Manioc can only be eaten after processing - the plant must be soaked and dried repeatedly, squeezing out the water (carrying the cyanide away) periodically throughout, and then thoroughly cooked It's highly labor-intensive, societies that depend on it spend a lot of time on it
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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"
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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
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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"
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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
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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
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End of conversation
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