The Beast Wore an Apron, Part 2

applying heat. Because in the last episode we uh, we talked about how humans are the only animals that regularly apply heat to their food on purpose to cook it, but animals do all kinds of other interesting things to their food before eating it. For example, we talked about birds that that sort of butcher and smash up and and process their their their animal parts before they consume them in various ways, like the shrike making shish kebabs

out of crickets and other critters. And uh, was it the lamber guyer that would would smash the bones or the turtles. Yeah, And you know, I realized after a record of that episode that there's another animal that that that cooks that is a part of my weekly life that I forgot to mention. It's that little puff on Instagram account in which a cat is made to appear to cook various items to try to replicate various sort of like TikTok cooking trends and crafting trends. Um. Sometimes

too great success. Sometimes uh it results in disappointing failure. Oh, if if you're familiar with TikTok cooking trends, there's one that I've seen by image alone. Do you can you explain the thing to me where somebody takes a big old wad of hamburger meat and they wrap it around dry pasta. What is that? Do you know what I'm talking about? Well, I am only familiar with TikTok um cooking trends that have been featured on that little puff, So I don't think I've seen the cat doing this

to hamburger made yet. Uh. I'm not the one to answer that question. Well, I mean it sounds like a cat's idea. What to be clear, this cat is is not actually has not been trained to do anything. Um, it's it's just the appearance of a cat cooking that they have created here trick photography. Yeah, cats lousy cooks. They're not they're not interested in cooking. But to tie it into our first segment here, you know one thing that that is great about cats is cats are very clean.

You know, they enjoy They groom themselves, they clean themselves. They lick all over to get the dirt out of the fur. Actually, I don't know if that's why they lick. They lock themselves. That appears to be for some kind of hygienic purpose. I have no idea what it's actually for, but that mirrors U some of the behaviors were about to talk about in the category of animals washing their food before they eat it, and Robert, I don't know about your house, but I tend to be pretty fastidious

about washing fresh produce. Do you do the same. Well, you know, I don't want any grit in whatever I'm cooking, and certainly, pending on the protosant question, you might get some grit if you don't wash it off. Well, if I make an ants on a log, I want to make sure that I have a scrub my celery sticks off before and then dry them, you know, before I actually start applying the peanut butter, and said ants. Well, it turns out this is one of the food preprocessing

behaviors that is not unique to humans. All kinds of animals exhibit various washing behaviors, and I wanna say washing with scare quotes because in some cases this may actually be related to cleaning dirt or other materials off of the food, and in other cases it may have a completely different purpose. But in any case, it is taking a piece of food and washing it, or doing something

that looks like washing with the help of water. That's right. UM. I was reading about some of this in a paper titled food dunking Behavior by a Eurasian Jay by Dearborn and Gager, published in the Ornithological Society of the Middle Least. They point out that crows and ravens have been observed to quote unquote wash their food and fountains before eating it. Um. And then they talk a little bit about how generally we see examples of this washing behavior in primates and

birds um washing or dunking um. And in both birds and primates, the two main theories seem to be that it's about washing or removing a thin coating from the exterior the food, which generally that's what we're doing, or it's about making the food easier to eat, which is not something we're usually doing if we're just washing our produce in the sink. But it is what we're doing if we're, say, uh, dipping a particularly tough biscuit into a cup of tea or something. Yeah, this is the

old hard tack tradition. You know, armies of old marching around or sailing around with hard tack biscuits. A lot of times. You like, you can't even eat these things straight. You can't just bite into them. You've gotta like dip them into your gravy or some other kind of liquid and then soften them up before you can consume. Yeah.

So some of the examples that they mentioned in this paper from from other creatures are carrion crows eating dry bread used to be a situation where dry bread has been provided for them and they dip it before they eat it. Uh. Kill deer have been observed washing muddy frogs off before they eat them. Macaques have been observed doing the same thing with sandy crabs. Um captive monkeys

have been observed doing this with dry monkey chow. And then the Eurasian jay example studied in the paper I cited. It involved the bird in question dunking an egg in water and then eating it. Though the researchers ultimately remained they remained unclear about what that was all about. Yeah, and in a lot of cases, it seems like these washing, dunking or dowsing behaviors are still uh, they're still unknown, and we still don't know exactly what the cause is

