Cinnamon and sumac are two common spices that are made from grinding up tree bark.
Wood smells like we should be able to eat it, but we can't.
Submitted 3 months ago by hperrin@lemmy.world to showerthoughts@lemmy.world
Comments
aphlamingphoenix@lemm.ee 3 months ago
echodot@feddit.uk 3 months ago
Also ginger.
And technically wormwood too, although that’s more you drinking water that is soaked into wood.
die444die@lemmy.world 3 months ago
Ginger is a root, maybe you’re thinking of something else?
pbbananaman@lemmy.world 3 months ago
You using a different kind of sumac than the rest of us? en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sumac#In_food
aphlamingphoenix@lemm.ee 3 months ago
I stand corrected on that one. I assumed it was sumac bark, and you know what they say about assumption. It makes an ass out of u and mption.
Fermion@feddit.nl 3 months ago
The bit about powdered sumac (bark?) being a powerful dye for marble is pretty interesting. I wish there was an example photo.
Willdrick@lemmy.world 3 months ago
That’s what whiskey is for
Muscar@discuss.online 3 months ago
And smoking anything, it’s definitely part of food as a taste just not as an ingredient.
nomous@lemmy.world 3 months ago
Being used to make the fire/smoke that cooks the food is a really good point, wood is definitely food adjacent even if it’s not strictly edible.
lord_ryvan@ttrpg.network 3 months ago
It what? Who thinks wood smells edible?
Illuminostro@lemmy.world 3 months ago
Maple smells like sugar when cut. Maple syrup used to be made of the sap.
hperrin@lemmy.world 3 months ago
We burn different kinds of wood under our food to make them taste like that wood. Mesquite, apple, hickory, all come to mind. Wood smells really good.
intensely_human@lemm.ee 3 months ago
My friend Winona for one
DarkCloud@lemmy.world 3 months ago
The big brown beaver?
Lexam@lemmy.ca 3 months ago
If you’ve eaten shredded cheese from the store, then you’ve eaten wood.
Aurenkin@sh.itjust.works 3 months ago
Eating shredded cheese and wood is certainly a lifestyle
antlion@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 months ago
Maple syrup is tree blood. Kind like tree vampirism.
I don’t think wood smells like food. But I wonder… apparently termites have a bunch of gut bacteria to digest wood. Maybe if you eat raw termites and bark beetles, you can then eat some sawdust. If you continue the process eventually you may be able to eat wood or paper with your own gut biome. Maybe start with a termite, sawdust, and banana smoothie and move up from there. Best of luck.
Anyolduser@lemmynsfw.com 3 months ago
“Tree vampirism”? Naw dude, we boil the tree blood down first. It’s concentrated tree vampirism.
intensely_human@lemm.ee 3 months ago
Kinda like centrifuge blood taffy?
suction@lemmy.world 3 months ago
Oh, you mean CTV?
olafurp@lemmy.world 3 months ago
Yeah, it stops being healthy because it’s ultra processed.
JasonDJ@lemmy.zip 3 months ago
5/7 with rice. Thank you for the suggestion.
Prok@lemmy.world 3 months ago
A grading scale like no other
muntedcrocodile@lemm.ee 3 months ago
U can eat it. Its just not particularly nutritious or paletable.
blanketswithsmallpox@lemmy.world 3 months ago
I still wonder why if we need more fiber in our diets we don’t just toss wood pulpnin everything.
Apparently supplemented fiber gives you colon cancer though.
Akareth@lemmy.world 3 months ago
The study that your article references is a mouse study, so the relevance to humans is questionable.
In addition, fiber is shown to be beneficial to humans primarily when comparing the standard American diet to a high-fiber diet. This is likely because fiber is mostly non-digestable by humans (as we’ve lost the ability to digest fiber more than 2-million years ago unlike our closest living great-ape cousins), and acts as a physical barrier to the absorption of sugars and starches which also helps to lower insulin spikes.
