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Potatoes, the great food crop of the New World, present [an] intriguing batch of mysteries. Potatoes are from the nightshade family, which is of course notoriously toxic, and in their wild state they are full of poisonous glycoalkaloids... Making any wild potatoes safe to eat required reducing the glycoalkaloid content to between one-fifteenth and one-twentieth of its normal level.

This raises a lot of questions, beginning most obviously with: How did they do it? And while they were doing it, how did they know they were doing it? How do you tell that the poison content has been reduced by, say, 20 percent or 35 percent or some other intermediate figure? How do you assess progress in such a process? Above all, how did they know that the whole exercise was worth the effort and that they would get a safe and nutritious foodstuff in the end?

Of course, a nontoxic potato might equally have mutated spontaneously, saving them generations of experimental selective breeding. But if so, how did they know that it had mutated and that out of all the poisonous wild potatoes around them here at last was one that was safe to eat?

The fact is, people in the ancient world were often doing things that are not just surprising but unfathomable.
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--Bill Bryson, At Home


I imagine it would be like picking up a box of rat poison, shaking it thoughtfully, then saying, "You know, if we tinkered with the recipe for this, I bet we could turn it into something to sprinkle on our popcorn."
 
Acorns are similarly quite toxic without being processed, raising some questions about how they ever came to be the staple food that they were on the North American coast. I don't think the cartoon implies a very realistic answer, though.
 
Politesse said:
Acorns are similarly quite toxic without being processed, raising some questions about how they ever came to be the staple food that they were on the North American coast. I don't think the cartoon implies a very realistic answer, though.
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In most cases the cartoon makes no sense because in most situations humans don't just appear in a new environment. Having evolved through the ages from earlier primates, and primates from earlier mammals, they would know what to eat and what not to eat. Only when a group suddenly moved to a very different environment would they need to learn what to eat and what to avoid.

I'm reminded of a documentary on WWII when the Japanese and the British were fighting in the jungles of Burma. The Japanese watched what the monkeys ate and presumed that if the monkeys ate it, it would likely be ok for humans to eat too.
 
That has got to be freudian. Every single other letter and word on that sign is well spaced. :rofl:
 
There was a store called Jandi's in my hometown.

I never saw anything interesting in the window, so I never went in. Didn't know what kind of store it was.

But one day, after maybe twenty years, they announced a going out of business sale. So I stepped in.

"Who's Jandi," I asked.

"Jandi. The store is named 'Jandi's'?"

"Jay and I's. The store is owned by Jay and I."

So there was a kerning problem and a grammar problem too.

I refrained from exclaiming, "You were trying to say, "Jay's and Mine," and in all these years nobody ever tipped you to the fact that your sign was wrong?"
 
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