Submitted 8 hours ago by fossilesque@mander.xyz to science_memes@mander.xyz
https://mander.xyz/pictrs/image/4337350e-fd73-4657-9863-1c89a378318d.png
Ok I’ll bite (literally), how does a person break into this niche, since it is definitely not a market? My engineering degrees did not heavily cover edible plants in my area? I can go find morel mushrooms and identify sassafras but that about covers it.
If I could buy like a ring of +4 to local botany that would be best I think.
On android you can use an app called “PlantNet” to take a picture of a plant and find out what it is. I’ve learned about many of the plants growing around me this way and have found new edible things. Garlic mustard is a good example. It’s invasive but edible and pretty good, so eating it is also protecting local ecology.
Chanterelles and at least some species of Leccinum are pretty good too.
Look into local berries. Maybe something is edible.
Best is to find people who live off the land and still remember what their forefathers taught them about edible plants or mushrooms. If you’re in the US and have a reservation nearby, maybe they keep the old wisdom alive? Idk I’m not American, the only thing I got off a native American was weed.
In countries where there are people dedicated to keeping tradition alive, it’s easier to find someone to ask I think. Here in Estonia a lot of people collect mushrooms and shit, so a lot of passionate people to ask about their hobby.
Although RFKjr has some crazy ideas, not adding food colouring to the balanced diet pyramid is not one of them, and one that any other GOP fascist loyalist, given the job, would gladly do it if given a dollar for it. Energy secretary as an example is full oligarchist energy protectionism.
This is dumb. Most plants resist cultivation. Bragging about being able to afford them does not make you Superior.
Resist cultivation or have some other undesirable properties. Often low yield, short harvest, low yield, difficult picking or transporting.
A favorite example of mine: oak’s acorns are sometimes edible. Roughly one in ten oaks produce edible acorns. They are indistinguishable from inedible ones unless you try them out - but inedible ones are fairly poisonous. The gene for edible acorns is recessive and it takes at least a decade before you know if a newly planted oak produces edible acorns or not, with a 10% probability of the former. It is just practically impossible to select for this criterion. Thus, we don’t eat acorns.
I thought we eat acorns after processing them? There are cuisines which involve acorns as main ingredient.
You just remove the tannins by soaking them, it’s not really a major problem. I tried it before, they were fine but fairly bland.
Often low yield, short harvest, low yield, difficult picking or transporting.
And let’s not forget, low yield.
Isn’t acorn flour edible after you rinse out the toxins?
Acorns are like the easiest thing to forage, though.
They are high in tannins, which your body is pretty good at processing in reasonable quantities (they’re in tea, coffee, and wine), but many acorns DO have unreasonable quantities of them and they can cause organ damage. Luckily, tannins are water soluble, so you just need to crack them open and soak them in water for a few days, then rinse and they’re safe to eat.
Let the deer and squirrels and wild pigs eat the acorns, then eat the deer and squirrels and wild pigs. Easy!
I mean, I think that goes back to the whole “industrial farming” point. If it can’t be farmed, it won’t be commercially available. But there are plenty of plants that you could scavenge, if you knew what to look for.
One of my personal favorite niche plants is osha root. It’s one of the best cures for a sore throat. It tastes a little bit like dirty root beer, and it’ll numb your entire throat when you chew on it. Native Americans kept some around for medicine. You can even grind it up and smear it on shallow scrapes to numb the area. You can find it in teas like Throat Coat, which is a sort of secret weapon for performers and public speakers whenever they have a sore throat.
But it can’t be commercially farmed, because it exclusively grows in the Rocky Mountains where a specific type of fungus helps it thrive. It isn’t commercially viable to market to the masses like throat lozenges, (even though it is just as effective in reducing sore throats) because it has to be scavenged.
Isn’t that what they meant by industrial agriculture preventing widespread use?
I think the point is it doesn’t prevent wide spread use. If a plant resists cultivation then it’s not worth it to try to farm, either industrially or in your back yard. Especially if you’re trying to farm for sustenance.
