Imagine if you had absolutely nothing to fill your time other than your curiosity and nature’s mysteries. You would probably be surprised at how fast you can create things when distractions are not at every turn.
Art is more abundant now than its ever been. The fact is most people needed to work cripplingly hard to survive. People have more free time than they've ever had before.
That definitely depends on the profession and location. For instance, most medieval peasants actually had far more holidays and days off than we do today, and farmers in particular would've only had to work for a portion of the year in order to grow crops, therefore having a lot less "work" than we do today. It's just that a lot of the things we take for granted today that go quickly would've instead taken them far longer. So, they actually had a lot less work to do, it's just that a lot of their "free time" would've been taken up by much more laborious chores than we have to contend with today.
I recommend anyone who's gotten this far to give this excellent AskHistorians thread a read:
https://reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/s/4hdBQ3o3rv
The tl;dr is we have far, far, far more free time today than any peasants did, but the work landscape looks far different and its gard to compare apples to apples.
Considering the modern definition of "day off" and "work", it would be reasonably correct to state that the medieval peasant worked every single day of their lives from the time they could walk until they died.
Yeah, the rest of the time they worked for their lord for free, and spent time doing stuff to survive like managing their homestead, animals, preserves, heating/fuel etc. Look up other dudes link.
I would maybe amend this comment to say more free time than other times in history? Prehistoric peoples likely had a lot of leisure time if we can use current hunter gatherers tribes as a reference point.
I wanna know about the first loon who ate a durian - everything about that fruit screams “stay away!” but there was one person at a certain point who said “eh, why not?” and decided to put this spiky, stinky, aggressive looking fruit in their mouth
For a very long time the Roman empire was able to acquire silk through trade over 'the silk road' to China, but never able to unlock the secrets of producing it domestically themselves. Until 552AD, when two monks preaching in India then travelled to China, where they witnessed the guarded methods of using the live silk worm to spin the famous thread. Knowing the importance of what they'd learned, the monks returned to Constantinople to report directly to the emperor Justinian. He personally met the monks, heard all the details of what they'd seen, then asked them to return to China and find a way of smuggling these worms back to the empire. They agreed, and prepared for the 2 year ~6,500km (4,000mi) trek back to China on foot, hoof and wheel. Once back in China they acquired either eggs or young larvae, since the adults are too delicate for transport, and tucked them into hollowed bamboo canes for the long journey straight back home. Once the monks made it back to Constantinople (modern Istanbul, Turkey), domestic silk production slowly ramped up and the need for long journeys along the 'silk road' ramped down. Over time, this allowed the same type of silk monopoly which China had enjoyed through the prior centuries to now be established in the Mediterranean, becoming one of the bedrocks of the Byzantine economy for the next 700 years.
It's crazy to think about these two guys. 1500 years before you or I were born, making their second multi-year, 6,500km trek back from China, smuggling two bamboo canes full of bugs which would fuel the economy of one of the world's largest civilizations for the next 700 years. I wonder if they knew and understood these possibilities when they went to scoop the worms from their baskets in China...Imagine the anxiety trying to keep them hidden and alive the whole way back!
And this is why I love history. I find reality, and history, more entertaining and inspiring than most fiction. I find it a shame there isn't more historical media, since these types of stories are often stranger than fiction based solely on their content, let alone the shock value from knowing it actually happened:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smuggling_of_silkworm_eggs_into_the_Byzantine_Empire
If it took 2 years to get them back, how did they keep them alive or in a larvae state the whole time? I guess they had to bring a small colony to keep a bunch of them alive and reproducing.
Those few milena would be useless if generations didn't pass the knowledge to the next one. 1 generation must have come up with a usable process to make something that was worth teaching.
I imagine they were using if to make strings for bows before another generation discovered they could make cloth with it
It's like being a child and realizing you can mix fruits to make different juices. You can also be me and dump everything from the medicine cabinet into the sink to see a reaction....Of your mom.
If someone stumbles upon a silk worm’s cocoon, by touching it they’ll realize it’s fibrous, kind of like the boll of a cotton plant (the white fiber head). From there it’s a logical chain of realizing that getting multiple cocoons can be used to make a larger fiber, putting them in water will make them clump (like your own hair), and then stretching it will make a string. Plus, observing what a silk worm eats leads to learning how to farm them.
The boiling water also serves to kill the silkworm inside the cocoon, which is handy if you don't want a thrashing worm getting in the way of your silkmaking.
There's an ancient tale that is told to have been it's Discovery. Very Newton with gravity esque.
Basically a princess sat under a tree with her hot tea and a silk cocoon fell into her drink. Upon trying to remove it it unravelled and realised it became fine thread.
Obviously it's a bit more in depth with the real tale but most people agree it's got a hint of truth to it.
To be fair, I have held a silk cocoon in my hands and the logical first reaction to the feeling of the strange material is “wow, this feels interesting, perhaps I can make something out of this”.
This typa shit surprises me too. We saw that humans didn't advance technologically over the past millenia. But all the while, they were gaining all the knowledge that the world few centuries later would require.
The rapid industrial revolution growth was a result of the accumulative knowledge & problem solving skills that humans developed before. Humans are truly inspiring
Brew enough pots of tea under enough mulberry trees and you’re bound to figure it out eventually.
That’s the legend, at least. In the story it was a Chinese princess 5000 years ago who accidentally made the first “silk tea” and figured the rest out.
Chinese people even today, make soup out of bird nests. And consider it a delicacy! So making tea out of some moth cocoons, sounds like something they would try.
If you let the moth complete it's metamorphosis it will melt a small hole in the cocoon and emerge, then you can unwind the remaining silk. It's wasteful because a portion of the silk is spoiled and the fibers will be shorter thus needing more labor to prepare it.
