It is so boring. I have never been interested in it. My people call it Yucca. Indians call it kappa. People in northern countries may be familiar with starch and cassava flour extracted from cassava.
It is popular because of its high yield, which produces more heat per unit land than corn, rice, sorghum, wheat, sweet potato and most other crops. This enables farmers to feed their families on small plots of land without too much fertilizer. Its biggest disadvantage is the low content of protein, vitamins and minerals. This means that it is usually food for the poor.
It's poisonous.
What many people don't realize is that many varieties contain one kind of cyanide, called linamarin, and the other is called lotus element. Cyanide means to produce cyanide. People who have studied chemistry will easily recognize the structural part of linarin. On the upper right, it produces cyanide (C and N are connected by three lines) [3].
Cyanide is a deadly poison. Some species planted by human beings, as well as wild species originally cultivated by human beings, all contain toxic linarin.
Be sure to clean all kinds of toxic cassava food carefully before eating it safely. This poster describes a step to do this. It's complicated Somehow, people discovered how to do this many centuries ago.
There are other ways to detoxify. This is a summary. Please note that they are all complicated and involve multiple steps. Not everyone can find it by accident.
Should we avoid buying?
Now all products sold in American supermarkets are non-toxic unless they have special labels. Eating these varieties won't kill you. Google search will give you many interesting recipes and attractive dishes, just like this one. For Indian recipes, please refer to kappa or cassava curry.
How did our ancestors find it edible?
Interestingly, people find that if you treat it first, you can live on it. Naturally, people may try it, get sick and never eat it again. But people have found an edible method.
This plant seems to have originated in Amazon [8] and distributed all over the world after 1492. The first person to find out how to remove toxins must be the Native Americans who lived there. We don't know whether Amazon's processing methods spread with this plant, but because people all over the world use different methods to make cassava, all these different people may have discovered each method by themselves.
A complicated factor is that people eat the leaves of this plant; They provide more protein, vitamins and minerals than roots. But leaves are also poisonous and must be processed before they can be eaten. (In the comments section, Martinho Isequiel describes a method. Someone must know the process.