Before the discovery of microbes humans had been preserving meat in a variety of ways. Discuss how these methods might have been discovered
What will be an ideal response?
Many answers are possible. The following are some examples.
People observed that the flesh of a carcass that had dried out did not rot. This could have occurred during winter in very cold, dry conditions, equivalent to lyophilizing, or in the desert. The observation could lead to the process of making jerky. Similarly, hanging meat did not dry out quickly but instead became fuzzy with fungus, a hungry person took a chance and discovered dry curing.
A mixture of meat with other foods was left in a cool dark corner too long and fermented. Someone tried it out and found it edible. This eventually led to developing methods for preparing sausages and other fermented meat products.
Fish are trapped in a drying lagoon and die but do not decompose (much) because the drying also left high concentrations of salt. Thus the use of salt to preserve food may have been discovered.
In each of these situations people experimented because they were hungry and nothing else was available.
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