Comments by "DynamicWorlds" (@dynamicworlds1) on "Tasting History with Max Miller" channel.

because lead is an amazingly useful metal that can be put to such a wide range of applications due to its range of beneficial chemical and material properties. If not for the fact that its poisonous (to the point, as we have learned in modern times, that there is no "safe" level of lead exposure) we would still be using it everywhere. Many of the applications we put it to have only found suitable replacements in the chemistry and metallurgy of the last century and still they're often not quite as good as lead (if you ignore the poisoning issue, of course, which we should not) The fact that they didn't fully understand the harm of widespread low levels of lead exposure is the other half of the answer to that question (but even after we did in the 20th century we still had to fight to get people to stop using it because it was just so damn useful). Also for perspective, we knew about the harm CO2 was doing about 5 decades ago and we're still burning it for many of the same reasons.
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I'd like to add that one of the first modern artifical sweetners was discovered by someone accidentally tasting some of a chemical he had on his fingers (and this was a modern lab with all the "never taste or dirrectly smell anything" rules). IMO, it probably was created by accident when creating salted fish and then iterated on to improve it.
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@haegger666 there's no possible way to know this for sure, but I'd bet the first human to drink non-human milk was a baby with desperate parent(s). How we got from that to cheese, though, I don't know enough about prehistoric food preservation to make a good guess at, especially without knowing if cheese or adult lactose tolerance came first. Edit: dark truth though: most human discoveries of what wasn't unsafe to eat likely came from babies and little kids stuffing random things in their mouths (as they are want to do) and some of them not dieing.
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@coppulor6500 if memory serves, MSG was discovered by a Japanese guy isolating a component of seaweed. Side note: almost all citric acid added to foods is produced in a lab. Once you're drilling down to specific chemicals, however, it's all identical. The water molicules in the clouds retain no memory of if they came from a crystal clear spring, evaporation off of some form of foulness, or a fire. Only physically measurable properties like momentum are retained.
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@dcgregorya5434 I mean, while you're not wrong, we put lead to some fairly trivial uses fairly recently (and the comment I was actually replying to seems to be from a channel that has been deleted for some reason, so context is missing)
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