that we have better ideas in some cases than in others. Uh. But one thing I was thinking about is that, um, you know, it may depend on your anatomy how important it is to douse something in external water before you eat it, depending on how strong your salivary glands are, because we're doing the same thing, but it happens in our mouths. I mean all the foods you eat. It gets kind of like coated in saliva and moistened that way, and it helps lubricate the swallowing process. Doesn't that sounds

so appetizing? Yeah, well, I think we've we've touched on this before, but actually quite recently, I think talking about food and digestion. But like the the digestive process begins in the mouth, Like this is where food is initially uh masticated, broken up, broken down, um, partially liquefied, and then formed into that bolus that will then uh have been be swallowed and continue the journey. You don't want

to be swallowing a dry bolus. No, no, But next, I wanted to think about one of the most famous examples of animals that appear at least to wash their food before eating it, and that is raccoons. This has got to be one of the cutest examples. I'm sure everybody out there on the internet this point has seen the the the heartbreaking video of the raccoon with a piece of cotton candy going to the water's edge to wash it, and then it dissolving, and the raccoon looks

just so sad. I don't think I've seen that one, but I'm picturing it. I can imagine it. So I found something out I didn't know before. You know the word raccoon. The English word raccoon is derived from a word originally in the Algonquian languages. But do you know what the raccoon is called in German? No, what is it called? It is the vah bear, the wash bear, the bear the washes Oh nice. And the same principle shows up in its scientific name, which is procyon low tour,

which means something like pre dog washer. So a raccoon is something that's maybe not quite a dog, not quite a dog yet, but it is associated with washing. And this etymology carries over multiple languages where the raccoon is known as something like the washing bear or the washing

dog or something like that. Uh, and it refle one of the most notable characteristic behaviors of the raccoon, which is the fact that when they acquire a piece of food and there is water nearby, they will often dunk that piece of food in the water and then manipulated kind of put it in the water and swish it around a bit, maybe feel at it, paw at it, rub on it, and then retrieve it from the water

and eat it. And it gives rise to the idea that raccoons are meticulous, little neat freaks that they're I don't know, hyper hygienic or germophobes or something, washing every bit of dirt and grime from food before consuming it, which is kind of funny when you think about other feeding habits of raccoons you might be familiar with, such as like getting into your garbage can and just eating the food in there, and they're not washing that food. They don't seem to be concerned about the dirt in

that case. No, no, this is of course what it has learned them the nickname trash pandas before because they there's straight up in the garbage can, or certainly they will. They don't need to be by a stream to eat. You can. You can find poluting evidence of of raccoons eating without a handy washing station nearby. Right. So it's an activity that they do often enough that it's in the name, like they're clearly known for it, but they don't always do it. It appears to be optional occasional,

but again common enough that it is. It has become a characteristic feature of the species. And so there's a big question like what are they doing. Are they actually trying to get dirt off of the food or are they doing something else? And there have been experiments that looked into this. So one study I wanted to look at was by Malcolm Lyle Watson, published in Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London in nineteen sixty three, called a Critical re Examination of food washing behavior in the

raccoon or procyon low tour. Now, one thing this article says that I found alleged elsewhere on the internet is that raccoon food dousing behavior, and it calls the behavior dousing instead washing to avoid pre judging the issue of the purpose of the dowsing. So raccoons put their food in water very often, but we don't know exactly why they're doing it yet, so so they say dowsing instead of washing. So dousing behavior is something that the author

here says is only seen in raccoons in captivity. But I kind of doubt that. I've just browsing around. I've read plenty of reports of people saying they observed this behavior and raccoons in the wild. So uh so, so I don't know about the the only in captivity part. I guess the detail here would be that in captivity one generally has a readily available supply of water. There's like a dish of water or I did just watch

that cotton candy video in the background. You know, this is a case where it looks like it is a raccoon in a captive environment and there is the water for it to drink from, so it makes use of set water. Right, That's a good point. I mean, so captivity clearly provides the right setting and opportunities for this behavior to be observed. So maybe if it does occur

in nature or if it doesn't. Either way, we can at least admit that the majority of the times humans are witnessing this behavior, it is in raccoons in captivity. But Lyle Watson says before this study, opinion was divided into roughly two camps about what the purpose of raccoon

food dousing was. He says that some researchers thought that raccoons were actually washing their food, actively getting dirt off of it, and others thought that they were moistening it to make it easier to eat, you know, to essentially lubricated for the mouth, like we were talking about with the birds. And before we go onto the actual experiments, I just wanted to note something from the paper that