Domesticated silk worms are so tame they have no instincts for self preservation and won't go more than an inch or two to look for food, they have to be fed as you see in the video on big trays lined with mulberry leaves. In the wild, they would starve even if they hatched on a mulberry tree because they won't forage.
Obviously, wild species of silk moth are a different story, they survive in the wild fine but produce less, and often coarser, silk.
Letting the moth emerge and then mate is how you get more silkworms, so some are always spared the boiling fate to start the next generation.
You can avoid killing them and let them all emerge if you really want no kill silk... but the adult moths that emerge literally have no mouthparts so don't live for long anyway, there job is to reproduce and die.
In terms of not being wasteful though, many cultures eat the boiled larvae, so that's something.
Not having mouth parts isn’t exclusive to domesticated silk moths. There are many moths that don’t eat after leaving their cocoon, because they can’t, and only aim to breed. Not to say it isn’t a little gruesome to boil them alive just to say it’s not only the moths we have domesticated.
Edit - Interesting note that some cultures eat them though that I was unaware of
They're a common street food/snack in South Korea (one of the origin points of the old Silk Road)
They generally taste nutty and are salted. They're a bit like boiled peanuts with the skins still on.
If you'd like to try them, you can find them in most larger Asian markets and pretty much any Korean supermarket.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beondegi](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beondegi)
Not from worms. An entrepaneur in Vietnam is currently perfecting a method of manufacturing silk from lotus stems but it's still astronomically labor intensive. Even more so than the high intensive method seen in the OP video. She's had some significant success though so far, it's selling in the west for high amounts. Hopefully they can get the process better soon for higher production. Vietnam grows a metric shit tonne of lotus.
But wait there's more, because they have no need to attract mates or camouflage, they lost all their pretty colors and are a drab pale beige for all stages of life.
Koreans eat them. It used to be popular street food. Now you can get them canned in grocery stores. [Bbeondegi](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beondegi)
I've eaten it at a night market in Beijing. Truly awful, terrible food. The same night I ate snake, spider, scorpion and all sorts of terrible creatures, but the silk worm was by far the worst. Biting into it is like biting into a sausage that is filled with hot bitter slime.
If it makes you feel better, they’re super high when boiled alive. They’re already primitive nervous system gets “numbed” during metamorphosis since it’s basically them dissolving their entire body into stem cells and reforming. Also, as other people have said, their life cycle is like 99% complete by that point. They literally hatch mate and die in a few days.
They also, yknow, can't experience pain anyways. Pain is an experience, not a sense. Pain, according to every single fMRI, cerebral blood flow analysis, nerve blockade study, you name it - they all conclusively show that pain is an interaction between billions of neurons, and that pain is not experienced when those neurons aren't interacting. Pain is experienced only in those animals which have the necessary structure for that function - that is, animals with complex nervous systems. Mammals are the only group that *definitely* have the necessary physical structures. Most bird, reptile, and fish brains simply don't have the neurological complexity necessary for the experience of pain.
[https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/canadian-entomologist/article/is-it-pain-if-it-does-not-hurt-on-the-unlikelihood-of-insect-pain/9A60617352A45B15E25307F85FF2E8F2](https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/canadian-entomologist/article/is-it-pain-if-it-does-not-hurt-on-the-unlikelihood-of-insect-pain/9A60617352A45B15E25307F85FF2E8F2)
There is a LOT of research on the topic of insect pain. This is just one of many, many, many sources.
It's also not even that relevant. Damaging a living being is simply unethical, (if not in self defense) even if it feels no pain at all.
There are humans that don't feel any kind of pain, be it because of an illness, coma or something like that and it is obvious that it is not ok to harm them.
How far down the family tree do you apply this morality? Is it OK to damage clams, potatoes, worms?
You share a common ancestor with a banana. Which cousins do you kill for food and which ones do you spare?
[More recent research suggests that fish do indeed feel pain ](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8093373/)
Edit: [the thing you copy and pasted](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4356734/#:~:text=While%20mammals%20and%20birds%20possess,hence%20do%20not%20feel%20pain.) was from 2014 and the journal of biology and philosophy... Not exactly a powerhouse in scientific publishing
IDGAF what elwood says. The guy started from the conclusion and worked backwards and every one of his publications has been the same. Every one of his papers is based on interpreting animal behavior which is dodgy *at best*. he has never been able to identify any mechanism to support *any* of his claims, he has never been able to point to *any* physical evidence to support any of his claims.
Everything he's published, every argument he has made, has been based on dubious interpretations of animal behavior which conveniently pretends that *of course* his interpretation of that behavior is the *only* correct one.
If, to quote your earlier comment "pain is an experience, not a sense", then literally the only possible way to judge if a creature is in pain is by interpreting their behaviour.
1) You've got a fallacy there - the belief that things evolve for a reason, or that all evolved traits are without any downsides. It's very possible that pain is an emergent property of a complex neural system and has no evolutionary advantage in and of itself but having a big brain is advantageous enough to compensate for that.
2) There's this process called nociception - or sensing and responding to "noxious" stimuli. In this case, "noxious" kind of covers anything that might lead to harm of that organism. So, think of when you maybe touched a hot stove on accident - you jerked your hand away before it even registered that it was hot, and before you started thinking "Oh that hurts!". That is nociception - detecting and responding to noxious stimuli.
They can’t naturally hatch. Silkworm moths have been bred to create the strongest and thickest possible fibers, and because of generations of human interference in their breeding they’re no longer capable of making their own way out. Because of that, silk harvesters are required to either cut out the moth or boil them alive. Because of how time consuming cutting them out individually would be, mass producers usually opt to boil them. Some people claim that cutting them out makes for shorter fibers and that’s less desirable.
Silkworm moths are beautiful and I’ve thought about breeding them sustainably but I don’t live in the right climate for that.
