[HN Gopher] Rotten meat may have been a staple of Stone Age diets
___________________________________________________________________
Rotten meat may have been a staple of Stone Age diets
Author : sohkamyung
Score : 103 points
Date : 2023-03-29 12:30 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.sciencenews.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.sciencenews.org)
| bastardoperator wrote:
| I eat rotten meat all the time... in video games, and it hurts
| you.
| purpleblue wrote:
| Blecch! Rotten food! The world spins and goes dark.
| detuur wrote:
| I don't see how that's surprising, at least if you subscribe to
| the Endurance Running Hypothesis (and I do). Any prey humans used
| to hunt using what we now know as persistence hunting would have
| been large game. Especially in the hot, tropic climates early
| humans seemed to have thrived in, such meat would have started to
| spoil, even if hunted fresh, before any such hunter would have
| had the time to bring it back to the family group, let alone
| consume it. Meats in general have a very short shelf life and if
| we look to the various independently developed preservation
| methods in human groups around the world, many of them seem to be
| centered around a controlled decomposition by "favourable"
| organisms (like the maggots in the seal story).
|
| There's also the simple observation that no doubt many of us have
| already made: animals all around us seem to have no issues with
| partially decomposed meat. Dogs don't seem to mind it, nor do
| cats, nor do other primates like chimpanzees. It's obvious that
| at least in our very recent evolutionary history we had far
| higher tolerance to spoilage.
| [deleted]
| leereeves wrote:
| > Dogs don't seem to mind [spoiled meat]
|
| I've recently seen proof of that. A dead horse was left on a
| trail I frequently hike, and I saw dogs eating it a week later.
|
| I don't even want to imagine how awful that meat was after
| sitting in the sun for a week.
| fencepost wrote:
| I haven't yet listened to the podcast but this has links to
| all the relevant info on Dogs In Elk which seems relevant.
|
| https://www.wbur.org/endlessthread/2022/02/25/dogs-in-elk
| giantrobot wrote:
| Dogs have much shorter GI tracts compared to humans. Just
| that fact means there's less opportunity for bacteria/toxins
| from rotted food to affect them.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| That said, all the pets I've had throw up way more than I do.
| I think we're ignoring the very real possibility that ancient
| people were constantly living with some level of
| gastrointestinal problems.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > I think we're ignoring the very real possibility that
| ancient people were constantly living with some level of
| gastrointestinal problems.
|
| We do know that humanity from its earliest days over the
| Rome Empire [1] up to, what, maybe a century or even less
| ago has had massive infestations of all kinds of parasites,
| including gastrointestinal.
|
| Would it be possible that these parasites actually could
| have a symbiotic relationship, in helping to break down
| spoiled food?
|
| [1] https://www.livescience.com/53303-ancient-rome-
| infested-with...
| protastus wrote:
| Pets have diet sensitivities too, which can upset their
| stomachs. My cat used to occasionally throw up but with her
| current food she has gone for more than a year without any
| events.
|
| By eating spoiled and contaminated food, ancient people
| were certainly getting internal parasites too (also
| something that a big fraction of pets have).
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| Oh, I'm sure if you wait long enough someone is going to
| argue that the parasites were a good thing too.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| I mean many modern people also live with constant
| gastrointestinal problems, and I'm not talking about teens
| eating taco bell and mountain dew every day and wondering
| why they have bathroom troubles, I'm talking about average
| people eating a varied and healthy diet with IBS.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| You're not wrong and that's an excellent example. I'm
| questioning the idea that somehow people were able to
| consume this food impact-free. I struggle with the common
| narrative that somehow people were healthier and better
| in some dark forgotten past and we should return to those
| times for our own well being. There often seems to be
| promises that conditions like IBS would stop existing if
| we did that. But maybe ancient man was cool with having
| near-constantly runny poos because there was no
| alternative.
| Connor_Creegan1 wrote:
| >It's obvious that at least in our very recent evolutionary
| history we had far higher tolerance to spoilage.
|
| I would agree, both in terms of actual immunity and taste
| response, although generally-speaking eating rotten meat
| (especially when well-sourced) is not nearly as risky as common
| wisdom would make it out to be. Many folks in the deeper
| circles of online carnivoria dabble in "high meat" (fermented
| rotten meat, a method of preparing meat learned from Inuit
| peoples who would feed it to their dogs) and swear by it, even
| if the taste can be unbearable to the uninitiated.
| prottog wrote:
| > Many folks in the deeper circles of online carnivoria
|
| The wonders of the internet!
| MayeulC wrote:
| It's still done in some French cuisine/hunting practices,
| though much less common nowadays: "Faisandage", where small
| game can be left to rot in a relatively controlled way for
| months: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservation_de_la_vian
| de#Matu...
| neonnoodle wrote:
| Relevant quote from the TV show _Newsradio_:
|
| Bill: In the olden days, a country squire would age his
| pheasants for weeks before they were deemed fit for
| consumption.