I thought was interesting. The the author actually makes a table of observations of raccoons eating different kinds of foods and ranks them by which foods were doused the most

often to the least often. So so if you look at this list, the foods that were doused the least often where things like corn oats and earthworms, and the foods that were doused the most often were crayfish, shrimp, water, snails, land snails, crabs, locusts, cockroaches, muscles, clams, cherries, grapes, eggs, and I'm reading down the list now, so I'm getting

to about the middle. But one thing I thought was interesting is that a lot of the food items that are the most doused are animals that naturally live in the water. So I think they're being given to the raccoon, probably already dead or or out of the water when the raccoon receives them. But the raccoon is taking them

to the water and dousing them and then eating them. Yeah, yeah, that is notable on this this hierarchy here though of course that you know, you look at it too, and you're thrown for a curve on why the cherries are ranked so high, why the earthworm is ranked so low? Um. Other things seem to make you know a certain amount of sense, like okay, yeah, well corn is more us

good to go the same with a pair. But so this study tried a couple of experiments to test the reigning hypotheses, the food moistening hypothesis and the active cleansing hypothesis. So as far as the cleansing hypothesis, uh, they said Okay, what if we try giving raccoons food that is dirty and then food that we've already cleaned off to see what the raccoons do with it. Will that make a difference? Like will they clean? Will they douse dirty food more

than clean food? So this was tried with quote, small mud crabs, so that they might forge for these in the wild and you might expect them to have mud on them. And so raccoons in captivity were tested with clean crabs and dirty crabs, and what do you know, it made no difference at all. In fact, this was not a significant difference. But they doused the clean crabs

more than the muddy crabs. Yeah. Yeah, So like if you're if you're going to be desperate with findings from this study like this wouldn't even back up the idea that they're washing anything exactly. So according to this experiment, it makes no difference at all, just sometimes they dunk and sometimes they don't, and it appears to have no relationship whatsoever to the amount of mud. So that's taken as a hit against the active cleansing hypothesis. But what

about the moistening action idea? So what if the point of dowsing is too, is that wet food is easier to eat. Well, they tested this with an experiment as well. Um So Lle Watson says there was a series of three trials with the choices between dry dog biscuits, dried shrimps, and similar objects which had been soaked in water, and the result was again the raccoons showed no significant difference at all. They were just as likely to dunk in douse wet food objects as they were to douse dry ones.

So both of the active hypotheses at at the time of the study in nineteen sixty three were disconfirmed by the experiments that Layle Watson did. So what does the author here think that the that the dowsing is actually for Well, he has an interesting idea. Of course the

is not conclusive, but this is his interpretation. He says, um that the best explanation is that raccoon dousing of food is quote an artificial creation of a natural situation whose function is to allow the expression of a thwarted

independent feeding mechanism. So I think what he means by this is that a raccoon, when dousing food, is going through the motions of an instinctual water based foraging or hunting strategy, that is, that is naturally rewarding, you know, in the same way that the hunting or foraging behaviors are to all kinds of animals. You know, we're motivated to do them, and it's rewarding to the raccoon's brain and associated with the acquisition of food, even though in

these captive scenarios it's not actually doing anything. Now that that's interesting. That would mean it's not adaptive. Well, it would be. It would be adaptive that a raccoon has a natural desire to like fish around in the water for food items. But that maybe this this urge is so strong it's coming through even in moments where it doesn't actually need to forage. It's just satisfying an overwhelming desire.

And he gives a comparison. So what Watson says, his quote the raccoons behavior is perhaps most closely related to what may be called the quote revitalizing behavior of certain

feel a day cats. A captive cat who's hunting patterns of behavior are starved by virtue of the fact that all food is presented dead, will artificially create the opportunity to satisfy these responses by throwing a dead bird into the air and quote giving it life in order that it may be hunted down and caught before being eaten.

