this post was submitted on 26 Nov 2025
145 points (100.0% liked)
History Memes
2061 readers
944 users here now
A place to share history memes!
Rules:
-
No sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia, assorted bigotry, etc.
-
No fascism (including tankies/red fash), atrocity denial or apologia, etc.
-
Tag NSFW pics as NSFW.
-
Follow all Piefed.social rules.
-
History referenced must be 20+ years old.
Banner courtesy of @setsneedtofeed@lemmy.world
OTHER COMMS IN THE HISTORYVERSE:
- !historymusic@quokk.au
- !historygallery@quokk.au
- !historyruins@piefed.social
- !historyart@piefed.social
- !historyartifacts@piefed.social
- !historyphotos@piefed.social
founded 9 months ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Always love the history of the invention of Cheese
Some people thought it was a good idea to drink milk from a cow because they saw that babies drank from a mothers breast .... why not the cow?
Then a few hundred years of that, some guy kept a bunch of milk in a goat's stomach they used as a storage bag .... the milk curdled and turned into big solid chunks .... hmmmm ... might as well try to eat it ... what could go wrong? that it might kill me!? hahahahahahaha !!!
Few hundred years later, a bunch of Europeans kept cheese in a cave and it started to get affected with a mold giving it a series of blue streaks and spots .... hey Hans, what happened to the cheese? .... don't know, let's feed to Gunther and see if it kills him
Ancient Middle Eastern Merchant: "Fuck, I forgot all about that milk! I hope it's still good after a week at the bottom of a camel's pack in the desert heat."
Milk: [comes out in chunks]
Merchant: "Guess I won't know until I try it"
lol ... the story of invention of Worcestershire Sauce
a bunch of guys were trying to recreate Oriental fish sauce in the UK .... the thing they came up with was terrible so they put the barrel of the stuff in the basement and forgot about it
They went back and rediscovered it a year later and tried it again ... they had created Worchestershire sauce
.... the fun part of these stories is that this is all based on survivalship bias ... these are all stories of foods that actually turned out. It makes you wonder how many instances there were throughout history of people trying to eat things they thought were unusual or forgotten foods and they tried eating them and it ended up killing them instead.
Damn, I hate it when my mother is right about patience being a virtue
I also hate it when your mom is right.
Words of wisdom from a Canadian Youtube mechanic I saw online .... it's probably a series of people like this guy that gave us so much variety of foods and cultural things in our world
"If you don't fuck around .... how are you ever going to find out?"
https://youtube.com/shorts/GKPU8lNEAZ4
When the alternative is starving you get shockingly open to trying gross things
How else do you explain the rise of Taco Bell?
tastes rock ...bleh
tastes rock ...bleh
tastes rock ...bleh\
countless attempts later
tastes rock ...Oooooooo! Sodium chloride!
Fish sauce goes back to the Romans. Garum, they put that sh*t on everything.
I once drank a curdled whey beverage. Finding surprise marshmallows in my mouth immediately compelled me to projectile vomit. That is what I immediately remember every time people talk about ancient food discoveries. It’s an utterly foreign mindset to me. I can only wonder how many times these things were independently discovered before they were actually eaten. I’d wager many
Starvation and famine helps .... if your options are eat nothing and die ... or ... try this semi rotten piece of food or this thing that's been sitting in the sun for three days or this liquid that fermented for a week ... most people would try out a bunch of things because they know they're about to die anyway.
I think that you're describing human evolution and missing the sheer scale at which people died learning what was safe to eat and what wasn't.
The trick is to wait until not eating the strange food would also kill you (starvation).
Also, when you are starving, you will eat anything. Ask the first US settlers the first winter they ate things from the mud that look like big insects.
They probably also ate actual big insects, so....
Imagine how hungry the first person was to eat a lobster? Nightmare demons.
The human evolutionary timescale with regards to cheese is nil