|
| Lisa Miller : In the olden days, people died of ptomaine
| poisoning and blamed it on ghosts.
| EdwardDiego wrote:
| It used to be traditional in English gamebird hunting to
| "hang them by the neck until the body separated from the
| head" to age the meat...
| atomicnumber3 wrote:
| I suspect that a lot of our tolerance of this stuff in
| prehistory stems from a combination of:
|
| - spices and seasoning was a lot less common and meat was
| gamey, not the well-fattened meats we're used to. So this
| stuff already tasted bland and not amazing as a baseline
|
| - it was preferable to starving, and hunger is the best spice
| of them all
| finnh wrote:
| Where did I last read about high meat, again?
|
| Ah yes, the Nov 22, 2010 issue of the New Yorker:
| https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/11/22/natures-spoils
|
| big h/t for "deeper circles of online carnivoria", you win
| phrase of the day
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| Fermentation implies an intentional process that protects
| against spoilage. I don't think anyone considers sauerkraut
| or wine rotten food.
| Joker_vD wrote:
| Not to mention diet of the peoples living in tundra that
| includes such wonderful stuff as e.g. igunaq.
| eternalban wrote:
| Had to look that up.
|
| -- http://www.nmto.ca/sites/default/files/igunaq.pdf --
|
| Igunaq-Aged meat
|
| Igunaq is fermented ( aged ) walrus or seal meat that has
| been cached away for future use. Meat is usually cached
| beneath stones or pebbles. Aged walrus meat is extremely high
| in protein, iron and vitamins. Igunaq has been traditional
| medicine to keep the digestive system clean, as it flushes
| away anything in its way. It is also great eating for those
| who have acquired the taste and can go beyond the smell.
|
| Too fermented, igunaq can be poisonous and can kill people.
| People have died from eating over-aged meat from walrus and
| polar bear. These two mammals are very rich in vitamins. The
| fat is often light green colored when the meat is aged
| properly. The fat will be darker green if the meat is over-
| aged or even brownish. Among Inuit it is a delicacy usually
| eaten with apples. To prepare the meat for eating people find
| that washing in cold water is better than washing with hot
| water. Cold water takes away the smell more.
|
| Igloolik and Hall Beach are known to have the best igunaq in
| Baffin Island. These two communities are blessed with walrus
| and proper gravel. Meat ages better when it is fermented in
| loose gravel. It takes time to make good igunaq. One has to
| store away the meat at the right season when it is not too
| hot or too cold. Temperature plays a big role.
|
| Cached meat is usually saved for the winter for people to eat
| but polar bears are known to steal the cache before people
| can claim them. Regardless the weight of the stones for
| caching, the polar bear will easily get at it. Polar bears
| are extremely strong animals.
|
| Common phrase..." I wonder how many polar bears I have fed to
| date?" Meaning...Hoping that the cache is not eaten by polar
| bears yet.
|
| As noted igunaq is good for the digestive system as it cleans
| it completely of any foreign objects such as viruses and
| sickness a person may have. A person may experience a natural
| "high" if they have not eaten aged meat for a while. Men who
| grew up with igunaq are usually more physically muscular than
| those who have not. Igloolik, Hall Beach and Cape Dorset have
| muscular looking men compared to other communities on Baffin
| Island. It is believed that igunaq contributes to the
| physical appearance of the people who eat it.
|
| Igunaq is such a delicacy that people that have no access to
| it will fly it in from communities that do have good igunaq.
| Igunaq is often brought in at special occasions such as
| Christmas for community feasts. Some communities look forward
| to Inuit organizations having meetings in their
| communities...igunaq is surely to be part of the feast.
| Igunaq when on sale, will sell better than fresh meat.
| Interestingly due to its odor some airlines in the north will
| not carry igunaq. People often have to disguise it to get the
| aged meat on a plane to take them home. It is said that if
| you can get beyond the smell, you'll enjoy the food as it is
| very nutritious and gives you energy and warmth....and you
| will be physically ready for your next outing. On a final
| note a full stomach will also make you concentrate better.
| Try it! It's a true Northern experience!
|
| By Elijah Tigullaraq
|
| June 2008
|
| -- end --
| dendrite9 wrote:
| There's also kiviaq: "a dish made by packing 300 to 500
| whole dovekies--beaks, feathers, and all--into the
| hollowed-out carcass of a seal, snitching it up and sealing
| it with fat, then burying it under rocks for a few months
| to ferment. Once it's dug up and opened, people skin and
| eat the birds one at a time."
|
| Here is one of the articles I found that wasn't too focused
| on how gross it is that these people eat this and instead
| digs into the history and purpose of the food.
| https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/what-is-kiviaq
| eternalban wrote:
| am ~ashamed that that description immediately made me
| wonder how gross it must be :}
|
| https://modernfarmer.com/wp-
| content/uploads/2014/10/fermente...
|
| But seriously, the extraordinary power of _hunger_ and
| _culture_ are on full display with the items discussed in
| this thread.
