Doing things as we were told to is sometimes called "following tradition". Traditional knowledge can be based in superstition or valid information that's out of date, but it can also be based on things that remain relevant.
e.g. Bitter cassava is a staple crop in parts of South America and Africa. Unlike apple seeds, it contains substantial quantities of cyanide. It's a great crop because you can plant it and forget it. No need for fences. Animals won't eat it. A chemist would be hard-pressed to come up with a more effective method for removing cyanide from it than some of the traditional methods of cooking it. However, problems arise when people cook and consume it in non-traditional ways.
Traditional knowledge can be both constraining and protective. It's like a fence whose purpose you don't know. Tearing it down is a gamble. You might win. You might lose. It's probably not a bad idea to try to figure out why a tradition is there before you mess around.
There are a lot of examples of this in the book The Secret of Our Success (which argues that human cultures have a lot of culturally-evolved knowledge which individuals would be very unlikely to develop in a single generation, and which often provides benefits for reasons that aren't consciously understood by the actual members of the culture, while occasionally including some noise or bad advice).
Many of those are traditions or ritual behaviors that decrease the chance of poisoning, sometimes subtle chronic poisoning rather than obvious acute poisoning.
> It's probably not a bad idea to try to figure out why a tradition is there before you mess around.
Interestingly, I think the rest of your comment supports exactly the opposite message. Traditional food preparation is the way it is for excellent reasons, that's true.
And what's also true is that you have absolutely no hope of determining what those reasons are. You can mess around and see if you get problems. But if you don't do that, you'll never have any idea what's behind the traditions. Investigating the question before messing around would be a gigantic waste of time and effort.
Chesterton's Fence
https://fs.blog/chestertons-fence/