What about hakarl? "Rotten" icelandic shark meat. It stinks to high heaven. Yet somebody thought "let's eat this". I can't imagine how hungry they must have been. And, if it doesn't decompose for 6 weeks under sand, it's toxic, so you die if you eat it. I'm sure they knew that. Yet they still tried it... Must've been a helluva famine.
> Yet they still tried it... Must've been a helluva famine.
Humans have lived at subsistence level, one bad harvest away from famine for most of history. Our modern abundance is very recent (1-3 generations) thing depending on where you were born.
So I think a tremendous amount of food discovery was a combination of food accidents didn't want food to go to waste, and desperation level eating anything to delay death from starvation.