| jonnycomputer wrote:
| I really don't think whether the prey is big-game or not
| matters with respect to "spoiled" meat, however, contra to what
| some others here are saying, persistence hunting is (or was) a
| real thing. This paper [1] describes ethnographic examples of
| persistence hunting; heck, my grandfather described to me
| running down rabbits as a way of hunting them.
|
| However, I would also argue that a more common approach, at
| least when there are multiple hunters working together, is to
| "herd" animals into kill zones such as pit traps, or channels.
| We have lots of evidence of those in the archeological record,
| such as here [2] and here [3].
|
| I actually suspect that bacterial "preprocessing" of meat would
| assist in digestion. Rather famously, it is hard to get
| everything you need in a raw food diet, and a well known
| argument in anthropology is that cooking with fire is our way
| to make food easier to digest (rather than approach the problem
| the way, say, cows do). Fermentation can also improve the
| digestibility of foods (increasing bioavailability of calories,
| nutrients, etc.).
|
| [1] https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/508695 [2]
| https://albertashistoricplaces.com/2018/07/18/pronghorn-trap...
| [3] https://torbygjordet.com/food/hunting/
| hyperthesis wrote:
| What's the advantage to not being able to tolerate rotten meat?
| Perhaps it's costly to tolerate it.
|
| Apparently the advantage of losing body hair is fewer problems
| with lice (consider how much time other primates devote to
| grooming)
| chrisco255 wrote:
| I would disagree that meat had a short shelf life. It is almost
| trivial to dry meat out and make jerky that will last a very
| long time. Doesn't even require advanced tools.
|
| That being said, still agree with the premise. When you're
| truly hungry, food is food.
| OJFord wrote:
| That _is_ a 'controlled decomposition' preservation
| technique like GP described though.
| ravenstine wrote:
| Why subscribe to the endurance running hypothesis, though?
| There are no contemporary examples of humans hunting that way,
| and hominids were already making tools by the time they had
| developed to subsist on meat. The endurance/persistence
| hypothesis doesn't even make sense without tools like spears,
| knives, or arrows, because humans don't kill their prey by
| biting into them. If they had access to primitive weaponry, why
| would they waste energy running when they could instead ambush?
| Even other species like chimps and dolphins, that can't chuck
| spears, hunt by surrounding their prey. The only reason the
| hypothesis is even a thing is because people find it confusing
| that we sweat so much.
|
| If anything, the persistence running hypothesis in some way
| discredits the idea that hominids relied on rotten meat. If
| they could catch fresh prey, why eat spoiled meat? Yet our
| stomach acid has a very low pH, more acidic than even that of
| cats.
|
| What's more likely, in my opinion, is hominids began to
| supplement their diet by eating the leftover kills of larger
| predators as well as any rotting carcasses they may have
| encountered, and then developed hunting strategies around when
| they began developing tools. Even having sharp knives made of
| stone or volcanic glass would have been an obvious advantage in
| food procurement, and it wouldn't have taken millions of years
| to figure out that slashing an animal's throat in the right
| place would take it down quickly. No need for persistence
| running at all if a group can corner a mammoth or buffalo or
| lead it to a dead end.
| mklepaczewski wrote:
| > If they had access to primitive weaponry, why would they
| waste energy running when they could instead ambush?
|
| Have you ever fought a dog, a deer or a boar? Fighting means
| wounds, possibly fatal ones. Spear or no spear, you're going
| to die in one of those fights. Running on the other hand is
| pretty safe and not that tiring, especially if you've been
| doing it for years and your weight is close to 50-60kg.
| Ability to sweat more should be even more advantegous in a
| warm climate. I sometimes run in 30degC for an hour / an hour
| and a half. It's hard, but you get used to it. I imagine most
| animals would just drop by that time.
| majormajor wrote:
| Would you want to chase animals you wouldn't want to fight?
| What if they turned around and tried to fight you? You have
| less tactical advantage than trying to hunt or ambush them
| with stealth, and if you turn to run maybe you get away but
| then you've burned up a lot of your extra stamina? Give me
| the bow and arrow or spears so I can wound the target
| before /while chasing it, vs just popping out and hoping it
| ran away from me instead of at me.
| chimpanzee wrote:
| Deer and such will not fight unless there are no options
| and it has the necessary energy and verve. Apart from
| immediate physical entrapment, they do not realize that
| they likely have no options in the long run (pun fully
| intended). So they run and keep running until they fall
| into the trough of low energy.
|
| Not to mention, the first weapons would have been far
| more basic and require closer range than a bow and arrow
| or a throwing spear. So, to your point, early humans
| would have had to have taken advantage of the sickly or
| exhausted in order to avoid injury. With exhaustion
| occurring as a byproduct of the hunt, it would have been
| an "accidental" discovery.
| hyperthesis wrote:
| Attenborough, persistence hunt
| https://youtube.com/watch?v=826HMLoiE_o
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| [flagged]
| senko wrote:
| Good GPT.
| ravenstine wrote:
| Certainly seems like it.
|
| Whether it's GPT or a human, this is wrong:
|
| > Finally, while it is true that the low pH of our
| stomach acid suggests that our ancestors were not relying
| on rotten meat as a primary food source, it is important
| to remember that scavenging for meat was likely an
| important part of their diet. It is also possible that
| the ability to run long distances gave our ancestors an
| advantage in scavenging for meat, as they could cover
| greater distances in search of carrion.
|
| The point I was making was that our ancestors _were_
| relying on scavenged, and probably spoiled meat.