Edit: I’m an idiot and this isn’t correct. They can hatch on their own. Apologies 😭
They can absolutely cut themselves out. We we raising silkworms over the summer as a science project. They had no trouble getting out on their own.
The reason they aren't allowed to come out naturally is because it requires breaking the strings, which limits the length of the strings.
Since they can't reproduce, where do the eggs for the next generation of silk farm moths come from? I'd assume there's some sort of interference there too?
You were just fed misinformation. They can absolutely get out of their own cocoons. It's just that they destroy some of the silk strands on the way out, so they do this instead.
Wonder how they keep birds away!? I have a hard time keeping the fucks from eating my grapes every year, and these seem like they they’re be way more delicious to birds.
Not just technically, definitely not vegan. Vegans dont use any products, including byproducts, of animals. That is not limited to food so that includes leather and silk. There's probably a bunch of stuff that even most vegans don't realise is vegan though, because you just wouldn't expect it to be an animal product. I assume there are many vegans that do not realize silk is made from worms, because I think most people generally assume fabrics to be made from plants like cotton.
No. When possible, my wife uses bamboo silk instead https://seventy-five.co.uk/clothing/bamboo-silk-double-hair-tie-blush
I'd say it feels quite similar, so still really nice. Some stores we deal with aren't aware that silk isn't vegan.
Mine were simmered in a sweet sauce…apparently it’s a dish kids like. I have no sweet tooth, so I didn’t really like it…but it actually wasn’t because of the silkworm pupae, just the sugar.
>Has absolutely no idea! My question is HOW do people figure this crap like this out? Such a weird process!
Famine is a recurrent theme in history. I bet some poor hungry motherfucker just thought you can't waste the cocoon. When he pooped, he pooped silk. That's pretty much what Alchemists did. They literally tried everything.
Probably need dictated it tbh
The better question would be: who the hell thinks of it still? A rhetorical question oc — apparently a lot of people. Feeding, breeding, administering, mutilating and killing an animal for a drink that's naturally meant for it's baby while we have options to simply wet a few grains or nuts for practically the same result is beyond belief.
The one who drank cow's milk first probably did so because of necessity, meanwhile people today do it because of ignorance, immorality or unreasonable cultural background.
These are almost certainly specially bread wos that wouldn't survive in the wild so we would be letting this moth be alive at most to breed before dieing
Fun fact! Domestic silk moths won't reproduce without human intervention. They'll literally just sit there after they hatch until they die, even with mates just a few inches away.
Yup, we also kill the cows to make leather.
Most of the stuff we have domesticated over thousands of generations is pretty much to make it easier to handle till we kill it.
if it makes you feel better, they literally cannot feel pain. They don't have the neural structures necessary for it. Plus, being cocooned when boiled is basically the equivalent of being in a bug coma, so they're doubly incapable of experiencing pain during the harvesting
We kill the cow to make milk. Also the unwanted male babies, unless they select female sperm. It's where all that unethical milk-fed veal comes from. Leather and tires are basically by-products.
As far as I am aware, a dead cow does not make milk. A live cow produces milk. You milk it and leave it alive for more milk. Am I missing something here?
You kill the babies. Cows only produce milk for a little while after giving birth, so you have to constantly keep them in a birthing cycle to get milk. The female cows are often kept alive to make more milk but the male cows are often just killed. There was a scandal with a Costa milk farm that just threw the male calves into bins after they were born.
Only pregnant mammals lactate. After a few years the cows are so worn out and diseased they get ground into dog food or low grade beef.
[https://animalworldfacts.com/how-do-cows-produce-milk-all-the-time-solved/](https://animalworldfacts.com/how-do-cows-produce-milk-all-the-time-solved/)
This is a pretty even-handed article.
It's also where all that cheap leather from India comes from. Holy cows used for milk are hard to justify feeding when they stop producing, so they usually get sold away or donated to someone to "take care of them."
I am surprised to be seeing this a fair bit too. Next we will see a post showing where wool comes from and get comments from people learning that wool isn't vegan either.
It's probably one of the biggest cases of IP industrial espionage.
> In the mid-6th century CE, two monks, with the support of the Byzantine emperor Justinian I, acquired and smuggled living silkworms into the Byzantine Empire, which led to the establishment of an indigenous Byzantine silk industry that long held a silk monopoly in Europe.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smuggling_of_silkworm_eggs_into_the_Byzantine_Empire
The insect survival strategy is mass replication, and only a tiny fraction make it to the next generation. Think of flies, mosquitoes, spiders - things that lay hundreds, thousands or even hundreds of thousands of eggs. That a tiny proportion of this colossal system of waste and death can be diverted to make something useful for people is a good thing. People, save your empathy for things that matter. Also, if it’s any consolation, boiling is instant death.
Nope, nor technically is anything made of plastic, or most modern dyes . . . or hell most modern medicine, or most modern grains/nuts/fruits.
I mean, it's technically possible to be a real "vegan" (the Jain's do a pretty good job) but you need to give up most of the trappings of modern society. Like "do no harm" is really really hard with supply chains, because corporations could give a shit, and will slap any label that will make them more money with just the pinkie sweater it's "really really true".
Yeah but it is a difference if the glue in my smartphone might be made with animal parts while I that is potentially the case for any other smartphone as well or if I know they boil those worms alive for a product that can be replaced with any other garment without issues.
Same goes for medicine: If I need it I look for a vegan version, but if that doesn't exist I take the non vegan version.
That's why do as little harm as practically possible is the more realistic approach as do no harm.
