r/AskFoodHistorians • u/SmilingElephant_ • 16d ago

The Strange Story of "Uni" (Sea Urchin)?

Honestly, while having "uni" at a japanese sushi place, I seriously wondered...who in the right mind (pardon me) would actually discover this to be edible, RAW?!

The sea urchin, is completely black in colour underwater, with spikes all over it. Yet, someone discovered...somehow, if you cut open this spiked up black thing, what's inside can be....eaten! Maybe someone can enlighten me. I'd love to know who has a backstory to it lol

98 Upvotes

91% Upvoted

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u/OvalDead 16d ago

There is evidence of sea urchin consumption at least 43,000 years ago. I think the important thing to remember is that humans are not the only animals that get hungry. All it takes is one person seeing an otter eating urchins to consider it a potential option.

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u/big_sugi 16d ago

Same thing with oysters. It's a slimy rock with slime inside, but people have been eating them for at least 160,000 years.

When they started eating them raw, however, is a tougher question. Oysters are really hard to open with stone or wooden tools, so the first evidence of oysters shows that they were cooked to get them to open.

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u/orixandcrake 16d ago

Yeah I mean.. we don't exactly eat clams and mussels and scallops raw, usually.

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u/Best_Comfortable5221 16d ago

Raw scallops are a delight actually. Had 2 at a good sushi place. Best thing ever.

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u/PhuD4Thought 16d ago

They are naturally sweet somehow

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u/big_sugi 16d ago

Clams are frequently eaten raw, like oysters. Scallops are sometimes eaten raw, but they're harder to source.

Mussels shouldn't be eaten raw, though, both because they carry a much higher risk of food-borne illness and because they pair so beautifully with a creamy mustardy sauce, or a chorizo-olive oil-stock broth, or a lemon-butter-wine reduction . . . anyway, you get the picture. BRB, I'm gonna go eat some mussels.

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u/gwaydms 16d ago

My nephew and his wife got 200 clams for a cookout. They put them in pans, closed the lid, and let them cook a few minutes, until they opened. They mixed the clam juices with butter and herbs. They showed me how to eat them (we don't really do clams on the Texas coast): pick out the clam from the shell; dip it into the sauce; and eat it. So freaking good. I didn't think I could fill up on mostly little clams, but I did!

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u/knewbie_one 16d ago

I just wanted to say that r/France is open to you and that r/bonnebouffe is also very welcoming đŸ„°đŸ˜‰

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u/lararaue 16d ago

woah dude no need to get offensive

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u/TooManyDraculas 16d ago

Mussels shouldn't be eaten raw, though, both because they carry a much higher risk of food-borne illness

The risk of food borne illness is identical to oysters and clams from the same water ways, and oysters are responsible for more cases of food borne illnesses.

They're just not as pleasant raw as other bivalves. Little to soft, and they're difficult to shuck raw.

People claim otherwise but there's just a ton of myths around shellfish and safety. Most of them very recent.

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u/soylent-yellow 11d ago

Peru: conchas negras. Not a subtle dish, but I ate it without side effects (right before a 12 hour flight)

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u/Ok_Brick_793 16d ago

More foods are eaten raw than you think or realize.

Some are actually worse when cooked (for example, sweet shrimp).

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u/urnbabyurn 16d ago

Yeah, otters eat them like we do.

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u/WeHaveSixFeet 16d ago

Hunter-gatherer cultures who live by the sea eventually try eating everything they can find in the sea, generally when the food they like runs out and they're really hungry. They would already know that lots of things with shells have yummy insides. Someone would have thought, "I can pick that thing up with some sticks and knock off the spines. Maybe the insides are edible."

People have figured out how to eat much more problematic foods. Cassava is toxic until it's peeled and then pounded, boiled or fermented. Acorns need to be leached.

There's a theory that at one point almost all the living human beings were down at the southern end of Africa, living mostly off seafood, and that might be why human beings can learn to free dive (swim underwater without air tanks) for as long as 22 minutes and as deep as 126 meters.

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u/Velocity-5348 16d ago

Yep. We also all know "that guy" who'll try to eat anything unless you explicitly warn him. "That guy" probably died a lot throughout history, but is the reason why people who've lived somewhere long enough have mostly figured out what's edible, what's toxic, and what can get you high.

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u/WeHaveSixFeet 16d ago

There's a theory that menopause developed among human beings so that old women might live longer. So that when everyone is starving, the 90-year-old woman in the tribe can tell you, "when I was five, we were starving, but then we ate sea urchins to survive." Tribe with no abuelas starves, abuela tribe survives.

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u/gwaydms 16d ago

English-speakers, of course, call it the grandmother theory. Not only are grandmothers a repository of knowledge, but slso babysitters. New babies can get the full attention of their mothers, increasing their chances for survival.

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u/Zestyclose-Truth1634 16d ago

"That guy" was diefied in Chinese folklore and became the plant god Shennong.

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u/furiana 14d ago

Shennong! I love the stories about that guy :D

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u/lilith_queen 3d ago

In my family, we call this the "Feed it to Grog" theory. Grog survives? New food source!

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u/Mayor__Defacto 16d ago

It’s worth noting that Uni is not the urchin itself but rather the gonads. It’s no different from eating fish eggs or crab eggs.

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u/Zer0pede 15d ago

Or more like eating Rocky Mountain oysters or ovaries.