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| Yes. Know it is rude (is it impolite to use GPT?), but
| I've been playing with GPT and thought I'd give it a shot
| to see if anyone noticed, or if HN had any detection.
| daliusd wrote:
| What is here then https://youtu.be/826HMLoiE_o ? Was this
| debunked as fake or something ?
| [deleted]
| walkhour wrote:
| > There are no contemporary examples of humans hunting that
| way.
|
| There are some examples [0], although admittedly they are
| isolated cases.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persistence_hunting
| mhb wrote:
| Running After Antelope: Scott Carrier's story of trying for
| twelve years to chase down and catch an antelope by foot.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35362140
| burkaman wrote:
| This is an unusually poorly written Wikipedia article with
| a very weird style and a lot of unsourced statements. I
| would be very hesitant to trust it without extensively
| reading the sources.
| bernawil wrote:
| this somehow always comes up when anybody mentions human
| sweating or how good we are walking large distances. But
| whoever thinks it's feasible to hunt any animal worth its
| calories just jogging behind it has never chased a playful
| dog. A furry mammal with no sweat glands has way more
| endurance than any fit man and let's not talk about top
| speed. You'd never catch it.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| Plus, now you're exhausted and you've chased it for how
| long? If you've run for the last 18 hours exhausting the
| gazelle, home is now an 18 hour jog back the other way, and
| you won't be jogging, you'll be lugging a gazelle with you
| and you're already utterly exhausted.
| jrootabega wrote:
| It would make sense to try to flank the animal and get it
| to run where you wanted it to.
| mklepaczewski wrote:
| Is gazelle able to jog for 18 hours in a hot day? Or even
| for 2 hours? Keep in mind that the predator chooses the
| prey. Humans didn't had to chase gazelles, they may
| choose something bigger and slower.
| pegasus wrote:
| Why would you be in such a rush to return home?
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| Conceivably everyone you left at home is waiting for you
| and the meat.
| NineStarPoint wrote:
| Dogs also have unusually high endurance actually, some
| breeds extremely so like sled dogs (up there in the top
| three with humans and horses). In general wolves are
| already pretty high up there endurance wise, and dogs
| probably had an evolutionary incentive to be able to keep
| up with us better on top of that.
| pegasus wrote:
| Not so:
| https://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/27/health/27well.html
|
| "But when it comes to long distances, humans can outrun
| almost any animal. Because we cool by sweating rather than
| panting, we can stay cool at speeds and distances that
| would overheat other animals. On a hot day, the two
| scientists wrote, a human could even outrun a horse in a
| 26.2-mile marathon."
| jaggederest wrote:
| And we know because there are a number of "human versus
| horse" races over long distances that are occasionally
| won by humans. Generally the longer the race the more
| often humans win.
| bernawil wrote:
| > distances that would overheat other animals
|
| what other animals? I used the dog example because it
| fits perfectly here: they don't sweat yet it's impossible
| to catch up to them if they are running away. Even if
| they overheat they don't just drop dead, they slow down
| to a human's walking pace.
|
| And what about running animals that do sweat like horses?
| makes no sense. What makes more sense is to approach from
| multiple fronts and spear/arrow it down. Plus, all
| remaining hunter-gatherers hunt with the help of dogs.
| Sure, you do have to run, a lot. But the endurance side
| is the least important.
| mklepaczewski wrote:
| On short distances all dogs outpace humans. After an hour
| of running most dogs will just quit. On several occasions I
| had very hard time convincing various dogs to get off the
| ground after an 8-10km run.
| bernawil wrote:
| my point is, can a human reasonably stay within viewing
| distance from a dog that is running away from him? the
| dog can just run at top speed, gain some distance, take a
| little rest and maintain that distance at a comfortable
| pace.
|
| I used to believe in the endurance hunting thing until I
| realized playing with my dog it didn't make sense. They
| DO get tired, but they take a 1 minute break and it's
| like they are back square 0.
|
| For the record, I'm in shape and with a pretty light
| frame (181cm/70kg) and go for 10km/1 hour jogs regularly.
| dmm wrote:
| In her book "The Old Way", Elizabeth Marshall Thomas
| describes the Kalahari San who she lived with in the 1950s.
| Despite having bows and arrows some members of that group
| would persistence hunt.