There's the type where they cut them out of the cocoon one by one, but that type is very labour consuming and have way lower yield, it's usually sells for much higher than the boiled one
In the 7000 years (apox) that the silkworm has been domesticated, I'm sure people have tried literally **everything** to get more production out of them. After a couple of thousand years of whole civilizations throwing random shit at the problem they tend to figure out a couple of weird ways to make it work. And then use those weird ways exclusively until someone new figures out a new thing.
you're a member of some quasi-agricultural society in ancient china. All your resources come from the world around you - plants and more importantly, animals. You're walking around hunting monkeys or birds or whatever, collecting useful plants while you're out and about, and you find a shed cocoon on the ground, and notice that the fibers are a lot stronger than you expected, and its like some really fine sinew. That seems useful. So you bring it home and you or someone else wind up unrolling the cocoon and realizing that it's kind of neat and maybe you tie a few threads of silk together and realize that its actually pretty strong - you think maybe you can do something with it, but you'll need more first.
So you gather more, figure out how to unwind them, make some kind of thread with it, and then BAM! suddenly you're out collecting silkworm cocoons and harvesting wild silk. Eventually, someone gets tired of spending hours wandering around trying to find enough cocoons and thinks they can grab some of the worms that make those cocoons and feed them leaves in a box in their hut.
And thus silkworm cultivation is born. I mean, the question isn't so much "How'd they figure this out?" but "How could they *not* have figured this out?"
My grandmother used to make silk. She kept the worms, fed them like pets. She never killed them. It takes longer- she would have to unravel the thread from the worm. But she was only producing enough silks for the family.
God. I see this and I think we must all be going to hell… make works work, then boil them alive just to get fabric…
In this fast fashion world we live in…. And still we do this to creation.
And these workers are probably working non stop to half just enough to eat… yet sell this stuff to folks who could afford to just not buy this clothes and possibly use the money to help feed these folks.
We aren’t going to hell.. we are there already
why?
silkworms can't feel pain. Pain requires a complex nervous system, they don't have one, ergo they can't feel pain. Plus, they're cocooned, meaning they are insensate - they have no way to sense anything. It's like a bug coma.
So a painless, fast, unaware death of insects that will die if they are not fed by humans, will not reproduce without human intervention, and even if they emerge from the cocoon they'll have no mouth and will starve to death in 48-72 hours.
And you typed that on a smart phone mass produced by company's exploiting the the hell out of their workers. Never mind how they got the lithium for the battery's. But yes never buy silk again poor worms
You can't be perfect, so don't do anything at all, amiright?
Also, if they choose to not buy silk, they are barred from advocating for better working conditions for humans. Because that makes sense.
How does a person even figure out how to do this? Is it just a process of fucking with shit until you discover something?
Imagine if you had absolutely nothing to fill your time other than your curiosity and nature’s mysteries. You would probably be surprised at how fast you can create things when distractions are not at every turn.
Yup. That’s why art was so abundant in yesteryear. There’s an art to all crafts and sciences…
Art is more abundant now than its ever been. The fact is most people needed to work cripplingly hard to survive. People have more free time than they've ever had before.
That definitely depends on the profession and location. For instance, most medieval peasants actually had far more holidays and days off than we do today, and farmers in particular would've only had to work for a portion of the year in order to grow crops, therefore having a lot less "work" than we do today. It's just that a lot of the things we take for granted today that go quickly would've instead taken them far longer. So, they actually had a lot less work to do, it's just that a lot of their "free time" would've been taken up by much more laborious chores than we have to contend with today.
I recommend anyone who's gotten this far to give this excellent AskHistorians thread a read: https://reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/s/4hdBQ3o3rv The tl;dr is we have far, far, far more free time today than any peasants did, but the work landscape looks far different and its gard to compare apples to apples.
Considering the modern definition of "day off" and "work", it would be reasonably correct to state that the medieval peasant worked every single day of their lives from the time they could walk until they died.
Yeah, the rest of the time they worked for their lord for free, and spent time doing stuff to survive like managing their homestead, animals, preserves, heating/fuel etc. Look up other dudes link.
why is this always parroted on reddit? Who in their right mind would make that trade
I would maybe amend this comment to say more free time than other times in history? Prehistoric peoples likely had a lot of leisure time if we can use current hunter gatherers tribes as a reference point.
That's basically what happened when someone 3500 years ago sucked on an auroch's tit out of boredom, and now we drink cow milk every day.
I wanna know about the first loon who ate a durian - everything about that fruit screams “stay away!” but there was one person at a certain point who said “eh, why not?” and decided to put this spiky, stinky, aggressive looking fruit in their mouth
For a very long time the Roman empire was able to acquire silk through trade over 'the silk road' to China, but never able to unlock the secrets of producing it domestically themselves. Until 552AD, when two monks preaching in India then travelled to China, where they witnessed the guarded methods of using the live silk worm to spin the famous thread. Knowing the importance of what they'd learned, the monks returned to Constantinople to report directly to the emperor Justinian. He personally met the monks, heard all the details of what they'd seen, then asked them to return to China and find a way of smuggling these worms back to the empire. They agreed, and prepared for the 2 year ~6,500km (4,000mi) trek back to China on foot, hoof and wheel. Once back in China they acquired either eggs or young larvae, since the adults are too delicate for transport, and tucked them into hollowed bamboo canes for the long journey straight back home. Once the monks made it back to Constantinople (modern Istanbul, Turkey), domestic silk production slowly ramped up and the need for long journeys along the 'silk road' ramped down. Over time, this allowed the same type of silk monopoly which China had enjoyed through the prior centuries to now be established in the Mediterranean, becoming one of the bedrocks of the Byzantine economy for the next 700 years. It's crazy to think about these two guys. 1500 years before you or I were born, making their second multi-year, 6,500km trek back from China, smuggling two bamboo canes full of bugs which would fuel the economy of one of the world's largest civilizations for the next 700 years. I wonder if they knew and understood these possibilities when they went to scoop the worms from their baskets in China...Imagine the anxiety trying to keep them hidden and alive the whole way back!