This has been particularly well observed in the Golden Cat or Feelish Taminki at the London Zoo and uh so so Yeah, in the same way that you might see a cat that doesn't actually need to hunt, kind of batting a food item or even like a dead mouse around as if like it's still alive. And maybe the cat is trying to satisfy some need for hunting behaviors

just because the hunting behaviors are instinctually rewarding. Perhaps the raccoon is doing something similar by fishing around for a food item that it actually already has in possession in the water, m okay, and so in this it would be comparable to like the play we observe in cats. We think of it as play. They're playing with a toy, but it's of course hunting instinct that you know that

they've they're highly evolved to partake in. And if it's and even though there's nothing live running around your living room, uh, they need to engage in that kind of activity anyway, right,

they have an instinctual drive for for hunting behaviors. They can't actually hunt in their environment because there's nothing to hunt, so they kind of hunt in superfluous ways, hunt in ways that are not really necessary and so uh and so Lyle Watson links this to the idea that this behavior is primarily observed or in his in his belief, only observed in raccoons in captivity. You know, normally they'd be out fishing around for crayfish and crabs and stuff

in the water. In captivity, they don't have to do that, so they satisfied this drive by swishing their food items around in the water. I've remember hearing before that the like the hands of the raccoon are extremely subtle, uh, and that they're not affected by the like they can reach into cold water and feel around in cold waters with a tolerance that that humans are completely incapable of, and that their feeling of things in the water is more uh in line with like human sight, Like that's

how sensitive their little hands are. Uh. So yeah, the sense experience of this, um uh, it makes sense when you think about like this uh, this sort of advanced uh grasping that's going on. This this advanced sense of touch. Well, that's actually the next thing I was gonna get to that.

That is the The other or hypothesis that seems to be live about why raccoons doused their food is the idea that somehow it is it hyper charges the sensory abilities of their paws, and exactly like you're saying, raccoons are known in the animal world for having incredibly sensitive fore paws. Apparently they gather a large proportion of their sensations of the world through touch, and of course this is very useful if you're an animal that's like rooting

around in muddy water for for prey. You know, you want to be able to get a lot of information by the pads on your fore paws, on your your hands and fingers, and so it has been argued that maybe the dousing behavior is related to the hyper sensitivity of their fore paws and the importance of the sensory information they get there. So perhaps moistening of the fore paws actually makes them more sensitive to textual information about

the food in hand. So if this hypothesis were correct, it would be that dousing serves the purpose of letting the raccoon get better sensory information about the food they're about to eat in the type of sense uh, since realm that is most relevant to them, which is touch. So it would be sort of similar to a human looking at a morsel of food by holding it up to the light so they could get a better look at it. Or you know, a dog really going to town sniffing a piece of food before they eat it.

That it would be a specialized sense heightening behavior that is particular to the sense regime of the raccoon. Ah. Now this, yeah, this makes a lot of sense, and at the same time, it also makes that cotton candy video all the more heartbreaking because it really wanted to understand this. This uh, this sugary concoction. What is this thing? Well, let me douse it in the water and feel it a little bit more. What now it is completely gone? Now I have I know even less about it than

I did before. But anyway, I'm intrigued by both of these hypotheses. I don't know which one I would lean more towards, the sort of the hyper charging sensory data from the from the hands or the thwarted natural foraging behavior. Uh. Both both seem possible to me based on what I've read.

The interesting thing about the idea of awar thwarted foraging behavior is that, um, it would seem to connect to that that list of foods that are doused most often, that the top of the list was all like aquatic animals that the raccoon would naturally forage for in the

creeks and in the mud. Thank but Rob, if you're ready, I would actually like to turn to another example of animals doing something to their food that looks like washing but has been hypothesized to have a different purpose altogether. And this is related to seasoning. So in the last episode, uh we spoken whispers of horror about the idea of

eating an unseasoned potato. You know, potatoes are great, they really needs some salt and pepper, hopefully some fat of some kind, butter oil or something to take them to their full potential. Just just the thought of a completely unseasoned cooked potato is is is very unappetizing. Yeah, even if you have one of those those really good potatoes, you know, like those fingerlings and the purple potatoes and of course sweet potatoes, even then they need a little something.

And if you get into the realm of the Russets all the more. Now as always, of course, you know, our food preferences could be just cultural preferences. But I think it's clear that a really important part of human cuisine in general is seasoning. Maybe not to the same extent in every single culture in the world, but broadly

all over the planet. People like to season their food, and seasoning amounts to augmenting the natural flavors of bulk food stuffs in our diet with with highly flavor relevant little little bits of ingredients, usually things like herbs, spices, and probably most importantly of all, salt. Now, there's a reason humans have a taste for salt. Salt is not just a nice to have. It is biologically essential, not

in the quantities that that we Americans eat it. You know that that we we weigh more salt than we need, but you you've got to have some salt. Without any salt, you would be in a bad place. And we talked about this to some extent in our episodes about the

