How did people know certain things were safe to eat?

Question

for instance, nuts from trees and berries and such.. how did they know they were safe to eat before they tasted them? They just took a risk?

Answer 1

Desperation. You eat what you know is safe, but when the choice is 'not eat it and die' or 'eat it and maybe die', you'll take the risk.

Hunter gatherers are a bit better at testing stuff. First of all you put a piece into your mouth and chew it a bit, if it's burns, tingles or tastes bad, it's spat out. If it's OK, the next stage is to eat a tiny piece of it a day or so later to see if it will make you sick, and to steadily increase the amount over a few days.

Answer 2

cave excavations have revealed paintings indicating that certain tribes had designated tasters... a role usually reserved for women and "slower" males.

Answer 3

A lot of times you can tell by how something tastes.  One time when i was a kid i tried to eat an acorn because i saw a squerrel doing it... Have you ever tasted an acorn?!?! It was really better and sour and tasted awful.  Since then i havn't tried to eat another acorn.  Other things i tasted only to find out people shouldn't eat them are lightning bugs(fireflies), and these strange little berries that grew on a bush by my aunt's house(they made my mouth really dry and tasted like death).

Answer 4

It was likely pure instinct.  Animals in the wild will not eat something that is poisonous to them.  Early man had to use a number of different instincts to survive.  Modern adult humans largely ignore instinctual signals because we have intellectual signals that tell us what to do.  Give a child a slice of stinky cheese, and the child probably won't eat it.  His instinct is telling him that it's not going to be any good, but you and I might eat it because somebody told us it's good.  

What I really want to know is who decided it was OK to eat puffer fish, when only a very small part is non-poisonous, and you need extremely good culinary skills to cut away the poisonous bits.

Answer 5

Sometimes watching animals, sometimes just tasting it, some foods humans eat are some of the same foods we ate since before we were human!

Answer 6

There are certain general guide lines for eating unknown plants. The "universal edibility test:"

http://www.wilderness-survival.net/plant...

Then there are certain identifiers of poisonous plants:

Milky or discolored sap.

Beans, bulbs, or seeds inside pods.

Bitter or soapy taste.

Spines, fine hairs, or thorns.

Dill, carrot, parsnip, or parsley like foliage.

"Almond" scent in woody parts and leaves.

Grain heads with pink, purplish, or black spurs.

Three-leaved growth pattern.

http://www.wilderness-survival.net/plant...

With berries, my training was that the darker the berry, the more likely it would be safe.

Hunter gatherers are well aware of the plants in their range and when they become ripe. Their movements are timed to reaching certain areas when food stocks are edible. Just as you at an early age learned about crossing the road, children of such groups learned what was safe to eat.

Answer 7

Trial and error.

Answer 8

Same way we do now--we wait for somebody else to drop or smile.