you ever wonder where half the food that we have comes from?

i’ll be more specific: think about cheeses, tofu, wine, japanese natto. I could go on, but i can’t think of anymore off the top of my head. Oh wait, sauerkraut.
These foods are just foods that have basically rotted in a specific way that doesn’t have any serious immediate repercussions (except for maybe drinking too much alcohol)
let’s start with cheese. i was reading a book this summer on cheeses, and it talked about one in particular, where cheeses were stored in these damp moldy caves that have a specific form of bacteria or lichen growing in it that gives it these blue veins. Blue. Cheese is basically curdled milk, and if you’ve ever seen curdled milk, or rather ever experienced curdled milk, it is disgusting. I left a cup of it behind a computer in my room once. I found it three weeks later. I had to poke it apart with a spoon to get it to start going through the drain mesh cover. It was disgusting. Now imagine that with blue veins. Why the fuck would you eat it?
Or let’s take natto. it’s a Japanese staple, basically it’s fermented beans, and there might be something else. From a first hand perspective, it was fermented beans with curdled goat milk mixed with pure crap. It had the flavor of poop (teehee) with the consistency of cheese off a good hot pizza. Japanese people evidently eat it all the time. No wonder they were so eager to fly suicide planes and crap. I’d want to kill myself too after eating natto on a regular basis.
then there’s my personal favorite, which is a specific kind of tofu the chinese make, that translated verbatim means “stinky tofu.” This doesn’t even try to hide it behind a non-descript name like “cheese” or “natto.” This straight up describes it: it’s stinky, trust me. The fact that it has that very name clues you in on the horror, but still, a lot of people eat it. It’s s’posedly quite delicious, as cheese and stuff can be (not natto P). You basically get it by tossing a bunch of stuff and tofu in a hole in the ground for a long time. Just the thought of someone eating it, then managing to convince others to eat it.

Now, the clear explanation here would be that some poor fucker didn’t have anything else to eat, so ate rotten nastiness, and somehow, over time, the knowledge of the nastiness was transcended up through the ranks of social hierarchy.

on a final note though, some king of france, when offered that blue veined cheese i mentioned, had a cook who cut out the blueness by order of the king. That’s one sharp cookie of a king, until he was convinced the blue was the best part…