|
| Dmitriy Lykov(1940-1981) of the Lykov family living an
| isolated life in Siberia developed a method of persistence
| hunting, despite or perhaps because of, the absence of any
| sort of hunting culture in his tiny, isolated group.
|
| Those are just two very recent examples off the top of my
| head of people persistence hunting for survival. Maybe you're
| out of your depth on this subject.
| precompute wrote:
| Some tribes in Africa also drink milk mixed with animal
| blood. Not enough water to go around.
| trws wrote:
| In addition to the direct persistence hunting, also note
| that most bow and arrow hunting or even spear hunting is,
| in and of itself, a form of persistence hunting. The
| expectation that an arrow will take down the animal where
| it is hit is usually not how it would have worked with more
| primitive bows except with very small game. The animal
| would still have to be followed and possibly struck more
| times to actually bring it down. Bull fighting is a modern
| extension of this, though in an enclosed space.
| kybernetyk wrote:
| >If they had access to primitive weaponry, why would they
| waste energy running when they could instead ambush?
|
| This is the main point why I don't believe in the endurance
| running hypothesis. Humans are lazy. Why would they opt to
| run for days over just waiting at the local watering hole for
| prey?
| krona wrote:
| > Humans are lazy
|
| I don't think you realize how easy it is if you know how to
| track and jog for 2-3 hours for antelope, even less for
| cats. All you need is a club. 'Running' isn't necessary.
| chimpanzee wrote:
| Plenty of humans "run for days" for pure enjoyment. Not to
| say the ancients would be so foolish when energy
| expenditure is a concern. But run for days, for a purpose,
| with companions, releasing endorphins throughout, and then
| topping that off with a nice, rewarding meal full of fat
| and protein? I don't see why not.
| vuln wrote:
| > It's obvious that at most in our very recent evolutionary
| history we had far higher tolerance to spoilage.
|
| I wonder what effect that's had on a humans immune system. I'd
| imagine eating spoiled meat containing bacteria, etc was giving
| their immune system a run for its money until a tolerance was
| built.
| zadler wrote:
| It might have been a good thing?
| zikduruqe wrote:
| Just look up the Hadza tribe's gut microbiome.
|
| https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36238714/
| https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms4654
|
| That's probably as close as you are going to get to truly
| paleo diets... not paleo-bros that eat only bacon, butter
| and meats.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| I was going to post about "paleo" diets, but you beat me
| to it.
|
| The Paleo Cafe would get closed down by the Health
| Department _real_ fast if it actually served paleo foods.
| klyrs wrote:
| I'm picturing a guy hauling a roadkill deer in, tossing
| it on a table and yelling "meat's up!" I mean, sure, they
| didn't have cars back then, but it's better than letting
| trash-eating deer meat go to waste.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| I dimly recall a New Yorker article about people who eat
| roadkill. They do have their limits though. It has to be
| _fresh_ roadkill :)
| klyrs wrote:
| New paleo motto: "Maggots is protein"
| vuln wrote:
| I see how easy it would be for me at least to assume they
| had better immune systems from eating the spoiled meat. If
| true our modern immune systems are most likely way less
| effective than theirs at that time.
| rybosworld wrote:
| There does seem to be this notion that being "too hygienic"
| is a negative thing because it doesn't train your immune
| system.
|
| That's only kind of true. Exposing a healthy person to
| small amounts of weakened virus tends to build immunity.
| Exposing the healthy person to large amounts of the virus
| overwhelms the immune system and may not even lead to a
| strong viral immunity.
|
| If I had to guess, eating rotten meat is something that
| indigenous peoples have adapted to over time (and some
| individuals died along the way to that adaptation) and they
| are resistant to the specific things in rotten meat that
| make modern day humans sick. I think it would be wrong to
| suggest the rotten meat eaters are somehow better off for
| doing this, or that they have stronger immune systems in
| general.
|
| Immune systems aren't like a muscle that you can repeatedly
| train to get stronger and stronger and stronger ad
| infinitum.
|
| Immunity also comes at a cost. This isn't talked about
| often. But it's not "Free" for your body to learn and
| maintain immunity to specific infections.
| legulere wrote:
| Especially in the last years, the hygiene hypothesis is
| not about a lack of immune training against harmful
| microbes, but a lack of encounter of so called old
| friends, harmless microbes.
|
| https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1700688114
| Retric wrote:
| The major issue isn't the bacteria but their byproducts. Ex:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Botulism
|
| This is why you can't render rotten meat safe by simply
| cooking it. That said, people still age meat. Small birds for
| will get left for 4-9 days in a cool space before being
| butchered etc.
| https://magazine.outdoornebraska.gov/2014/01/hanging-
| pheasan...
