31–40 of 192 posts
> Meanwhile, evolving resistance also comes at a cost. We don’t know that directly, but we can infer it pretty well. If resistance to tetrodotoxin were cheap and easy, everything would evolve it. [..] We don’t know, but we’re pretty sure there must be something. We know that garter snakes outside of the Pacific Northwest are much less resistant to tetrodotoxin. They’ll drop dead from doses that their Oregon cousins s…
> Meanwhile, evolving resistance also comes at a cost. We don’t know that directly, but we can infer it pretty well. If resistance to tetrodotoxin were cheap and easy, everything would evolve it. [..] We don’t know, but we’re pretty sure there must be something. We know that garter snakes outside of the Pacific Northwest are much less resistant to tetrodotoxin. They’ll drop dead from doses that their Oregon cousins s…
Not wrong, but one could frame that as a "cost" that you pay in the space of genealogical problem solving. Having one less constraint makes it easier to adapt to other evolutionary pressures
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Eating wild mushrooms has got to have the worst cost/benefit ratio outside of wingsuiting or recreational bear wrestling. In exchange for hours of study and a significant risk of death you get fifty to a hundred calories of food. Probably made sense in the tenth century when the average person was one bad harvest away from starvation, but it seems harder to justify today.
Not even that much. A couple of cups of mushrooms -- a generous helping as a side dish -- has around 30 calories. All the significant calories comes from the oil or butter they're cooked in. I'm not sure it was ever about avoiding starvation, but rather just a different flavor to eat sometimes. When you're always eating the same local ingredients, food can get boring pretty quick. It's the same appeal of spices -- yo…
That's not the appeal of spices. People don't stop using the spices they like in quest of newer, worse-tasting ones. By far the most common case when a person is eating spices is that there's nothing new about the flavor.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Eating wild mushrooms has got to have the worst cost/benefit ratio outside of wingsuiting or recreational bear wrestling. In exchange for hours of study and a significant risk of death you get fifty to a hundred calories of food. Probably made sense in the tenth century when the average person was one bad harvest away from starvation, but it seems harder to justify today.
Not even that much. A couple of cups of mushrooms -- a generous helping as a side dish -- has around 30 calories. All the significant calories comes from the oil or butter they're cooked in. I'm not sure it was ever about avoiding starvation, but rather just a different flavor to eat sometimes. When you're always eating the same local ingredients, food can get boring pretty quick. It's the same appeal of spices -- yo…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Eating wild mushrooms has got to have the worst cost/benefit ratio outside of wingsuiting or recreational bear wrestling. In exchange for hours of study and a significant risk of death you get fifty to a hundred calories of food. Probably made sense in the tenth century when the average person was one bad harvest away from starvation, but it seems harder to justify today.
do you only eat the food with the highest calories:risk ratio?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not even that much. A couple of cups of mushrooms -- a generous helping as a side dish -- has around 30 calories. All the significant calories comes from the oil or butter they're cooked in. I'm not sure it was ever about avoiding starvation, but rather just a different flavor to eat sometimes. When you're always eating the same local ingredients, food can get boring pretty quick. It's the same appeal of spices -- yo…
Mushrooms add to the umami flavour, before salt was easily accessible this was probably your best bet for easy flavour enhansement
Interestingly written article. Raises some questions: >Newts with weaker poison? They get eaten. Snakes with less resistance? Have trouble finding newts they can choke down, and don’t get to steal their poison. So the arms race continues. How does a snake know that the Newt has weaker/strong poison? Is it leaving some Newts along and eating others, or is it eating any Newt it runs across? Does a strong-poison newt su…
I think the preceding sentence in that paragraph answers it. Important context here is that garter snakes tend to swallow prey whole. tldr: a strongly poisoned newt survives consumption attempts. > And it explains why the newts keep evolving to be more toxic: the snake may want to eat newts generally, but if an individual newt packs enough of a wallop, the snake may just retch it up and go after a different one. Newt…
That's got to be an extremely weak effect. No snake gets an individual benefit from eating the newts. They get a collective benefit, that predators recognize the species as poisonous, in which all snakes, poisonous and delicious alike, share equally.
The problem is large enough that actually-poisonous animals routinely have delicious mimics of entirely different species who free-ride off of the work the originals do to be poisonous.
You can't explain why snakes apparently need to avoid sending a dishonest signal with a theory that predicts that mimics don't exist.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Eating wild mushrooms has got to have the worst cost/benefit ratio outside of wingsuiting or recreational bear wrestling. In exchange for hours of study and a significant risk of death you get fifty to a hundred calories of food. Probably made sense in the tenth century when the average person was one bad harvest away from starvation, but it seems harder to justify today.
You can say that to any mildly dangerous hobby
The number of hospitalizations is somewhere around 10k a year. For ~1500 of those it's at least life threatening. ~100ish end up with organ failure or permanent neurological problems. ~10 of them die. That's every year.
That might be mildly dangerous compared to other hobbies, but if you isolate for actual practitioners of the hobby, suddenly those numbers look extremely dangerous.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
MSG is like $0.30/kg.
I don't think they had MSG before salt
You wouldn't choose to do manual typesetting (or copying books by hand!!!) today either versus alternatives.
If you're _just_ looking to add umami flavor to a dish today, you'd be crazy to pick foraging for wild mushrooms over Aji no Moto.