How was it decided which foods were edible and which were poisonous?
What a very good question. Imagine there were 10 men and 10 women shipwrecked on a large remote Island. There would be some plants and animals they would recognise and others they wouldn’t, so immediate starvation would be ruled out. They would see a Monkey eating certain things on a regular basis, which means these things are edible, whilst ignoring others, which could be seen as a warning. Likewise, there could be sea birds which eat certain fish and ignore others. Eventually, there would be children to whom this knowledge is passed on, and over generations the database of knowledge would expand. Of course there would bound to be a certain amount of “trial and error”, but there are not likely to be that many potential foodstuffs that would be instantly poisonous: “don’t eat that, it gives you the runs/vomiting/headache etc.” None of this, of course, comes even close to understanding how someone once decided that something as disgusting as Liver was fit to eat!