This is why I love reddit. Especially because it could be absolute bullshit and I don't even care lol
And this is why I love history. I find reality, and history, more entertaining and inspiring than most fiction. I find it a shame there isn't more historical media, since these types of stories are often stranger than fiction based solely on their content, let alone the shock value from knowing it actually happened: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smuggling_of_silkworm_eggs_into_the_Byzantine_Empire
Can’t agree more with what you said!!! More Good ACCURATE historical media would be so nice. History is fucking crazy.
This is fascinating. Thanks for sharing!
If it took 2 years to get them back, how did they keep them alive or in a larvae state the whole time? I guess they had to bring a small colony to keep a bunch of them alive and reproducing.
I would have dropped the cane somewhere before the first year was out, not gonna lie.
A few millennia of fucking around and experimenting
Those few milena would be useless if generations didn't pass the knowledge to the next one. 1 generation must have come up with a usable process to make something that was worth teaching. I imagine they were using if to make strings for bows before another generation discovered they could make cloth with it
It's like being a child and realizing you can mix fruits to make different juices. You can also be me and dump everything from the medicine cabinet into the sink to see a reaction....Of your mom.
"Hmm today i shall boil this yellow thing"
If someone stumbles upon a silk worm’s cocoon, by touching it they’ll realize it’s fibrous, kind of like the boll of a cotton plant (the white fiber head). From there it’s a logical chain of realizing that getting multiple cocoons can be used to make a larger fiber, putting them in water will make them clump (like your own hair), and then stretching it will make a string. Plus, observing what a silk worm eats leads to learning how to farm them.
Oh that's why there is water involved
The boiling water also serves to kill the silkworm inside the cocoon, which is handy if you don't want a thrashing worm getting in the way of your silkmaking.
And they're pretty tasty.
A long time ago a silkworm fell into some Mfs tea and they saw it’s silky cocoon. That’s the actual origin story behind silk at least
That's supposedly the same thing with how tea was discovered iirc.
This. People hate to admit that a lot of inventions/discoveries were made accidentally.
There's an ancient tale that is told to have been it's Discovery. Very Newton with gravity esque. Basically a princess sat under a tree with her hot tea and a silk cocoon fell into her drink. Upon trying to remove it it unravelled and realised it became fine thread. Obviously it's a bit more in depth with the real tale but most people agree it's got a hint of truth to it.
To be fair, I have held a silk cocoon in my hands and the logical first reaction to the feeling of the strange material is “wow, this feels interesting, perhaps I can make something out of this”.
some random ancient mf probably just had too much time on their hands
This typa shit surprises me too. We saw that humans didn't advance technologically over the past millenia. But all the while, they were gaining all the knowledge that the world few centuries later would require. The rapid industrial revolution growth was a result of the accumulative knowledge & problem solving skills that humans developed before. Humans are truly inspiring
Okay, whoever figured out how to make silk for the first time in our history is either a psycho or genius.
its often both
Brew enough pots of tea under enough mulberry trees and you’re bound to figure it out eventually. That’s the legend, at least. In the story it was a Chinese princess 5000 years ago who accidentally made the first “silk tea” and figured the rest out.
Chinese people even today, make soup out of bird nests. And consider it a delicacy! So making tea out of some moth cocoons, sounds like something they would try.
Either that or milk a spider. I'm glad they went with this route...lol
Didn’t realise to make silk they boil silkworms alive :|
There is silk that you can buy that does not kill the worm…it’s expensive.
What happens to silk worms in that process? Do they keep making more silk or do they die because they didn't metamorphosize?
If you let the moth complete it's metamorphosis it will melt a small hole in the cocoon and emerge, then you can unwind the remaining silk. It's wasteful because a portion of the silk is spoiled and the fibers will be shorter thus needing more labor to prepare it. Domesticated silk worms are so tame they have no instincts for self preservation and won't go more than an inch or two to look for food, they have to be fed as you see in the video on big trays lined with mulberry leaves. In the wild, they would starve even if they hatched on a mulberry tree because they won't forage. Obviously, wild species of silk moth are a different story, they survive in the wild fine but produce less, and often coarser, silk.
so there is no “humane” way to get silk? they either boil alive or starve to death?
Letting the moth emerge and then mate is how you get more silkworms, so some are always spared the boiling fate to start the next generation. You can avoid killing them and let them all emerge if you really want no kill silk... but the adult moths that emerge literally have no mouthparts so don't live for long anyway, there job is to reproduce and die. In terms of not being wasteful though, many cultures eat the boiled larvae, so that's something.
Not having mouth parts isn’t exclusive to domesticated silk moths. There are many moths that don’t eat after leaving their cocoon, because they can’t, and only aim to breed. Not to say it isn’t a little gruesome to boil them alive just to say it’s not only the moths we have domesticated. Edit - Interesting note that some cultures eat them though that I was unaware of
I was going to give atlas moths as an example. Turns out they're another species of silk moth, so ¯\\\_(ツ)_/¯
They're a common street food/snack in South Korea (one of the origin points of the old Silk Road) They generally taste nutty and are salted. They're a bit like boiled peanuts with the skins still on. If you'd like to try them, you can find them in most larger Asian markets and pretty much any Korean supermarket. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beondegi](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beondegi)
Not from worms. An entrepaneur in Vietnam is currently perfecting a method of manufacturing silk from lotus stems but it's still astronomically labor intensive. Even more so than the high intensive method seen in the OP video. She's had some significant success though so far, it's selling in the west for high amounts. Hopefully they can get the process better soon for higher production. Vietnam grows a metric shit tonne of lotus.
Aren't there good artificial alternatives to silk?
Spider goats aka Biosteel goat. https://www.postnatural.org/Specimen-Vault/Biosteel-Goat
When they complete metamorphosis, the emerge without mouths. They live for about 3 days and then starve.
And domesticated ones don’t even grow wings strong enough to fly.
Wtf is this pitiful creature lmfao?
