12-2-21 The Durian Witches
Welcome to the Moment of Truth: the thirst that is the drink.
There are a lot of unsturdy judgments laymen have come to about science and medicine. It seems the more we probe and discover about the universe the more fodder amateurs have to build mistaken beliefs on. And the more we probe mistaken beliefs, the more certain we become that what we call the nature of reality reflects not aspects of the universe so much as our prejudices. Prejudices about social stratification and the way society ought to be. Being a layman myself, and an especially dilettantish layman to boot, I exhibit these prejudices as much as, if not more than, anyone.
There’s an efficiency model of evolution, where a Darwinist mechanism weeds out losers within a generation or two, rapidly leaving a species better adapted to be its best self, without being weighed down by feeble kin. This model pairs nicely with an über-capitalist view of winner-takes-all, losers weepers. It also feeds the neo-Nazis’ and other eugenics enthusiasts’ Nietzschean argument that the weak masses of humanity have polluted our species. They have manipulated collective morality, fooling the strong into wasting time and resources taking care of them, whereas in some putative state of “nature” they would have been left to die for the good of posterity.
That state of nature exists in some parallel universe where humans are not communal animals with an innate impulse to care for each other. It’s a fantasy where humans are lonely gatherers competing in an austere landscape for limited resources.
Research lately indicates that beings caring for less self-sufficient members of their own species is a rule rather than an exception. Trees in a forest sense each other’s needs through a mycological nerve network and respond to the distress of others by redirecting nutrient resources and water their way. Lizards form bonds of affection. Vampire bats have been observed sharing blood with needy vampire bats nearby, even those outside their kinship circles. Nature as the realm of the rugged individualist is a pathological rationalization for maladaptive, greedy, cruel treatment of others. It is not somehow more real than the instinct for compassion and mutual aid.
On an only slightly related topic, I recently heard someone ascribe the discovery and cultural adoption of hideous-smelling foods, in particular the famously reeking southeast Asian durian fruit, to severe hunger: “remember, for most of human existence we were hungry, trying to get calories out of everything no matter how unlikely or awful.” I objected, based on my own recreational reading and fallible thinking.
And let me explain my objection further than I did during the actual discussion: How does efficient evolution, after six hundred million years, come up with a pinnacle of the survival-of-the-fittest process so out of whack with its environment that it’s always on the brink of starvation?
But putting that perhaps straw-man argument aside, I don’t think we were constantly desperate for calories, and more importantly, I don’t believe hunger was the motivator for culinary discovery.
I believe tribal humans formed sophisticated, connected communities early in human existence. I’m going to posit 80,000 years ago, because it sounds nice to me and makes a bit of sense as possibly the latest moment for long-distance idea and object transmission to come about. Long-distance transmission here means, ideas and objects transported from the group of people you saw every day, through intervening groups, in a chain, to another group of people you would never meet.
Evidence of trade and early migration bears out this wishful thinking. And, yes, we migrated to find better land, but better may have been better, not because it contained more food, but because vain, self-important warlords with coercive cadres weren’t in control. There’s a lot of evidence that large, organized populations would separate themselves from those self-appointed supermen. Archeological explorations of many proto-agrarian municipalities show that they tended to relegate heroic warrior subcultures to territories outside their civic limits. Y’know, away from where people were getting on with their lives, creating the bulk of civilization, before the mighty – that is, the mighty selfish, the egocentric glory addicts – learned how to make the law protect their psychopathic hoarding behavior.
But even long before then, even before we were technically taxonomically human, we were familiar with fermentation. Animals, from birds to apes, eat fermented berries for the purpose of enjoying the alcoholic buzz. And if experience with disease and death was common, I think the next most common experience was rot.
Things were rotting all around you. Fruit and vegetables. Fermentation and its various stinks were everywhere and interesting. We were drunk before we were linguistic. And we were also adept at learning to select foods and drinks long past their sell-by date. We learned to let our bread dough ferment. We even stole milk from other animals and learned to let that ferment.
Rather than being constantly hungry for most of human existence, which may have been the case for the first hundred-thousand years, I believe that for the next hundred thousand we were drunk and ate a wide variety of stuff.
All this taken into account, I would like to posit a different origin story for discovering the edibility of the durian fruit.
In prehistoric times, there existed a land we know today as Borneo, whither a prehistoried, drunken people had once sailed on a dare from the shores of some ancient mainland. Most advancements around this time were made on a dare, but especially culinary ones. People would point at a lump of stinking, rotting vegetable matter and say, “I dare you to eat that.”
What started to arise amongst humans was a class of wizardly daredevils who would walk up to others in the kinship group and say, “Hey, Oyuk-ma-zeet, I buried this sealed pot weeks ago. Inside is an egg enveloped in a tea-and-lye paste. You dare me to eat that egg?” And Oyuk-ma-zeet, who was no fool, said, “All right, but if you die, I get to make all your husbands my sex slaves.” The deal was struck, the pot was cracked open, the egg was retrieved and eaten, some cramps were felt, but on the whole the presentation was a success.
These witches and warlocks survived by the prestige they earned daring to eat all manner of repulsive or impossible things. And since they and their audiences were always drunk, the demonstrations never failed to astound and amuse, and many surprising foods were thus introduced into the human diet, including fermented horse milk, cave-aged bleu cheese, surströmming, fermented skate wing, basturma, stinky tofu, pickled cud, and a selection of Chinese rotten plum drinks.
And so it was with the durian. These newly-arrived Bornean colonists were casually sniffing each other’s butts one day, when they smelled a vomit/sulfur/rotten onion fragrance on the breeze wafting from the jungle. They traced it to some large, hard-shelled spiky-looking things stinking of civet glands and turd gas. Most of the cowards turned away from the fruits and hastily went to throw up, but in a trice the official witch of the colony had cracked one open and enjoyed a handful of the yellow custardy pulp.
And that’s how people started eating things people thought people shouldn’t eat. It’s the same principle that gave us bungie jumping, bull-fighting, bobsledding, cliff diving, and adolescent alcohol poisoning.
This has been an educational Moment of Truth. Good day!