Natto

Reading James' post about how people could have discovered using fat, which is usually very dirty and somewhat repulsive, to make soap and clean things with made me think about something I have long pondered. Who decided that natto was an okay thing to eat?
Seriously. Every year on new years day, we go to my grandma's house and she makes ozoni - mochi soup, and my grandpa and uncle crack open a container of natto, much to the dismay of pretty much everyone within the smelling radius of the slimy, fermented soy beans. I have always wondered how people can eat that with it smelling so foul and looking so rotten, because it actually is rotten, in a way. If I lived in feudal Japan and were presented with something that someone said was food but smelled and looked like natto does, I would have probably refused to have anything to do with it just as I do now. Unless of course I was utterly starving. But anyway, why would somene choose to eat it? How did the first person to eat it know that it wasn't going to make them sick?
In an attempt to answer my own question about the origins of natto and other related info to the natto, I of course went directly to wikipedia. The most reasonable explanation for it is that people were in fact starving and ate the soy beans after several days even though they were fermented. They tasted good to the starving japanese and became a regular part of the japanese diet.