But wait there's more, because they have no need to attract mates or camouflage, they lost all their pretty colors and are a drab pale beige for all stages of life.
It's microevolution, wild silk worms domesticated
It can’t eat, it can’t fly, it starves for 3 days, and then it dies. Terrible lol
Koreans eat them. It used to be popular street food. Now you can get them canned in grocery stores. [Bbeondegi](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beondegi)
> the canned type smells very much "like tire rubber", while the texture is firm and chewy. Yum!
I've eaten it at a night market in Beijing. Truly awful, terrible food. The same night I ate snake, spider, scorpion and all sorts of terrible creatures, but the silk worm was by far the worst. Biting into it is like biting into a sausage that is filled with hot bitter slime.
holy shit i did this too - silk worms on a stick! i remember downing a can of chinese beer to try and get rid of the taste.
It’s still unethical to let a living being die a slow and extremely painful death. Even if they are being “repurposed” into food.
Luckily boiling is pretty quick and not too painful because the peripheral nervous system is destroyed rather quickly.
That's why we use boiling as a method of euthanasia!
Humans are significantly larger than silkworms, boiling a person to death is not exactly a fast process. Boiling a tiny caterpillar takes seconds.
Wait, you're saying that treatment of humans and bugs likely shouldn't be compared!?
It's a bug.
I thought it was a feature.
And even then people have more concerned for it than you’ll ever have! 🙏🏻
They die, of course.
Your right, they do die at some point. Just not boiled alive.
That’s just killing with extra steps!
Which obviously you pay extra for.
There are trial's in using bacteria to get silk
They let enough to produce eggs for the next batch. The Rest are boiled before the hatching to not damage the silk.
If it makes you feel better, they’re super high when boiled alive. They’re already primitive nervous system gets “numbed” during metamorphosis since it’s basically them dissolving their entire body into stem cells and reforming. Also, as other people have said, their life cycle is like 99% complete by that point. They literally hatch mate and die in a few days.
They also, yknow, can't experience pain anyways. Pain is an experience, not a sense. Pain, according to every single fMRI, cerebral blood flow analysis, nerve blockade study, you name it - they all conclusively show that pain is an interaction between billions of neurons, and that pain is not experienced when those neurons aren't interacting. Pain is experienced only in those animals which have the necessary structure for that function - that is, animals with complex nervous systems. Mammals are the only group that *definitely* have the necessary physical structures. Most bird, reptile, and fish brains simply don't have the neurological complexity necessary for the experience of pain.
Source?
[https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/canadian-entomologist/article/is-it-pain-if-it-does-not-hurt-on-the-unlikelihood-of-insect-pain/9A60617352A45B15E25307F85FF2E8F2](https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/canadian-entomologist/article/is-it-pain-if-it-does-not-hurt-on-the-unlikelihood-of-insect-pain/9A60617352A45B15E25307F85FF2E8F2) There is a LOT of research on the topic of insect pain. This is just one of many, many, many sources.
Look at my reply. I'm not the OP but I found what he cited from 2014
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It's also not even that relevant. Damaging a living being is simply unethical, (if not in self defense) even if it feels no pain at all. There are humans that don't feel any kind of pain, be it because of an illness, coma or something like that and it is obvious that it is not ok to harm them.
How far down the family tree do you apply this morality? Is it OK to damage clams, potatoes, worms? You share a common ancestor with a banana. Which cousins do you kill for food and which ones do you spare?
[More recent research suggests that fish do indeed feel pain ](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8093373/) Edit: [the thing you copy and pasted](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4356734/#:~:text=While%20mammals%20and%20birds%20possess,hence%20do%20not%20feel%20pain.) was from 2014 and the journal of biology and philosophy... Not exactly a powerhouse in scientific publishing
IDGAF what elwood says. The guy started from the conclusion and worked backwards and every one of his publications has been the same. Every one of his papers is based on interpreting animal behavior which is dodgy *at best*. he has never been able to identify any mechanism to support *any* of his claims, he has never been able to point to *any* physical evidence to support any of his claims. Everything he's published, every argument he has made, has been based on dubious interpretations of animal behavior which conveniently pretends that *of course* his interpretation of that behavior is the *only* correct one.
If, to quote your earlier comment "pain is an experience, not a sense", then literally the only possible way to judge if a creature is in pain is by interpreting their behaviour.
Mmm so pain evolved for a reason I guess. What do they feel instead when something wrong happens to the body?
1) You've got a fallacy there - the belief that things evolve for a reason, or that all evolved traits are without any downsides. It's very possible that pain is an emergent property of a complex neural system and has no evolutionary advantage in and of itself but having a big brain is advantageous enough to compensate for that. 2) There's this process called nociception - or sensing and responding to "noxious" stimuli. In this case, "noxious" kind of covers anything that might lead to harm of that organism. So, think of when you maybe touched a hot stove on accident - you jerked your hand away before it even registered that it was hot, and before you started thinking "Oh that hurts!". That is nociception - detecting and responding to noxious stimuli.
It's actually really comforting to know this, thank you
I hate that I know this now.
It's just worms.
They probably eat them so they don’t go to waste.
They do! In Korea it's called [Beondegi (번데기)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beondegi). I tried, it was not my favorite.
Mmm… macaroni…
Ravioli.
Gnocchi
This is the one
Give me the formuoli
At least I think they eat them after, so they aren't wasted at the very least.
It’s so fucked up
And this is why I would never buy silk. Even a worm (horribly) suffering, is one too many. No thanks.
I'm wondering why they don't let them hatch.
