how did someone figure out to eat cinnamon

did they go around gnawing trees for months and were like :blobcatthinkOwO: this one really paid off. this one was delicious.
someone also had to go around drinking tree blood before some leaf was like

:blobcatthinkOwO: maple tree blood is the best.

@icedquinn
Oh god... I CONSTANTLY wonder about this stuff... It's probably a much too deep rabbit hole, that's best to avoid. That's what I feel.

Because even when you learn how people found out some things are safe to eat and others not, then you inevitably stumble upon things like: well, how did they realize grinding that thing and cooking it that way, makes this other thing that is 10x more delicious? And the rabbit hole just goes further and further... just save yourself man, and scrub those thoughts out of your brain.

@alyx ostensibly once enough progress has been made it's just a matter of recombining the known patterns.

somebody eventually made stuff in a spice grinder (well, mortar and pestle) and once that turned out not to be a shit idea somebody had to try just putting every random thing in there.

@icedquinn
Yeah, but the number of combinations is endless, and then there's the potential to give up a certain combination because the result was horrible, but in reality the result would be good in different proportions.
I'm telling you man, this is deep enough to be it's own field of science. If you think about it, the entire process is inevitably very close to the process of evolution by natural selection. We could call it: evolution of food by cook selection.

@alyx F to all the humans who ate the mushrooms and died shitting their brains out for 6 weeks.
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@icedquinn
Yeah, honestly the discovery of drugs is even more scary. Like how many people had to die from overdoses until they got a good, safe dose to use. Or how did they even figure out that a substance that acts like poison in large quantities, can feel good in low quantities? And then how many more people had to die when they tried lower quantities of actual poisons, thinking they'd discover other feel-good substances.

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@alyx sibling to the guy eating all the trees ate a hemp plant instead
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