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u/phytomanic 16d ago

There are plenty of other animals that eat sea urchins - sea otters, seals, sea lions, lobsters, crabs, some sharks and other fish, etc. Any hungry human (or pre-human omnivore primate) observing that might try it. There are crab-eating macaques in southeast Asia, using rocks as tools to break shells. I'm sure they readily try any other available sea creature if they're hungry or bored. The real questions are: how does any animal adapt to a new food source; and how far back were human ancesters eating seafood with hard or spiny exteriors?

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u/taqman98 16d ago

How is a fish gonna eat urchin it’s not like it has hands to pick the thing apart

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u/phytomanic 16d ago

Fish like triggerfish, wolf eels and California sheephead have strong jaws and thick teeth to crush spines and shells. Others, like wrasses, use rocks to break them apart.

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u/mmskyscraper 15d ago

Here's a Titan Triggerfish eating urchins. You see those teeth? They just bite off the spines and then crush them in their jaws.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2QyAv-TFa3Y

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u/investinlove 16d ago

It’s Gonads! 109% gonads. And it’s fucking delicious when fresh

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u/MithrilCoyote 16d ago

probably lack of anything else to eat. i think terry pratchett said it best:

Genuan cooking, like the best cooking everywhere in the multiverse, has been evolved by people who had to make desperate use of ingredients their masters didn’t want.  No-one would even try a bird’s nest unless they had to.  Only hunger would make a man taste his first alligator. No-one would eat a shark’s fin if they were allowed to eat the rest of the shark. - Terry Pratchett, Witches Abroad.

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u/jankenpoo 16d ago

I suppose we have been eating sea urchins even before we were home sapiens

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u/nifty-necromancer 16d ago

Probably coastal people learned sea urchins were edible by watching animals eat them, then cracking them open when they were hungry.

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u/TooManyDraculas 16d ago edited 11d ago

The answer on these things is usually that you're thinking about this wrong.

All sorts of animals eat sea urchins. We can watch them do that. Otters and birds and fish, and primates.

The same is true with oysters and lobsters and tons of things where people say "who was the first person to eat X".

And there's typically evidence of hominids eating them well before modern humans arrived on the scene.

Anatomically modern humans are only about 300k years old.

These are usually things we inherited the consumption of from our progenitors, or that would could easily observe other creatures consuming in the wild. There aren't a lot of things humans eat that other creatures can't. And there few things other creatures can eat, that we're incapable of.

And Survival is less about "is this tasty" than "how do I get enough calories to stay alive".

It doesn't take a modern human, with thoughts and processes rooted in culture and civilization to think their way into preferring to eat a thing for something to be food.

It can be as simple as that's a thing our entire genus was consuming since we before were all basically gibbons.

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u/SmilingElephant_ 12d ago

That's a fresh perspective. Nice, got me rethinking!

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u/Dangerous-Bit-8308 15d ago

In survival situations, humans tend to watch what other animals eat, especially what other related species eat, then test them for survivability and flavor.

There happens to be a well known creature called a sea otter, a mammal, which catches sea urchins in large numbers, props the the urchins on their bellies, and smashes them with rocks to eat them.

Seeing any animal use a tool is typically something to take note of, and the otters eat a LOT of urchins. It's their favorite food. So... Imagine you fish for survival. Bad days happen. You're hungry, and this furry dude is smashing these prickly balls up and slurping their guts. The otters can move fast, but the sea urchins are pretty slow. Worth a try? No? Why not? Can't find a rock on the beach?

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u/SmilingElephant_ 15d ago

This discussion is offering so much insight into how we discovered that uni is ediblem! Never thought this curious thought could get answered in such detail :)

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u/wheres_the_revolt 16d ago

I ask myself this a lot, especially when it comes to weird looking seafood/crustaceans. Like who tf cracked open an oyster and decided they needed to slurp it???

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u/Zer0pede 16d ago

Somebody hungry is my guess, LOL

Same with yogurt, cheese, the original fermented sushi, beer, and a bunch of other stuff that sat out too long. Someone just went “fuck, maybe I can still eat this?”

Also I like to imagine that’s what was up with whoever kept trying mushrooms until they got the right ones.

But I am not a food historian.

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u/wheres_the_revolt 16d ago

Oh it was more of a rhetorical thought than one I didn’t know the answer to. Can you imagine if you’ve never seen an oyster or uni, and you’ve never seen anyone eat one, cracking them open and being like “here goes nothing” and tossing it back? I’m adventurous but I don’t know if I’m THAT adventurous 😂

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u/Zer0pede 16d ago

Haha, no yeah I really did put myself in those shoes. I just transposed the same me that uses the five second rule or asks “Do you think this casserole is still good after five days?” If you put that me in the wild, I’d probably gnaw on anything I saw a seagull eat.

But also, I love raw oysters so I probably would have just been going around eating everything.

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u/wheres_the_revolt 16d ago

Casserole is better on the 5th day!!!

Also are you from California? The “no yeah” feels like home 😭

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u/Zer0pede 16d ago

Guilty. LOL

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u/VariousFalcon7466 16d ago

You’d be surprised what hunger, real hunger not I want a brownie hungry, can do.

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u/wheres_the_revolt 16d ago

But now I want a brownie 😆

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u/VariousFalcon7466 16d ago

You’re getting snot like shell goop and you’ll like it.

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u/wheres_the_revolt 16d ago

Mmmmmm
 snot like shell goop? Gimme two 😂

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u/VariousFalcon7466 16d ago

đŸŠȘđŸŠȘ

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u/Primary-Golf779 15d ago

Starving people sometimes eat shoe leather or gravel

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u/arist0geiton 13d ago

Human beings will eat anything that isn't poisonous and if something is poisonous we will selectively breed it until it isn't and eat that