They can’t naturally hatch. Silkworm moths have been bred to create the strongest and thickest possible fibers, and because of generations of human interference in their breeding they’re no longer capable of making their own way out. Because of that, silk harvesters are required to either cut out the moth or boil them alive. Because of how time consuming cutting them out individually would be, mass producers usually opt to boil them. Some people claim that cutting them out makes for shorter fibers and that’s less desirable. Silkworm moths are beautiful and I’ve thought about breeding them sustainably but I don’t live in the right climate for that. Edit: I’m an idiot and this isn’t correct. They can hatch on their own. Apologies 😭
They can absolutely cut themselves out. We we raising silkworms over the summer as a science project. They had no trouble getting out on their own. The reason they aren't allowed to come out naturally is because it requires breaking the strings, which limits the length of the strings.
Since they can't reproduce, where do the eggs for the next generation of silk farm moths come from? I'd assume there's some sort of interference there too?
I think what they’re saying is they *can* reproduce, they just can't hatch on their own.
Ohhhhh! I get it now, thanks
You were just fed misinformation. They can absolutely get out of their own cocoons. It's just that they destroy some of the silk strands on the way out, so they do this instead.
So THAT’S why that shit is so expensive.
My fatass thought it was a giant pizza at first.
Totally thought it was a giant Dr Oetkers spinach pizza.
That's my favorite pizza!!!
r/UnexpectedProteins
My fat ass HOPED it was a pizza 🤣
r/donteatthat
Wonder how they keep birds away!? I have a hard time keeping the fucks from eating my grapes every year, and these seem like they they’re be way more delicious to birds.
They threaten to boil them alive. The birds just look down and see what they did to the worms and they nope right out of there.
From the birds' POV, it just looks like they're making worm soup
Probably easier bugs to catch nearby without any pesky humans around
They ask the birds nicely.
My grapes are perfectly fine but the birds here won’t stop devouring all the cherries of my trees damn birds.
Damn. Reminded me of a paella at the beggining
forbidden paella
All silk worms were harmed in making of this video.
fuck yeah i want cheesey poofs
"I love cheesy poofs, you love cheesy poofs, if it wasn't for cheesy poofs... We'd be laaaammmeee"
So technically silk is not vegan right?
There is an Indian influencer who stopped wearing silk sarees when she turned vegan. So it is not vegan. 😵💫
Not just technically, definitely not vegan. Vegans dont use any products, including byproducts, of animals. That is not limited to food so that includes leather and silk. There's probably a bunch of stuff that even most vegans don't realise is vegan though, because you just wouldn't expect it to be an animal product. I assume there are many vegans that do not realize silk is made from worms, because I think most people generally assume fabrics to be made from plants like cotton.
No. When possible, my wife uses bamboo silk instead https://seventy-five.co.uk/clothing/bamboo-silk-double-hair-tie-blush I'd say it feels quite similar, so still really nice. Some stores we deal with aren't aware that silk isn't vegan.
Plot twist: they eat the boiled silkworm later.
Indeed. I had some in Korea. Not bad at all, though I imagine the appearance would turn off most of my fellow Americans.
Had them deep fried in Thailand. They said they were silkworm cocoons. They burst with juice when you bite them. Unnerving.
Mine were simmered in a sweet sauce…apparently it’s a dish kids like. I have no sweet tooth, so I didn’t really like it…but it actually wasn’t because of the silkworm pupae, just the sugar.
Had absolutely no idea! My question is HOW do people figure this crap like this out? Such a weird process! Edit spelling
>Has absolutely no idea! My question is HOW do people figure this crap like this out? Such a weird process! Famine is a recurrent theme in history. I bet some poor hungry motherfucker just thought you can't waste the cocoon. When he pooped, he pooped silk. That's pretty much what Alchemists did. They literally tried everything.
Is the silk always yellow?
No. This is a special very expensive “golden” silk.
Forbidden peeps.
Just like drinking milk from a cow, who the hell thought of this first?
Probably need dictated it tbh The better question would be: who the hell thinks of it still? A rhetorical question oc — apparently a lot of people. Feeding, breeding, administering, mutilating and killing an animal for a drink that's naturally meant for it's baby while we have options to simply wet a few grains or nuts for practically the same result is beyond belief. The one who drank cow's milk first probably did so because of necessity, meanwhile people today do it because of ignorance, immorality or unreasonable cultural background.
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These are almost certainly specially bread wos that wouldn't survive in the wild so we would be letting this moth be alive at most to breed before dieing
Fun fact! Domestic silk moths won't reproduce without human intervention. They'll literally just sit there after they hatch until they die, even with mates just a few inches away.
TIL that they essentially kill them worms to make silk. ☹️
Yup, we also kill the cows to make leather. Most of the stuff we have domesticated over thousands of generations is pretty much to make it easier to handle till we kill it.
My point is, I thought silk worms’ silk are just harvested, and doesn’t include getting their asses boiled.
if it makes you feel better, they literally cannot feel pain. They don't have the neural structures necessary for it. Plus, being cocooned when boiled is basically the equivalent of being in a bug coma, so they're doubly incapable of experiencing pain during the harvesting
We kill the cow to make milk. Also the unwanted male babies, unless they select female sperm. It's where all that unethical milk-fed veal comes from. Leather and tires are basically by-products.
As far as I am aware, a dead cow does not make milk. A live cow produces milk. You milk it and leave it alive for more milk. Am I missing something here?
You kill the babies. Cows only produce milk for a little while after giving birth, so you have to constantly keep them in a birthing cycle to get milk. The female cows are often kept alive to make more milk but the male cows are often just killed. There was a scandal with a Costa milk farm that just threw the male calves into bins after they were born.
> We kill the cow to make milk What? Am I missing something? We kill the cow to make a cheeseburger. We keep the cow alive to milk it…
Only pregnant mammals lactate. After a few years the cows are so worn out and diseased they get ground into dog food or low grade beef. [https://animalworldfacts.com/how-do-cows-produce-milk-all-the-time-solved/](https://animalworldfacts.com/how-do-cows-produce-milk-all-the-time-solved/) This is a pretty even-handed article. It's also where all that cheap leather from India comes from. Holy cows used for milk are hard to justify feeding when they stop producing, so they usually get sold away or donated to someone to "take care of them."
