Someone who doesn't listen when told not to do it the first time gets everyone killed This is why these things graduate from just "advice" to being actual "orders", and from "orders" to "laws", and "laws" to "religious taboo"
-
-
If you soak it for one day instead of three days, everyone seems fine at first, and then slowly over time people start getting serious health problems Developing goiters (the cyanide builds up in your thyroid gland), dying young
Show this thread -
Hell, if it's mild enough, you don't even actually know anyone is sick People just start getting... clumsier, weaker, more scatterbrained The cyanide slowly poisoning your brain and your nervous system but this being hard to distinguish from the overall signs of age
Show this thread -
(I think about the difficulty of knowing just how much your brain has been damaged by your environment a lot Re: the lead poisoning epidemic of the mid-20th century, or what we're likely to see in the aftermath of COVID-19)
Show this thread -
Obviously what happened historically is that it was an evolutionary process People who were more "superstitious" and scrupulous about soaking and squeezing the cassava again and again and again lived in communities that were healthier and lived longer
Show this thread -
People whose communities half-assed it died off They may not even have ever known that was why they died off They were just weaker and lost more people to accidents, predators, losing wars against other communities
Show this thread -
This happened again en masse when European colonization disrupted the culture of West Africa Feeling the new economic squeeze of harsh masters demanding more work for less reward, land being cleared to grow cash crops, being ravaged by war etc, the "old ways" were forgotten
Show this thread -
The 19th and 20th centuries saw an explosion of goiters as a chronic condition in many parts of West Africa, and the introduction of a new illness, "konzo" ("bound legs") in hunger-stricken communities, where random people mysteriously lost the ability to walk
Show this thread -
Modern science had to swoop in and try to figure out the cause and it took them a while, for all their technology and expertise It's a hard thing to nail down, the first suspects are either germs or a nutrient deficiency and it wasn't that
Show this thread -
The actual answer, the opposite of a nutrient deficiency - an environmental toxin that's universally present in the community's staple food source - was kind of a harsh surprise
Show this thread -
There's been a lot of papers written about the UN having to go humbly to find old women who remembered the "old ways" so they could train the younger generations on how manioc should be properly prepared It's the original case study of hidden value in "primitive folkways"
Show this thread -
And I mean yeah In the *long* run Western science and our philosophy of asking questions and overturning tradition and inventing new things won, I suppose In the modern era you can just buy tapioca starch made from cassava in a factory with no risk of poisoning yourself
Show this thread -
But a lot of people suffered and died in that transition The long period of time in between in which smart arrogant white people showed up and said "This whole three day soak thing is a huge waste of time and time is money so we're changing it"
Show this thread -
It turns out that ugly cliché of "I'm just telling you how to do it because this is how my mom told me to do it and how her mom told her to do it and scores of generations that survived this long can't be wrong" isn't always a bad thing
Show this thread -
Most people in history who survived a long time didn't do it by being clever and using their brains and figuring things out from scratch at all They survived by taking orders and doing what you're supposed to do
Show this thread
End of conversation
New conversation -
Loading seems to be taking a while.
Twitter may be over capacity or experiencing a momentary hiccup. Try again or visit Twitter Status for more information.