science of thirst. Remember, you know the things about how you've got to have the right balance of osmolality in your blood, Like, yeah, the the amount of substances, especially salt, dissolved in the blood is relevant to the functioning of cells. Without salt, your body just doesn't really work. You need

some salt. And likewise, you're cooking a stew or a soup or just about anything, you often find yourself in the situation where you're adding salt to taste, and you know it's like, oh, it's not quite there yet a little more salt. Not quite there, a little bit more salt. But the closer you get, the more stressful it can become, because you know that if you over salt it um there's not an easy way back. There may not be

a way back. That is a very good point. Especially, Yeah, if it's like one homogeneous mass of food, like a like a soup or something, it's it's really hard to take the take the salt out, I guess, unless you just diluted by adding more water or something, but then you screw up the other flavor ratios. Yeah, it's just you don't want to over salt that that that's that's hard to fix. Steps. Now, lots of foods that we would find in the natural environment already have some salt content.

You know, vegetables already have salt in them. If you, you know, like a like a stalk of celery actually is you can almost taste that celery is naturally a little bit salty. You can sort of taste the sodium in there. Of course, meat already has salt in it naturally, most people would add more salt to to season and but it has some sodium content there already. But we want more. And why why is it that we want more?

As well? It's because the concentrations of salt that we naturally find in meat and plants in the environment, it's fairly low, and salt is necessary for surve bible. So our bodies are shaped by evolution to seek out extra salt. However, we can get it, and lots of animals acquire salt not just from food, but from mineral reservoirs known as

salt licks or more accurately, mineral licks. Again, because salt can, in the narrow sense, be taken to imply just sodium chloride, and sodium is not the only electrolyte or mineral that animals need to supplement in this way. Animals are also

looking for calcium, iron, zinc, phosphorus, and so forth. But the idea of a salt lick is interesting to me because I was reading about them, and what I had always pictured for a salt lick when I was growing up was that there's a deer, specifically a deer, and it's licking a white rock that has the desired minerals

on its surface. And while this scenario does happen, apparently a lot of times, a mineral lick can also consist of like a place where animals come to sort of eat dirt or mud or clay that has the molecules they're looking for. But of course humans do something pretty interesting, which is that we combine the quest for supplemental salt with the broader quest for nutrition by salting food directly. The result is clearly more than the sum of its parts, because,

after all, salt doesn't just make food taste saltier. I think humans mostly know from experience that it makes food taste more like itself. A little bit of salt seems to magnify the natural flavors present in whatever you're eating, So salt makes chocolate taste more like chocolate, and salt makes broccoli taste more like broccoli. It's just a general flavor intensifier. Yeah, Even things that don't need salt at all.

Like a really good slice of watermelon is perfect on its own, and yet sprinkle a little salt on there, and you've managed to intensify even that. Yeah, it becomes hyper watermelon. And because of these obvious you know, sensory and pleasure benefits, the complement of supplemental salt to food. You might wonder, we'll do any non human animals season their food like we do? Do they combine the quest for food with the quest for supplemental salt into a

single consumption activity. And you might assume no, But I came across a really interesting surprise here. So I want to turn to a actually rather famous episode in the history of primatology, but famous for a different reason than we're going to be talking about it, and that is the potato washing monkeys of Koshima Island in Japan. Rob, Have you ever heard about these before? I don't believe I had. Um, Yeah, some some of this came up in my research, but I knew that you you had

the primates firmly in your side. Here. Well, I want to briefly mention side a couple of papers as sources here for what I'm about to talk about. One is by Massau Kauai called Newly Acquired pre Cultural Behavior in the Natural Troop of Japanese Monkeys of on Koshima inlet in the journal Primates in nineteen sixty five. And then the other one is a book chapter UH called um Sweet Potato Washing Revisited by Satoshi Hirada, Kunio Watanabe, and Kawai Masao. The last author is the same as the

author of the paper from the sixties. Uh. This was published in Primate Origins of Human Cognition and Behavior in two thousand and eight. Uh So, first of all, one thing we should say is that everything we're about to describe is not a behavior observed purely spontaneously in the wild, but one that is at least in part a result of human intervention. So the entire story here comes with

that caveat, but it's very interesting nonetheless. So on the island of Koshima in Japan, there are native populations of a monkey called the scientific name is Macaca fuscata, also known as the Japanese macaque or the snow monkey. You've never seen one of these, you should look them up that I think they're very cute. They're they're quite cute. They're very soft looking. For I know one shouldn't feel this way about wild animals, but I to pet them.