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| Yep other than a couple notable exceptions like salmonella,
| this is the norm for food poisoning. It's intoxication from
| metabolic byproducts, not infection. Remains one of the
| biggest lay misunderstandings of food safety though.
|
| "Just cook it out" plus "your nose can tell" (it can't,
| spoilage microbes aren't usually illness microbes) are
| false beliefs that still get people killed.
| foobarian wrote:
| Curious about sources for this. I see some indication
| that botulism toxin can be destroyed by cooking, though
| the bar is pretty high - needs to be boiled over 5
| minutes. So lesser temperature methods such as grilling
| the meat may not be sufficient, but something like
| stewing over many hours seems like would work fine.
| undersuit wrote:
| Boiling for 10 minutes would be better. Pressure Cooking
| would be best as it can reach the heat/pressure needed to
| destroy the botulism spores too.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| Here's an example with Staph food poisoning[1]. The
| bacteria dies when you cook it, but the enterotoxins that
| Staph generates aren't broken down by heat and remain
| (section 4). It's good to not consume live Staph, but
| contaminated food can still cause issues despite cooking.
|
| [1]https://www.hindawi.com/journals/bmri/2014/827965/
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| I'm not gonna have a peer reviewed journal article for
| you or anything. I learned this in the food safety class
| you have to go through before managing a kitchen in a lot
| of jurisdictions.
|
| > stewing over many hours seems like would work fine.
|
| It won't! Good luck with it though.
| foobarian wrote:
| Well I get that would make sense in that kind of
| environment. Best way to not hurt your customers is to
| never even risk it - why would you?
|
| But my agenda is more selfish. I like to cold-smoke meats
| for adding to stews, based on the knowledge that stewing
| in > 85'C [1] water will destroy the botulism toxin. I
| could just stay away from cold-smoked meats to be safe;
| but then I would lose out on some of the tastiest food
| ever :-)
|
| It can be a confusing topic because there are 3 different
| things to worry about: the active bacteria, the spores,
| and the toxin. Of the 3, the spores are the most
| resistant to heat, and according to the WHO link [1] can
| survive multiple hours in boiling water. However the
| toxin seems relatively unstable.
|
| I really need to track down their sources though.
|
| [1] https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-
| sheets/detail/botulism
| throwway120385 wrote:
| USDA indicates that boiling for 10 minutes can prevent
| botulism: https://www.fsis.usda.gov/sites/default/files/m
| edia_file/202...
|
| Although the boiling doesn't destroy the toxin itself,
| only the bacterial spores.
| foobarian wrote:
| > Although the boiling doesn't destroy the toxin itself,
| only the bacterial spores.
|
| The other way around
| logicalmonster wrote:
| 1) Is this what was referred to in the movie "The Menu"
| where they were taking the tour in the beginning and
| talking about the 152 day aging process for meat, but the
| 153rd day would bring chaos?
|
| 2) Why is there such a precise known number for that issue?
| Don't bacteria grow differently? It just seems odd that 152
| days would definitely be ok and 153 days would definitely
| kill.
| nathanvanfleet wrote:
| My dog's propensity for diarrhea makes me feel less inclined to
| state that she has any tolerance for it.
| zdragnar wrote:
| I've known dogs that have lived on very varied diets
| (including most human food sans poisons like grapes), and
| other dogs that had very strictly controlled diets because
| they were sensitive to pretty much anything and everything.
|
| Many breeds of modern dogs are very far removed from the
| lifestyle and habits of their wild brethren.
| version_five wrote:
| But studies conducted over the last few decades do indicate that
| putrefaction, the process of decay, offers many of cooking's
| nutritional benefits with far less effort. Putrefaction
| predigests meat and fish, softening the flesh and chemically
| breaking down proteins and fats so they are more easily absorbed
| and converted to energy by the body.
|
| That was my first thought seeing the headline. As long as it can
| be stomached, it makes sense that we'd favor rotten food as a
| kind of natural over processed food that makes it easy to get at
| the nutrients. Another way to look at it is that the putrefaction
| is basically the same thing that happens once we eat it.
| dabernathy89 wrote:
| I can't wait to see all of the influencers who will feel
| obligated to post TikToks of themselves eating rotten meat now.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| You're looking for "high meat" and it's already a thing.
| dabernathy89 wrote:
| Yuck.
| greenhearth wrote:
| It's worth considering that our recent obsession with the
| "caveman diet" is the extension (and obvious continuation) of the
| early modern "noble savage" construct. It seems we ran out of
| culture clashes of colonization and now are trying to colonize
| the past to process our anxieties and dissatisfactions.
| [deleted]
| elhudy wrote:
| >"a gold mine of ethnohistorical accounts makes it clear that the
| revulsion Westerners feel toward putrid meat and maggots is not
| hardwired in our genome but is instead culturally learned," Speth
| says.
|
| These two statements aren't necessarily in contraindication of
| one another. The revulsion can be both hardwired in our genome
| _and_ we can culturally train ourselves to ignore that revulsion.
| exfatloss wrote:
| The book The Fat of the Land by Vilhjalmur Stefansson
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vilhjalmur_Stefansson) describes
| how the Eskimos he lived with ate rotten fish all the time. It
| was a delicacy for them.
