it...

I have been told that tapioca is from manioc root, which is extremely poisonous, some kind of acid is in it. In order to create tapioca, you have to scrape and pound and scrape and pound the root. I may be way off base here, but I think the premise is that it takes a lot of work to get food from this poisonous plant.

This isn't a modern-day invention, either. It was some tribe or other that worked it out. And my question was:

How?

Let's say that you're living in the jungle. You and your family are subsisting on roots, berries, fish, the usual. You find this nice-looking root that smells good (I'm taking liberties here. I have no idea how it smells.). You hack off a piece of it and hand it to your brother, who immediately dies a painful foaming death.

Point taken? Of course not. You scrape all the brown stuff off of the root and give an inner piece to your sister, who dies a horrible foaming painful death.

Not to be deterred, you whack the root with a rock until it's soft, then kill your father with it.

After a long period of working on this, and after killing your family, the root is finally edible. You enjoy a nice, solitary meal of "tapioca."

It doesn't seem like the kind of thing that just pops up randomly, does it? Was the jungle so barren that poison looked tasty?

My conclusions:

1. Mankind considers anything worthwhile as long as it has not been done before.

2. Tapioca is worthwhile (and yummy).

You know...I've often wondered the same thing. There are a multitude of foods we eat which, if not properly prepared, are deadly. Who got the bright idea anyone could eat it? How many died learning how to safely prepare it? Maybe it's best not to know.

Exactly. And what's our obsession with eating things that we KNOW are deadly? Like that very, very poisonous blowfish that they serve in Japan. People die from it every year, and from what I've heard it doesn't taste that good. To quote one of Terry Pratchett's characters; "Ah, I see. Fish and Chips _for men_."

I have always believed that the bravest person in the history of the human race was the 1st one to eat an oyster!
They must have been seriously hungry.

;^)#