But anyway, Beginning with some papers published by a scientist named Shunzo Kawamura in the nineteen fifties, researchers began to document an interesting behavior among a single troop of monkeys on Koshima Island, and it was washing their food. So

the history went like this. In the early nineteen fifties, several Japanese researchers began providing food in the form of sweet potato pieces to the monkeys on the island, and I read in a book passage elsewhere that the original purpose of giving them the food like this was to lure the monkeys out into an open space near the waterfront where it would be easier for the researchers to

watch them to observe their behavior. And I think part of the intended significance of this of this study was that the scientists would end up making long, multi generational observations of the same monkey troop, with individuals in the troop named and differentiated so that their individual behaviors could be documented. But of course the monkeys liked the extra food.

They liked the sweet potato pieces. But the real twist came in September of nineteen fifty three when a young monkey, a one and a half year old female named Emo, appeared to have invented a new behavior. She washed her potato.

And now washing was not previously part of the behavioral repertoire of these monkeys, but apparently Emo was reacting to the fact that these sweet potato pieces left out on the ground, they would get covered in sand and dirt, which, even if you're a monkey, is apparently not the best thing to eat. So in September nineteen fifty three, Emo

started washing the sweet potatoes. So the standard sweet potato washing behavior is described as the monkey taking a sweet potato piece to the edge of the water um and then dipping the potato into the water, holding it in one hand, and then removing the sand or grit by brushing the potato under the water with the other hand.

This potato washing behavior became famous because it was taken as evidence of the existence of quote culture in non human animals because, again according to mess Al Kauai in the paper from sixty five, by nineteen fifty six, eleven monkeys in the troop had acquired the behavior and had themselves become potato washers, and across subsequent research periods after that, the behavior continued to spread two more and more of

the troop. Now, we could probably come back and do a whole episode on the idea of whether this should be viewed as analogous to human culture. But on its face, it seems to have a lot of properties that look like culture. It's a behavior that is not instinctual to the animal, but is learned and then is spread apparently from one individual to the other in the troop through a process of copying, eventually becoming the norm for the

entire animal troop. But then, on the other hand, they're interesting questions about this and in differences from how we normally think of culture. For one, thing I thought was kind of interesting in this instance, Uh, the learning process seemed to work backwards from the way human culture is presumed to pass across generations, because it looks like sweet potato washing started with younger monkeys and gradually spread to the older ones. Like they said that Emo's mother apparently

learned the potato washing behavior from Emo. Oh, well, I mean we we mentioned TikTok trends earlier. Okay, and you know TikTok trends are often associated with with youth culture, so that could be a case, there could be a case to be made. Well, yeah, you do have things that originate with the young people, with the youth, and then they are passed upward two older members of of of a population of a culture. I guess. So, yeah, maybe it's the the youth innovate and then the elders educate.

But then certainly it does it does run counter to the sort of idea of of elders in a given group saying this is the way, this is the way we handle potatoes, this is the way we wash potato. Obey me, younglings. But but here, here's where we're about to get to the part that's relevant to the idea of animals seasoning food. So I wanted to read a

passage from that paper by Kauai in nine. The background of this section is that the author is describing two distinct variants of sweet potato washing behavior, one in which the sweet potato is like I described a minute ago, dipped into the water with one hand and then brushed with the other hand to remove sand. The other variant is known as quote rolling, and it consists of letting the sweet potato drop into the shallow part of the water and then rolling it back and forth with one

hand before retrieving and eating it. But now, to read from Massau Kauai quote but during the second period, a third type appeared. It consisted in dipping the potato into the water every time after knowing it once or twice. This behavior seems quite different from brushing the sand off from the potato. They collect potatoes and take them to the seashore. But if this is not for the purpose of washing, what reason is there in this behavior except

for seasoning the potatoes with saltwater. Therefore, I will call this behavior the seasoning behavior. Huh So, obviously the behavior of repeatedly dipping the sweet potato into saltwater every time the monkey takes a bite. That could have other interpretations, but the seasoning interpretation seems to be a pretty good one. Like, why else would they be dipping it again every time they take a bite off of the off of the

