Mushrooms are kind of a mixed bag when you think about it. There are kinds out there that are delicious and tend to be fantastic on burgers or salads. Then there are kinds that will just plain kill you, regardless of how delightful they may taste. It makes me wonder who was the first person to try a mushroom and which kind they tried. I would imagine if it was the poisonous kind then his friends may have looked at each other and decided to go ahead and skip eating the fungus, which I would imagine would have been a setback for mushroom recipes. Of course if they sampled the not-going-to-kill-you kind then everyone involved would be happy to know there was another food source growing in shady areas. There is, however, a third scenario. This is the one that got me thinking about this whole situation in the first place. I have a friend who is very allergic to mushrooms. Even touching them causes problems. I try to imagine someone like her coming in contact with mushrooms for the first time, before anyone had an idea that they could be eaten, and wonder what would do when they had an allergic reaction? Think about if the first guy to try mushrooms had a fatal mushroom allergy and died after trying them for the first time. Would mushrooms have been treated much like poison ivy, as in you avoid it at all costs?
In a lot of cases I bet people think that a person would have had to be very hungry to eat certain things for the first time. Look at the lobster or crab. They are like giant underwater insects and while they're moving around, there is very little about them that looks appealing. Somewhere along the way though someone got the idea that they would crack them open and eat whatever was inside. I don't know if you've ever had raw crab before, but it's not a very enjoyable meal. In fact there is a very good chance that when eating raw crab you can get sick. I wonder if someone tried it raw first and decided to cook it after they stopped vomiting or somehow a burning crab came screaming from the ocean and someone just figured it smelled good enough to eat. Then again maybe it wasn't desperation at all that prompted the first bite. It could have been someone had something similar and decided to take a shot at those clawful creatures. I would like to thank whoever it was who figured out that melted butter goes great with them. Although to be fair, melted butter goes great with so many things.
Those examples are food related and I could go all day about different kinds of food that seem like things people would avoid rather than stuff into their maw. The first people to do things must be equal parts curious and crazy. Birds have been around for millions of years and I'm sure that ancient man saw them and wondered to themselves what it must be like to fly through the air. It takes a special kind of person to go beyond just wondering what it might be like to actually trying to figure out how to fly. The Wright Brothers get a lot of credit when it comes to flying, as well they should, but there were people studying flight long before they actually flew those hundred feet. Leonardo da Vinci conceived of an Ornithopter flying machine back in 1485, but never actually built it.
How is it that some people are able to make the mental leap to something that previously wasn't thought of before? Is it ever more than one person that comes up with the same idea at the same time? An example would be that while da Vinci was pondering the nuances of flight, was there someone somewhere else thinking the same exact thing? It's like the scene at the beginning of 2001 where ancient man is fiddling with the bone and notices that with enough force it could smash something. Then suddenly the idea spreads to everyone nearby. Soon those who learned the new idea can't remember a time when they didn't know it. The movie Inception makes reference that an idea is a lot like a virus in the way that it spreads. I don't know if there's ever been a calculation on the speed of thought, but I'm betting its speed grows exponentially as it passes from one person to another. Yell the word fire in a crowded room and the panic will spread faster than an actual fire, meaning the idea of a fire is like wildfire.
All this makes me wonder what firsts will we see next. You've heard the phrase "making progress in leaps and bounds" and that just shows that once an idea is introduced there is potentially no limit to what other ideas it may create. In 1946 ENIAC was shown as the world's first computer. Look at how far computers have come in a relatively short amount of time. Imagine what will happen when someone somewhere is the first to come up with whatever is next. People will wonder how is it that we've gone so long without thinking of that before?