|
| Kind of like we eat "rotten/spoiled" blue cheese and dry-aged
| beef.
| dugmartin wrote:
| I remember watching a video a few years ago about a present day
| tribe (I believe in SE Asia) that went on a hunt and killed a
| monkey. Due to the heat by the time the hunting party was back
| the meat had spoiled but nobody in the village had any issue with
| diving in and eating it. I would think that up until very recent
| times in human development this was very common.
| precompute wrote:
| Not new, Aajonus Vonderplanitz talked about this for years.
| https://aajonus.online/
| koliber wrote:
| Fish sauce, dry aged steaks, and bellota ham come to mind. All
| delicious, and while I'm not sure if you'd call them putrefied
| meat, it's not that far off.
| ThePowerOfFuet wrote:
| Jamon is about as far away from "putrefied" as you can get;
| it's cured in salt for weeks and then hung to dry for months or
| years.
| hirundo wrote:
| I enjoy the work of Israeli anthropologist Miki Ben-Dor on this
| subject:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=miki+ben+dor
|
| He's very much in agreement, saying that the human pattern was to
| hunt large game and then bring it home to eat over weeks,
| evolving a highly acidic stomach as a result to deal with the
| bacterial load of rotten meat. That pattern was interrupted by
| the growing scarcity of megafauna, perhaps caused by human
| hunters.
|
| "Archaeological evidence does not overlook the fact that stone-
| age humans also consumed plants," adds Dr. Ben-Dor. "But
| according to the findings of this study plants only became a
| major component of the human diet toward the end of the era."
|
| https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/814485
| stefantalpalaru wrote:
| "It is interesting to note that humans, uniquely among the
| primates so far considered, appear to have stomach pH values more
| akin to those of carrion feeders than to those of most carnivores
| and omnivores. In the absence of good data on the pH of other
| hominoids, it is difficult to predict when such an acidic
| environment evolved. Baboons (_Papio_ spp) have been argued to
| exhibit the most human-like of feeding and foraging strategies in
| terms of eclectic omnivory, but their stomachs - while considered
| generally acidic (pH = 3.7) - do not exhibit the extremely low pH
| seen in modern humans (pH = 1.5). One explanation for such
| acidity may be that carrion feeding was more important in humans
| (and more generally hominin) evolution than currently considered
| to be the case [...]" - ["The Evolution of Stomach Acidity and
| Its Relevance to the Human Microbiome" (2015)](https://journals.p
| los.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...)
| MagicMoonlight wrote:
| Or maybe the people who eat trash are the ones that never
| developed and that's why they're still eating trash today.
| fwlr wrote:
| I recall reading, a long time ago, of a person who was eating
| just meat and only meat for his diet. He was struggling for a
| while with it, until he intentionally allowed a small amount of
| meat to rot for a bit, consumed that, and from then on he did
| much better on that diet. The principle I believe was in play was
| that the rotting meat contained a lot of bacteria that was very
| good at breaking down that meat (it would proliferate the
| fastest) and that bacteria was taking up residence in his gut
| microbiome and assisting in digesting non-rotten meat in the
| future. Sort of like how herbivores will sometimes consume small
| stones to act as mechanical grinders of plantstuff in their
| stomachs.
|
| This seems like the most likely way that ancient humans consumed
| actually-rotten meat, in small doses to edit their gut microbiome
| (likely encoded in traditions that viewed certain specific rotted
| foods as a delicacy/luxury - not because it was hard to acquire
| but because you were only supposed to eat it rarely). To the
| extent that you see claims that "ancient humans ate large amounts
| of rotten meat" I suspect they're conflating that with merely
| "spoiled by modern food standards" meat, which is much less
| rotten than it sounds.
| moremetadata wrote:
| Menaquinones are the naturally occurring form of vitamin K
| identified in bacteria.
|
| Different bacteria make different chemicals which can be useful
| to humans.
|
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7928036/
|
| Is it any different to the Germans eating fermented sauerkraut,
| or Asians eating fermented Soy source?
| tracker1 wrote:
| Kind of curious how much this may correlate to the fact that we
| don't dry age meat nearly as much as in times past.
| 1MachineElf wrote:
| As an aside, most industrial meat is exposed either intentionally
| or unintentionally to lactobacillus strains. Working in kitchens
| I've had the opportunity to taste spoiling meat that had high
| amounts of it. When prepared right it is actually quite good.
| Taste can be similar to dry-aged steak, but juicer and more
| flavorful. I've never gotten sick, but it certainly seems like a
| risk, however tasty it may be.
| tyfon wrote:
| I eat lactobacillus all the time in my sourdough bread :)
|
| It is what makes the sourdough bread taste so good too.
| Zickzack wrote:
| Lactic acid fermentation [1] is the secret to many sausages. In
| the case of Mettwurst [2], made of raw meat, it is essential.
| Aged steak, hanged pheasants [3 - with a discussion of
| bacteria] - even today, the list should be long.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lactic_acid_fermentation [2]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mettwurst [3] https://honest-
| food.net/on-hanging-pheasants-2/
| fencepost wrote:
| Lactobacillus has been a part of human meat preservation for a
| long time. https://record.umich.edu/articles/underwater-
| storage-techniq...
