The first time you see how cashew nuts grow, you’re gonna think somebody’s posting a joke picture or a weird art installation.
ok but you say this….then don’t give us pictures
LOOK AT THESE RIDICULOUS THINGS
And it gets even weirder!
The shell of the nut itself:
contains a resin that’s so toxic just touching it causes burns to the skin, similar to poison ivy. Which is why cashews are never sold unshelled, because processing them requires safety measures like this:
How humanity ever figured out to eat this nut is beyond me.
In case you ever wondered why cashews are so expensive. Now you can wonder why they aren’t more expensive.
what i’m wondering now is how anybody ever found out that you could eat cashews
OK but you seem to underestimate how scarce food could get for people, and how desperate they become to try anything. If eating it raw kills you? try cooking it because we’re gonna starve to death anyway. Cooking it kills you? Try cooking it a different way. Touching it is painful? Try washing it, or extracting the inner bit and washing that.
There’s this plant that’s eaten by aboriginal people of australia around where I live. Only certain parts of this plant can be eaten, and even then only if those parts are cooked exactly right, kept at a certain temperature for a certain amount of time. And it has to be exactly that amount of time as both undercooking it AND overcooking it are deadly.
The history of food is a history fraught with countless, terrible deaths because we are so stubborn that when faced with starvation, we will fucking eat poison again and again until it’s not poison anymore.
Some Paleolithic chef “I know like five people died already, but I think I got it this time.”
Some different, starving, Paleolithic person “fuck it bro. Gimme the nut.”
Ok but cashews are not just the nut. The fruit is edible (and delicious). I know because i’m from a region that it’s rich in cashew trees. They smell amazing. But here in Brazil we have a few plants that are poisonous until cooked, like mandioca (the root used to make tapioca) and tucupi, an Amazon plant that has to be cooked for seven days(!) to be edible.