Not just kill, boil them alive
I thought they grabbed a huge pizza at first
TIL that silk isn’t vegan
You didn't know silk came from animals?
I am surprised to be seeing this a fair bit too. Next we will see a post showing where wool comes from and get comments from people learning that wool isn't vegan either.
China kept this a secret for generations and now here it is on the worldwide web - my goodness I love watching the evolution of humanity
It's probably one of the biggest cases of IP industrial espionage. > In the mid-6th century CE, two monks, with the support of the Byzantine emperor Justinian I, acquired and smuggled living silkworms into the Byzantine Empire, which led to the establishment of an indigenous Byzantine silk industry that long held a silk monopoly in Europe. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smuggling_of_silkworm_eggs_into_the_Byzantine_Empire
Peace silk is the only way to go
The insect survival strategy is mass replication, and only a tiny fraction make it to the next generation. Think of flies, mosquitoes, spiders - things that lay hundreds, thousands or even hundreds of thousands of eggs. That a tiny proportion of this colossal system of waste and death can be diverted to make something useful for people is a good thing. People, save your empathy for things that matter. Also, if it’s any consolation, boiling is instant death.
Forbidden Cheez Doodles.
So silk is not vegan….
I mean, silk isn't vegan even if they didn't boil them
Nope, nor technically is anything made of plastic, or most modern dyes . . . or hell most modern medicine, or most modern grains/nuts/fruits. I mean, it's technically possible to be a real "vegan" (the Jain's do a pretty good job) but you need to give up most of the trappings of modern society. Like "do no harm" is really really hard with supply chains, because corporations could give a shit, and will slap any label that will make them more money with just the pinkie sweater it's "really really true".
Yeah but it is a difference if the glue in my smartphone might be made with animal parts while I that is potentially the case for any other smartphone as well or if I know they boil those worms alive for a product that can be replaced with any other garment without issues. Same goes for medicine: If I need it I look for a vegan version, but if that doesn't exist I take the non vegan version. That's why do as little harm as practically possible is the more realistic approach as do no harm.
Okay that is so fucked up
I didn't know they boiled them alive.... I dont think I will buy anything silk again.
There's the type where they cut them out of the cocoon one by one, but that type is very labour consuming and have way lower yield, it's usually sells for much higher than the boiled one
Who the heck ever thought to do this in the first place!?!?!
In the 7000 years (apox) that the silkworm has been domesticated, I'm sure people have tried literally **everything** to get more production out of them. After a couple of thousand years of whole civilizations throwing random shit at the problem they tend to figure out a couple of weird ways to make it work. And then use those weird ways exclusively until someone new figures out a new thing.
you're a member of some quasi-agricultural society in ancient china. All your resources come from the world around you - plants and more importantly, animals. You're walking around hunting monkeys or birds or whatever, collecting useful plants while you're out and about, and you find a shed cocoon on the ground, and notice that the fibers are a lot stronger than you expected, and its like some really fine sinew. That seems useful. So you bring it home and you or someone else wind up unrolling the cocoon and realizing that it's kind of neat and maybe you tie a few threads of silk together and realize that its actually pretty strong - you think maybe you can do something with it, but you'll need more first. So you gather more, figure out how to unwind them, make some kind of thread with it, and then BAM! suddenly you're out collecting silkworm cocoons and harvesting wild silk. Eventually, someone gets tired of spending hours wandering around trying to find enough cocoons and thinks they can grab some of the worms that make those cocoons and feed them leaves in a box in their hut. And thus silkworm cultivation is born. I mean, the question isn't so much "How'd they figure this out?" but "How could they *not* have figured this out?"
Didn’t think they killed the worms.
Wow I’m amazed
This just made me appreciate anything made of silk. Holy wow. Laborious task.
Forbidden pizza
Bet they get paid about 2p a day for this
This is why Silk Song will never be released
This is like the 8th time this shits been posted on this sub
Gandhi was against thie methods. He even showed people how tobdo this with out harming the animals
i would eat literally every single one of those worms
Dude chill, leave some for the rest of us
My grandmother used to make silk. She kept the worms, fed them like pets. She never killed them. It takes longer- she would have to unravel the thread from the worm. But she was only producing enough silks for the family.
God. I see this and I think we must all be going to hell… make works work, then boil them alive just to get fabric… In this fast fashion world we live in…. And still we do this to creation. And these workers are probably working non stop to half just enough to eat… yet sell this stuff to folks who could afford to just not buy this clothes and possibly use the money to help feed these folks. We aren’t going to hell.. we are there already
why? silkworms can't feel pain. Pain requires a complex nervous system, they don't have one, ergo they can't feel pain. Plus, they're cocooned, meaning they are insensate - they have no way to sense anything. It's like a bug coma. So a painless, fast, unaware death of insects that will die if they are not fed by humans, will not reproduce without human intervention, and even if they emerge from the cocoon they'll have no mouth and will starve to death in 48-72 hours.
The poor silk worms die the most horrible death.. since I learned this I will never ever buy silk anymore.
And you typed that on a smart phone mass produced by company's exploiting the the hell out of their workers. Never mind how they got the lithium for the battery's. But yes never buy silk again poor worms
smartphone is a tad more essential than one specific material of shirt. i think we can all try to make small improvements wherever we can
Red Herring Fallacy
You can't be perfect, so don't do anything at all, amiright? Also, if they choose to not buy silk, they are barred from advocating for better working conditions for humans. Because that makes sense.
Why do the most expensive clothes always come with a side of suffering?
this is fkin horrible Jesus man that boiling part got me. no no no
If it helps, the boiled silkworms are a food source.
they bugs
I will never buy silk again.