Shadowy Man
Contributor
What's really crazy is to read current recipes for things and realize all the crazy things people must have tried with food before learning what actually worked.
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.
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.
Alright, what is it?
That has got to be freudian. Every single other letter and word on that sign is well spaced.
Alright, what is it?
It's a woman's hairdo! The "eyes" are her sunglasses on top of her head and her bangs form a snout shape.