Comment on Anon thinks about wheat
Dojan@pawb.social 2 days agoI would’ve thought there were at least lingonberries over there? Lingon preserves have been around and ubiquitous enough since at least around the 1600s here in Sweden. In addition to that, off the top of my head there’s also blueberries, juniper, and at some point rose hips were introduced. Depending on where you are you could harvest cloudberries. In late spring/early summer you could harvest pine needles, as well as young pine cones.
In some part of China (Yunnan I think, but I could be wrong) they also harvest pine pollen, though I’ve not heard of that practise around here.
Granted, the ecology is decently different between Sweden and Norway, if they actually lived on a hunk of rock with no forest in sight I’d assume it’d be hard to get berries.
thebestaquaman@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Oh, don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of berries around. You can pick 10 L of blueberries in not too many man-hours, the same goes for cloud berries. Lingon berries are also abundant for that matter.
As mentioned, they definitely had these things as part of their diet, but it was nowhere near being a primary calorie source. The reason for that is probably that fishing or harvesting seagull eggs was a much, much more efficient way to get the calories you need. When you’re already sustenance farming, you typically maximise efficiency when possible. My primary point was really that when maximising calorie-efficiency (which they largely did) you end up living primarily off boiled fish and boiled potatoes.
porous_grey_matter@lemmy.ml 6 hours ago
I see you’ve all already had the discussion but my point wasn’t really to say that they were the main source of calories or something. But a small part of the diet can still make an important contribution to nutrition, particularly when it comes to vitamins.
thebestaquaman@lemmy.world 3 hours ago
Oh, that’s definitely true! I was honestly surprised at how much response I got to what was initially meant as a semi-joke :)
Dojan@pawb.social 2 days ago
Aye, this makes sense. You can pickle fish just as easily as you can create berry preserves, and ultimately the goal is to have enough calories around to get you through winter, the more efficiently you spend your time the better I suppose.
thebestaquaman@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Preserving fish is great! You can salt it, dry it, ferment it, smoke it, pickle it, soak it in lye (we have a dedicated word for that), aand that’s about it :D