Cooking With Blood

Black pudding is pretty common here in Scotland. Hated it as a kid but when I got older, not gonna lie, I thought it was amazing. I'd absolutely try any other blood based dish at least once.

I'm not afraid to try anything at least once. I grew up with a family who was afraid of "weird" food, and we missed out on a lot of good things. I wouldn't have some of my most favorite foods if I didn't try new things all the time.

I've had blood sausage, it was delicious.

Try cooking with love instead of violence. It is much more effective.

You need to get in a time machine and tell that to Australopithecus sediba. They invented stone tools that enabled them to extract brains and bone marrow from animal carcasses, which put them on an evolutionary trajectory that resulted in the evolution of the human genus.

Oh wait, if you tell them to do that then humans won't evolve at all....

:frown:

I ate pigs blood on many occasions while in Thailand. It's fine tasting, in my opinion. Not a food I'd go out of my way to make or eat here in the US though.

Morcilla(blood sausage) is good. Not sure of how many calories are in the sausages.

Must...not...bait...the...vegan

Why a vegan would even read this thread boggles my mind... unless they are one of those who likes to bait people.

Dang it... I fell for it didn't I?

*sad face*

Humans needed tools before they started catching prey and cooking meat. Therefore, they developed the intelligence eating plants that enabled them to use tools to eat meat.

The very first stone tools were used to extract bone marrow and brains from animal carcasses. Australopithecines were already eating meat before that. Even chimpanzees co-operatively hunt small mammals such as various small monkeys, and humans split from chimps around 7 million years ago, much earlier than the use of the first stone tools. So meat eating in hominins predates stone tools by a long way. The innovation that stone tools provided was the ability to extract brains and bone marrow from carcasses.

Meat eating was a major driving force in human evolution. Let's look at the evidence:

1. the earliest stone tools were used to smash bones to extract brains and bone marrow

2. there was no expansion in brain size in hominins until after these tools were invented - prior to that australopithecine brain size had pretty much flatlined....... but after being able to extract brains and bone marrow - rich in essential fatty acids necessary for brain growth... slightly larger brained hominins called Homo habilis emerged very soon after, followed by Homo ergaster with their even larger brains, i.e. the earliest humans, who evolved into larger and larger brained humans......... so basically, shortly after the invention of stone tools, hominin brain size started expanding and kept on expanding until Homo neanderthalensis evolved, and they hunted huge animals like mammoth, woolly rhino, bison, etc.

3. every species of human has been found alongside the remains of animals that have been butchered with stone tools. If a bone has cut marks on it made by stone tools, then it was a human that did it, because with the exception of a modern bonobo named Kansi (who was taught by humans) only humans and their immediate australopithecine ancestors made stone tools. The very earliest humans butchered animals with stone tools that they made. The immediate ancestors of humans, Australopithecus sediba, used stone tools that they made to butcher animals.

3.5 if you want to mention tool use in chimpanzees at this point, yes they use tools to do things like extract ants from ant nests and crack nuts... no doubt hominins (sharing a common ancestor with chimps) did as well, but chimps co-operatively hunt small mammals, and one subspecies of chimps the females spear bushbabies on pointy sticks (another example of chimpanzee tool use to get animal protein) - human ancestors were no doubt eating insects and small mammals long before they were able to make stone tools... but it was the use of these tools to extract brains and bone marrow that set them and their descendants on a trajectory that led to the evolution of humans.

4. human evolution is also marked by more and more sophisticated hunting weapons, i.e. as brain size increased, the humans developed more sophisticated hunting weapons, got better at catching animals, were able to grow bigger brains, and thus make more sophisticated hunting weapons.... a positive feedback loop of increased meat eating, bigger brains and increasingly complex hunting weapons. Resulting, ultimately, in Homo neanderthalensis and Homo sapiens

5. there's a correlation in primates between meat eating and brain size, as in the more meat they eat the bigger the brain. This trend exists in humans too, with Homo neanderthalensis being the species of human that had the largest brain, and also that ate the most meat. Homo sapiens comes in a very close second (although some Homo sapiens populations, e.g. the Inuit, eat as much animal protein or even more than neanderthals did... interestingly neanderthals were a cold-adapted sub-arctic species and the Inuit are an arctic Homo sapiens population... Inuit people can withstand even colder temperatures than neanderthals could, due to having much more advanced technology....)

If you want to see the evolutionary trajectory of a hominin that ate a diet similar to a gorilla's (which includes insects, by the way, not just plant foods... but is nevertheless more plant based than a human, chimp or bonobo's diet) look at Australopithecus boisei (sometimes classified in its own genus Paranthopus boisei) because while humans evolved bigger and bigger brains, they evolved bigger and bigger teeth, all the better to eat coarse vegetation with. And they had huge temoralis muscles (necessary for chewing coarse vegetation) which constrained their brain size, while in the lineage that ended up evolving into humans, teeth and temporalis muscles got smaller due to being able to get much more nutrition from soft foods like flesh, brains and bone marrow, and thus brain expansion became possible as the temporalis muscle was no longer constraining skull/brain size.

But why promote evolution when humans have evolved into the species that will destroy the planet. Eating meat is the leading cause of environmental destruction. Ironic that you believe it was needed for our evolution, when in reality, it will be the leading cause of our demise.

lol yes, it was necessary for us to evolve. That's not my opinion, it's the current opinion of palaeoanthropologists based on the evidence from the fossil record.