Lamb’s lettuce superiority! They don’t need cultivation, grow everywhere even if you don’t want them to grow, and they are quite edible, also delicious.
i tried to use corn syrup as a vegan honey substitute for a glaze of spiced nuts for roasted carrots and let me tell you that corn taste is a bit off and I really should have just like idk made a simple syrup with sugar or something
i wish vegans would just eat honey it’s just bees I didn’t vote to consider bugs animals (but even though I disagree i’m not gonna feed people honey like the cooks I work with who sometimes “forget” it isn’t vegan)
Eat your weeds… This is Common Purslane:
It grows mostly everywhere and is a huge source of Omega 3 fatty acids. It’s much better cooked in my opinion. Also it’s best to find them in a field and not by the roadside where it may be leeching up god knows what hydrocarbon adjacent type of poisons.
I think I have these in my yard. The ones I have grow along the ground like vines almost, strong stems and such. I’ll have to check when I get home but thats really cool, thanks for sharing!
I pulled so many of these boogers out of the garden this summer
Non-vegans when you let them know there’s more you can eat outside meat and dairy products
I can’t say I know anyone that loves on an entirely meat and dairy diet.
Even I eat potatoes sometimes.
I tried it for a couple of months. I felt great on it, but it got really fucking boring
That sounds like a malnourished human
I’m a vegan and I barely know about all this stuff. I love all the tips everyone’s sharing here though!
I harvest stinging nettle to use as a spinach replacement
I’m going to try to make maple syrup from big leaf maples this year too!
I mostly eat spinach now for potassium, but I just looked it up and stinging needle has only 25% lower potassium content than spinach, so at least for my use case it seems like a fairly good substitute seeing as how well stinging needle grow.
How do they taste? Do they not, uh, sting with the little spikes?
I got then popping up all around.
If you cook them they stop stinging.
My mother makes pasta with them too, puts them in the dough.
I blanch them and then freeze them. So no stinging!
there are some other problems too. I would love to scavenge or grow things here, but the town I live in is basically built on a gigantic industrial waste dump, so eating anything out of the ground here is a bad idea.
That’s what the government says. But I know the truth - I know it’s the queers! They are in it with the aliens to build landing strips for GAY MARTIANS! I swear to god!
I like you Stewart, you’re not like the other people. Here in the trailer park.
Define edible
I mean there probably are lots of reasons why we farm only certain plants.
For example dewberries have short harvest window and as far as i know they need to be hand picked.
There are many reasons, but it all comes down to economics: how easy and cheap it is to farm and harvest, yield size, does it require refrigeration during transport, what’s the shelf life, etc. Unfortunately optimizing for economics rarely pairs well with user interests, e.g. How nutricious the food is.
Which is why until modern farming some of the most nutritionally balanced people’s were hunter gatherers and pastoralists. The big advantage of farming vs ranching or pastoralism is that you can feed a lot of people for relatively little work, this rule of thumb is still true it’s just that we can now do it on such a massive scale that a lot of the downsides have simply been overwhelmed.
Even if two species existed that had similar soil, water and sun requirements, had similar properties regarding taste, processability, etc., it would still be easier to farm just one instead of breeding both for milennia and splitting the means of production.
Until a disease pops up, that targets your only crop. Example A: bananas.
Blackberries are pretty rampant here in the UK. Always wondered why you guys didn’t have it- Seems they were banned in the US until recently due to some fungus.
Just to be clear, you mean blackcurrants, yes? Blackberry means something quite different, at least over here.
Yeah, I pick some every year. Also cherry plums grow quite a bit near me, along with some apple trees and loads of sloes.
Or why don’t we use all our technological, scientific and research knowledge to good use and engineer fruits and vegetables that can grow in less hospitable environments and can grow larger yields, have a longer growing season and have plenty of nutritional value.
Instead, we use all our knowledge and ability to build bigger, faster, more deadly weapons of war or AI that can micromonitor everyone’s lives or create slop and porn.
Hi, I’m engaged to someone who studies chickpea and other legumes. Shitloads of money goes into agriculture every year and from my understanding, what you’re describing is being done by some brilliant people (I’m a bit biased). However there’s so many concerns around GMOs doing damage to the environment that it is tightly regulated. Doubly also, Americans don’t have the same ready access to grocery stores that other first world countries have.
Plus the equivalent of flat earthers exist that believe that GMOs will kill us all and we need to go back to eating only what nature created (somewhat hyperbole, there are valid concerns but people have been irrational).