piece of food. Yeah, you can see this is something that emerges out of out of purely you know, the washing behavior. But then they grow to realize, Yeah, if the potato has been dipped in saltwater, it is more satisfying. And it of course is not only enhancing taste it is uh, it is also supplying something that the monkey's body needs exactly. So I would say that I think the seasoning interpretation sation of this behavior is not conclusive. We don't know for sure that's what they're doing, but

it seems pretty valid, like it seems certainly on the table. Uh. Of course, as we talked about before, a potato tastes so much better with some seasoning. The same goes for a sweet potato. So yeah, could it be that this is not only an example of cultural transmission in non human animals and monkeys learning a non instinctual behavior from one monkey to another within the troop, but also an example of cookery culture cuisine emerging. Yeah. Yeah, I think

that's a fascinating example. Thank thank now. In putting together these episodes, you assembled a list of different things that

were part of human food culture. Uh, culinary practices uh that we were using sort of a guide to try and look for behaviors in the animal were old that yeah, more or less line up with them like, for instance, we we talked about the processing of food, the but butchery practices of course of the butcher board, the shrike, the lamb of guy or uh you know, and to a certain extent, you could make an argument that any kind of predator that doesn't eat its prey hole is

engaging in some sort of butchery. Right. It's if it's selectively eating parts of the corpse of the cadaver um, then you could make at least a week case for this. Yes, though, when I when I start thinking about human butchery, you know, one thing my mind goes to is like the classic butcher's tools, the tools you see next to the big old wooden block that the animal would be taken apart, and of course you've got your knives, and that would be related to, you know, the things we've already been

talking about. But another butcher tool you often see is that big old hammer. What's that hammer for? For tenderizing the meat? Uh? So, for many of our tougher foods, the material must be made tender prior to cooking and or consumption. The tenderization of meat with a hammer or mallet or masher is a great physical example of of this. You know, um and uh. You know it also essentially

busts out some extra chewing prior to cooking. You know, you don't want to spend x amount of extra time chewing that meat or in any cases of chewing that potato or whatever it happens to be. Let's break it down a bit physically before it goes into our mouth. But of course, we we don't just tenderize foods with hammers and mallets. We also tenderize them chemically via special enzymes,

as well as via mixtures like vinegar and broth. And when we apply a marinade, we're not only flavoring the matter we intend to cook or and or eat, but also we're softening it up. And again, this is a chemical breakdown that occurs inside the body as well, beginning in the mouth. Now we've discussed some methods of externalizing this process before, uh, and they bear at least equipment mentioned here. House Flies consume their food is a liquid diet.

So first, a housefly scrubs food with the that it fines with bristles on the end of its proboscis, freeing up food particles. So think of these like dusty food particles that the house fly has found and then it vomits up a slurry of saliva and digestive juices. And in doing this, it's kind of like adding hot water to instant oatmeal mix. Um. You know. So if you're being very generous with the term, you can say a house fly is cooking sort of and then of course

its slurps all of it up. I love that. Yeah, so it's it's cooking right from its own gut. Yeah. Uh. Spiders are also another great example. They'll inject digestive juices into the bodies of their prey to break down the insides, you know, particularly prey that's been paralyzed or wrapped up in webbing. Uh. And then after this, um, these juices have had time to work, they can simply drink the

insides of the prey that they have captured. I believe we did a whole episode on what this would be like, What would it would be like to be eaten by a spider? It was called I Was Eaten by a Giant spider. Um. Yeah, that was a fun one. Yeah. Yeah.

Now it's also worth noting that these various means of tenderizing organic material, you know, it's it's also comparable to the process of decomposition, so we might well loop in natural decomposition into this category, especially for scavenger creatures who take advantage of such conditions. They can take advantage of food material that has been softened by decomposition, and they have evolved to tolerate uh levels of decomposition that other animals would not be able to handle. Now that that

brings up another question. Uh, how about fermentation? That was another one we had on the list. Are the You know, there are plenty of examples of animals that consume fermenting fruit, for example, but are there examples of animals that are more actively involved in fermentation process? I couldn't really find any good examples, but again we could roughly file fermentation

under the category of decomposition. So animals like elephants, birds, and monkeys that eat fermented fruit are also taking advantage of this process. And and on that note, I'd like to touch on just a few examples of animals that get involved with a couple of other activities that are that are highly important to human food culture, uh the storing of food, but then also of agriculture itself. So first on the the just on the topic of hoarding food, of of creating a cash of food that one can