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| Yeah you can definitely lacto ferment meat, it's a major flavor
| component of the european dry sausages. Doing it safely isn't
| hard, but a lot of the nuances of that technique are towards
| making it actually taste good. It's very easy to lose control
| of water activity and get out of control rancid elements, or
| get air ingress and grow aerobic bacterias that clearly taste
| like rot, or too much oxidation of the fat, or the wrong mold.
|
| Definitely pretty advanced level fermentation stuff, more to
| control and more serious consequences than making kimchi or
| something. Naem and other SE asian sour sausages are probably
| the most approachable entry point if you want to give it a
| swing though.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| Lebanon bologna is a more commonly available fermented meat
| in the US. Much better stuff than the pink slime bologna.
| tracker1 wrote:
| I can say, that I grew up on "well done" meat... Even as an
| adult, It's taken years to get used to medium-rare steak. The
| texture of raw fish is still really hard for me to get past. It's
| definitely a learned thing, and the hyper-palatable "foods" we
| have today doesn't exactly help things at all.
| al2o3cr wrote:
| Sadly for the cause of lolz, the subreddit where folks would
| trade tips about eating "high meat" and reassure each other that
| intestinal parasites are "totally natural, like our caveman
| ancestors had" went private a while back.
| djaychela wrote:
| I was unfortunate enough to eat some rotten meat at a restaurant
| in Tanzania when I was working there. The main part was not down,
| but it was hidden under some potatoes, and I only discovered it
| as I ate.
|
| Took me months to recover from it. Up to that point in my life, I
| was totally "regular" as they say. It was probably a year before
| I got back to normal in that respect.
|
| Don't mess with your gut flora if things are going well, imo.
| ulnarkressty wrote:
| There are quite a lot of videos on YouTube of people eating
| rotten meat, they claim it 'gets you high'. Perhaps one reason
| it's considered a delicacy?
| jrootabega wrote:
| My gut refuses to believe it, but my brain understands that this
| is probably a lot like cheese -- blue cheese in particular. If
| you've only had fresh milk, letting it curdle and mold before
| eating it would probably be unthinkable. Same for fresh cabbage
| vs. kimchi or sauerkraut.
| wincy wrote:
| If you ever get a chance to go to a really nice steakhouse, and
| eat a 45-day or 60-day dry aged steak, do so. It's one of the
| funkiest most delicious things I've ever eaten, like a combo of
| the best blue cheese and the best steak I've ever had.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| The trick with a dry aged steak is that you don't eat the
| bits that were directly exposed to the air. The outer layer
| of the beef protects the inner from the intrusion of all the
| bacteria and spoilage that makes you sick and that's
| discarded and you cook the inner stuff that's had time to
| change but not go bad.
| kerpotgh wrote:
| [dead]
| BigCryo wrote:
| Scavenging explains many of the body traits that humans have..
| are good binocular vision allows us to see long distances.. so
| prehistoric man may have been able to see buzzards surfing over a
| corpse miles away.. so then we began to ran toward the corpse but
| we had to run fast so that we could beat the other animals to
| it.. our skeletal structure allows us to run fast and the fact
| that we have little hair allows us to sweat and carry off the
| heat so we can run long distances quickly.. once we get to the
| corpse there are likely other animal scavenging it such as
| hyenas, and our ability to grasp rocks and throw them allowed us
| to throw rocks at the hyenas or whatever and scare them off the
| corpse.. then if there was even little meat left we could pick up
| a rock smash the bones and get the marrow out.. this explains how
| we got good long distance binocular vision, a skeleton that
| allows us to run, a body that allows us to carry off heat through
| sweating, hands and other anatomy that can grasp and throw
| stones, and smash bones to get the marrow out
| mzimbres wrote:
| So why rotten meat smells terrible and a steak delicious? Why
| would we evolve that perception of something that nutritious and
| which could prevent me from starving. Why my nose keeps telling
| me to keep away from rotten meant?
| m0llusk wrote:
| There is an interesting related point in that cruciferous
| vegetables and allium roots synthesize specific chemicals which
| have been correlated with healthy effects. Many of these
| chemicals have significant amounts of sulfur and tend to smell
| quite strong not necessarily in a pleasant way. Olfactory
| associations seem to be complex.
| hvis wrote:
| IIUC, the digestive system (and the gut bacteria in it) provide
| feedback to your taste buds over time.
|
| If the appropriate "paleo diet" bacteria settled in (e.g. using
| the gradual method to build tolerance), your nose would
| probably change its mind soon enough.
|
| Not a biologist, just a layman here.
| eqefqe wrote:
| I saw people on youtube who eat rotten meat on purpose.
| amriksohata wrote:
| https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/human-ancest...
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