Imagine being a cave person and any time you had a craving for something salty you had to go lick a rock
people are like "who discovered you could eat $thing???" but it was very clearly someone who was very very bored of eating the same three foods without salt, or spice, every day.
@Betty when hungry enough, humans will eat anything. A lot of it might have come from necessity.
@enk_dash_one Yeah, but I think a lot of the greens were boredom. greens aren't really massive sources of calories.
@Betty
@enk_dash_one in early spring if you've been eating nothing but stored food all winter long, even the least palatable of technically-edible early greens become DELICIOUS. I can well imagine being willing to try anything at that point!
@Betty @enk_dash_one years ago I spent one winter following a diet of only eating locally-grown produce and let me tell you, after that many months the first dandelion greens of spring were the best thing I'd ever tasted, even though I have always otherwise found them to be unpleasantly bitter!
@soph_sol what were you able to find? I'm guessing root veg and ...?
@Betty root veg plus increasingly mushy apples, on repeat! technically one can overwinter kale here, with care, but I did not know that at the time unfortunately and it was not being sold at the farmer's market! I also had some jars of home-canned tomatoes and peaches and pickles, but that still wasn't enough variety tbh
@soph_sol this is what I'm talking about. You can definitely see why first nations people were like "those pine needles look like they might taste interesting."
@Betty EXACTLYYYYYYY and honestly a lot of conifer tea is worth drinking even when you're not dying from lack of green food! pine is my least fave because it's pretty bitter, but cedar-tip tea is soooo good, especially with a bit of honey
@Betty @soph_sol oh definitely! i think our bodies are pretty good at going ‘i am not getting everything i need, lets try eating different things?’ and also at recognizing when something does have the thing by making it suddenly taste great (tho those impulses can also go haywire, eg. iron deficiency causing PICA)
@Satsuma I mean, I have had, on very hot and sweaty days, the thought, "I wanna drink lemonade, but salty?" and I usually drink it and it is delicious which I take to mean I was pretty dehydrated because salty lemonade is not usually delicious to me.
But I also think eating the same thing six days in a row could really incentivize some perhaps unwise experimentation.
@Satsuma it is truly amazing to me when my body does this, perhaps because I am not usually very in tune with my body, so having my body's chemical balance seize the wheel, as it were, in this very blatant way is weird.