can turn to, especially during the winter. There are numerous examples of this, and we could easily talk about chipmunks and squirrels and whatnot, but I wanted to talk just a little bit about a super predator of note. Um, and that is the mole. Sup. Yeah, I mean if you're if you're an earth worm, the mole is the the ultimate destroyer. It is the super predator of the earthworm world. Uh. It eats nearly its weight in worms and similar subterranean creatures every day. Uh and um, it's

it's impressive. But of course this is standard hunt and eat behavior, right. Nobody's gonna accuse the mole of engaging in uh, you know, culinary activities here by gobbling it's it's weight in earthworms every day. But where it begins to mirror some aspects of human food culture is that, like many other animals, moles also stockpile food for leaner times.

While various rodents famously stockpile nuts and human stockpile all sorts of foods, the mole creates a horrifying subterranean dungeon of living worms, and this is an example of larger hoarding. Whoa living worms, yeah, or in some cases you might say, um, sort of half living worms. I guess it creates a

limbo of worms, a limbo of of worms. Yeah. I was reading about this in a Tree Hugger article by Russell McClendon, citing a Mammal Society Species Overview article, and it points out that the moles have a worm paralyzing toxin in their bite, but they also will just bite the heads of of an earthworm to ensure a debilitating

but non fatal injury to said worm. And then you know, they'll eat a lot of worms, obviously, but then they'll start dragging them away and they'll create these chambers full of still living worms that they can munch on through the leaner months. Single single mole chambers have been found to contain as many as four hundred and seventy live earthworms. So that's about eight hundred and twenty grams or one eight pounds of still living, still writhing earthworms for them

to eat. This one, Like I said, I feel like it's a more grizzly and alarming example of the sort of thing we're used to. You know, it's like, oh, yeah, it's the story nuts for the winter. Now, this is storing live earthworms and a big dungeon for the winter. Now, we would be remiss if we didn't at least touch on a topic that, of course, I think we we've we've discussed in in greater length before in the past.

But uh bee honey Uh you know, Um, this is the sweet food stuff produced by the honey bee as well as some other bee species, and honey is basically yes bee vomit. Uh. We have uh enzyme activity playing a role in this, as well as water evaporation transforming mere sugary organic secretions of usually plants into an ideal storable food. So in this example we see both food production and storage. Uh. So it's one we're all familiar with. We all know where honey comes from. We know the

miracle of honey. It's one of the great um achievements of the animal world, certainly the insect world. But it's also when we're so familiar with we kind of uh it's easy to forget the wonder of it, to overlook the wonder of what is being achieved here. And then another prime example from the insect world concerns the marvel of the leaf cutter ants, of which there are around I think forty seven identified species. They cultivate their own

crop of fungus, growing it on harvested leaf clippings. In some cases, these fungus species are entirely dependent on their aunt masters. Uh. You know, we're talking like extinct in the wild situations, but it is uh, I mean, these are these are complex uh societies of these leaf cutter ants. But what they are practicing here is is agriculture in a nutshell, and they've been practicing it for for a period of time that dwarfs human agricultural practice. They got

a stew going they do. Yeah, So I mean, I think it's neat to kind of look at some of those examples, especially because they kind of forecast what humans would come to do. Like what humans are doing with their food is certainly an advanced model, uh, compared to anything going on in the human world. But it's not unconnected.

It's not it's not an island, you know. You you see shadows of what we are doing, uh in these other practices, in these other approaches to life, and so yeah, what we're doing is just kind of the the human

complication of that. All right, we're gonna go and close out this episode, but you know, we would love to come back in the future and discuss the cuisine of non animals a bit more so if you have particular favorite examples of this, or if there's something in the animal world that you would like to personally make a case for um or it's just something you've observed right in and let us know, we'd love to hear from you.

And uh, you know, we were just chatting a few minutes ago off Mike that you know, there are a number of different leads for this episode that we didn't have time to look into. So yeah, we could easily come back in the future and do a third episode

if you the listener desires it. In the meantime, if you would like to check out other episodes of Stuff to Blow Your on Core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays and the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast feed Listener Mail on Monday, Artifact or Monster Fact on Wednesday, and on Fridays, we do Weird House Cinema. That's our time to set aside most serious matters and just focus in on a strange film. Huge thanks as always to our

excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest topic for the future, just to say hello, you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts for my Heart Radio with the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening to your favorite shows, I might just have a tabs back by a prot