An example is that chickpea and other legumes reintroduces nitrogen into soil after it the soil loses vitality, which makes chickpea a good intermediate crop that can be grown in between others. Its high in nutrients. So yeah, stop eating corn and eat legumes.
(I’m not the molecular biologist so if I got stuff wrong, sorry, I will pay more attention when my partner speaks)
We do both. The problem is corporations and stupid people. See Monsanto, the non-GMO push and the results of golden rice or similar.
It isn’t all industrial agriculture. There is also the enclosure of the commons meaning that foraging is illegal in a lot of places.
“ CaPiTaLiSm bReEdS InNoVaTiOn “
Do people (in general) really only eat 100 different plants? I feel like that number must be too low. Surely if you listed out all the plant foods that people consider “normal”, there would easily be more than 100.
Might be considering all Brassica as one.
I recently found out you can eat nettles (the ones that sting you), and they actually taste nice.
lots of iron in them
Can make tea out of them aswell
Nettle and potato soup is delicious.
Good source of potassium as well. Although you’d need to eat 1.25 kilo to reach 100% recommended daily intake.
What’s the definition of “good source” employed here?
You only need to plant sorrel in your garden once. It’s the ultimate volunteer crop. Quite winter-hardy too, and perennial, plus it tastes like lemon. Halfway between an herb and a green.
My daughter is kind of becoming a horticulturalist and recently taught me that sumac (there are non-poison varieties) can make something akin to lemonade if you dip the berries into water and then filter the water back. They have a citric-acid-like outer shell that dissolves in water.
And we’ve eaten so many mushrooms and stuff - thanks to communities on the internet who have categorized lookalikes, where to steer clear of certain types (white mushrooms, don’t even bother. Half of them will kill you)
Dewberries are so fucking delicious. I used to go pick them and make dewberry pie as a kid. God I miss that, ghey don’t grow where I live rn 😔
There’s so much hogweed all over the UK that’s just sitting there, uneaten. Not the giant stuff, that’s not a fun time. But the regular stuff has good flavour
Hey, there’s some of that in my garden!
It’s growing right next to some giant hogweed though.
A lot of Lebanese shops sell sorrel. Sorrel is just clovers. 50% of people setting this meme are 100 meters or less from sorrel right now.
Sorrel is not clovers. Sorrel are commonly used in cooking here in Europe while clovers, not so much. That being said, both are hardy and easy to cultivate.
my grandmother picks sorrels on the way home and makes sorrel soup. When I was a kid, i remember we would eat them when we we’re playing outside. We knew where all the crunchy ones had grown and not share with anyone that was unworthy
Sorrel can give you kidney stones. As kids, we were told not to eat too much of it.
Ahhh, OK, that’s my bad. I was thinking of some other name for clover. I’ve cooked with sorrel before, it’s nice. Same for clovers, nice lemony flavor.
Thanks for the correction.
The staple foods we’ve chosen to cultivate are all energy dense. Overheard a client talking to another guy he hadn’t seen in years, “Yeah, got diabetes. Can’t eat any white foods. :(”
That really got me thinking. Rice, potatoes, wheat and corn. The core desirability is energy.
Add something like beans to fix nitrogen and add missing nutrients, you’re all set.
Here I go thinking about the three sisters again.
If you can’t kill it or fuck it then eat it. It’s that easy.
Why can’t I have 1 thing where all 3 are possible?
You can if you’re a spider
SEX! AND VIOLENCE!
If the word “prefer” is in this meme, we might need another pass for tone.
Getting an allotment, so soon I will be able to grow things I don’t normally eat because they are expensive or aren’t sold in shops here.
Can anyone recommend anything to watch out for in BCs lower mainland? (Climate similar to Seattle)
Pretty sure it’s lack of cultivation and selective breading. That usually takes a couple of human lifespans (even of you’re born into a family with the land/tools to do it).
xylogx@lemmy.world 42 minutes ago
Paw paws grow naturally in the area I live and are a delicious fruit. Due to cultivation and transport issues you will never find them in stores.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asimina_triloba
nomy@lemmy.zip 23 minutes ago
I love seeing the explosion of interest in pawpaws over the last decade. They’re very good, a bit of a cross between mango and a banana. I’ve actually seen them at a local fsrmers market this season, I was pretty surprised.