【Historical Live Broadcast】Watching videos and being seen by our ancestors

[Our ancestors never lied to us, which is actually a very sad thing]

[Some netizens saw the local specialty hairy tofu when traveling in Sichuan. It was obviously moldy and hairy, but diners were still enjoying eating it.]

[He was puzzled, so he posted a question online: How did the ancients discover that this thing could be eaten?]

[However, the answers in the comment section deeply shocked him]

[I couldn’t bear to eat it after it went bad at home, but I got a little drunk after tasting it. I woke up the next day and found that I was not dead, so this practice was retained.]

[Yes, the reason why there are so many strange ways of eating handed down today is because our ancestors always lived on the brink of starvation, and there was too little fresh food in season, so they had to eat even if the food was spoiled.]

[Take daylily and fungus as examples]

[Freshly picked daylily is poisonous. Adults will easily suffer from vomiting and diarrhea if they eat more than 100 grams at a time. But the ancients must have developed a method to dry it.]

[Eating a lot of fresh fungus may damage the liver, so the ancients dried it and then soaked it]

[This is not because the ancients were smart, but because those who did not do so became sick and died.]

[Every dish today is the result of countless people’s experiments]

[For example, the whole plant of konjac contains a large amount of alkaloids. Eating it directly can burn the intestines and cause motor nerve disorders. The mucus secreted can also cause allergies. In severe cases, it can cause respiratory failure and death on the spot.]

[However, the ancients used a series of complex methods, such as decomposing wood ash, boiling with alkaline water, and grinding, to make non-toxic cold cakes.]

[There are also various poisonous mushrooms in Yunnan, and each has its own corresponding way of removing the poison. Even the jianshouqing has invented a special way of eating it, which shows how bad the living environment was back then.]

[Henan people pick leaves and flowers from trees every spring and steam them to eat. It's not that people in the past were greedy and wanted to try everything, but there were only these foods, and if they didn't eat them, they would starve to death.]

[The more delicious food there is, the more suffering there is]

[The shortage of food forced them to find everything they could eat and develop various ways of eating]

【Thinking about it this way, isn’t it a blessing that Hangzhou can become a food desert? 】

[Thanks to our ancestors’ careful selection, China’s dining tables have been enriched with so many choices]

After watching this video, Mu Yu suddenly thought of the specialty of her hometown - kudzu powder.

How did the ancestors of this place think that this thing can be eaten? It is buried deep under the trees, like thick and ugly tree roots.

I'm afraid they must be extremely hungry. They can only dig deep into the soil on the mountain to see if they can find some meat such as mice. If they can't find any, they can only eat tree roots raw.

I unexpectedly discovered the kudzu root, which looks like a tree root. I ate it and found that it was not hard at all, and surprisingly powdery. After that, I served it on the table as food. During festivals, in order to make my food look better, I ground the kudzu root into powder and used it as a staple food.

"I think puffer fish can be considered a kind of food. The ancients should have also tried it out little by little to figure out what they can eat and what they can't eat (there is a little anecdote that the ancients would deliberately choose a place next to a manure pit to eat puffer fish, so that if there are signs of poisoning, they can drink a spoonful of manure to induce vomiting)"

"My grandfather said that 40 or 50 years ago, they ate all the grass roots in the fields, and they could only eat soil and belts. They ate so much that they couldn't defecate, so they had to use hooks to poke them out."

"I just learned that fresh black fungus is harmful to the liver. When I was a kid, I ran all over the mountains and fields in my hometown and picked black fungus whenever I saw it. But I didn't do it often, so it should be fine [blushing]"

"I remembered why the vinegar in Shanxi is so good. It's because the soil there is poor and the things grown there are not suitable for vinegar and are easy to be indigestible.

(I heard this a long time ago, I don’t know if it’s correct)”

"The Book of Herbal Medicine for Famine Relief, a book from the Ming Dynasty in China that has spread all over the world, tells how to turn various weeds into wild vegetables"

“Food is the primary need of the people. The meaning of food will change with each passing year.”

"Humans are animals specialized for dealing with hunger, with gastric juices comparable to those of scavengers, diabetes, and a habit of eating almost anything."

“Foreigners say hello: Nice day, right?

Chinese people greet each other by saying: "Have you eaten?"

"The collision between the ancient farmers and the new farmers has only solved the problem of food and clothing for the vast majority of the 14 billion people until now, so respecting food and not wasting it should be basic education."

Our ancestors often suffered from droughts and disasters, and were hungry all day long and rarely had a full meal. People in later generations said they wanted to thank us, and thanked us for creating all kinds of delicious food.

This is nothing to us. Human life is cheap. We ate those things without any intention of living! We can still live after eating them. For poor people like us, it is God's mercy to let us live again!

And compared to these, we actually want to thank future generations as well, because they are the ones who really benefit us.

If it weren’t for them, without Tianmu, we wouldn’t know that potato lumps can be eaten, or even that they can be widely planted!

This clod of earth may look ugly, but it tastes delicious! After boiling it in hot water, it is soft and sticky in the mouth, and it doesn't get stuck in the throat at all.

This magical object has filled the stomachs of many people in our village. We no longer have to eat the hard-to-swallow Guanyin soil, which makes us feel bloated and uncomfortable if we eat too much.

……

Our ancestors from the pre-Qin or Han dynasties: It seems that if there had been no explanation of papermaking by later generations, we might still be using bamboo slips to carve words!

It is so convenient to write with a pen on thin and light papers now. I no longer have to spend so much effort to carve a word like before.

Thanks to the cheapness of paper and the support of our monarch, the price of books has been successfully lowered, and those who are poor and weak at home are now qualified to read!