If you do not eat a high-carb diet (such as a ketogenic diet), then eliminating the undigestable matter (i.e. fiber) from your diet is probably beneficial because you’ll be able to absorb more nutrients and get rid of constipation-related issues.
muntedcrocodile@lemm.ee 3 months ago
A lot of processed foods do have wood pulp in it. Often labeled celulose to hide that they just putting wood pulp in ur food.
acannan@programming.dev 3 months ago
For the majority of human history, we’ve eaten around wood (around a campfire, a hearth, etc), it makes sense it would become intertwined with our food palette
bjoern_tantau@swg-empire.de 3 months ago
Skill issue.
BlackJerseyGiant@lemmy.world 3 months ago
We can, and do, eat wood. It’s listed as “cellulose” in the ingredients, and it’s in everything. Your ice cream, your bread, probably up in yo closet doin your Mamma right now
hperrin@lemmy.world 3 months ago
That’s made from plants, including trees, but that’s not really what I’m talking about.
suction@lemmy.world 3 months ago
Daaayum
abbadon420@lemm.ee 3 months ago
Wood is notoriously hard to digest. After wood evolved, it took millions of years before funghi and bacteria evolved the ability to decompose it. And that’s why we have oil now.
AnyOldName3@lemmy.world 3 months ago
Coal, not oil, but it’s still an interesting fact.
ripcord@lemmy.world 3 months ago
There was a point during that millions of years where there were areas of thousands of feet deep layers of dead trees. It still boggles my mind.
Amanduh@lemm.ee 3 months ago
Would you be willing to find a good article explaining this further? This sounds really neat and I’d like to know how scientists figured this out :O
magikmw@lemm.ee 3 months ago
Wood is the reason for climate change!
intensely_human@lemm.ee 3 months ago
And now these hippies want to plant even more trees.
intensely_human@lemm.ee 3 months ago
(the oil helps us digest wood)
xep@fedia.io 3 months ago
I'm... not so sure about this. Also we can eat paper and that's just mashed up wood, right?
hperrin@lemmy.world 3 months ago
We can consume it, but we can’t digest it.
otter@lemmy.ca 3 months ago
We also should consume it, or other types of dietary fibre
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3614039/
Not that we should gnaw on wood like beavers, but maybe that’s why some indigestible foods also feel “edible”
obre@lemmy.world 3 months ago
You can bake sawdust into bread lol youtu.be/MTC_ETWa3JA
GingeyBook@lemm.ee 3 months ago
Or a Rice Crispy if you’d rather
Taako_Tuesday@lemmy.ca 3 months ago
Also if you believe the stories ive heard from pizza chains like Papa Johns and Domino’s, sawdust is regularly added to pizza dough to make it cheaper to produce
Thorny_Insight@lemm.ee 3 months ago
You can. I know a guy who eats a birch log every year. He literally sits on the couch pulling splinters from the log and chews on them. He also grinds his egg shells and mixes with oatmeal.
ThrowawaySobriquet@lemmy.world 3 months ago
Are you sure your friend isn’t just three beavers in a long coat?
ripcord@lemmy.world 3 months ago
This sounds like a terrible idea in the long-term.
zaphod@sopuli.xyz 3 months ago
Why? It’s basically just fiber.
intensely_human@lemm.ee 3 months ago
Wood is a renewable resource
OutlierBlue@lemmy.ca 3 months ago
Why wood he do such a thing?
Pandantic@midwest.social 3 months ago
Is this a thing? Why does he do it?
Thorny_Insight@lemm.ee 3 months ago
He believes there’s some health benefits to it
FartsWithAnAccent@fedia.io 3 months ago
OP confirmed for beaver with dental issues.
It might interest you to know that we do eat wood when we eat that sprinkled parmesan or romano cheese in the plastic containers: It contains wood to prevent the cheese from clumping (and it counts as fiber)
Cosmonaut_Collin@lemmy.world 3 months ago
Thank God I can eat cheese to get my fill of wood for the day.
scutiger@lemmy.world 3 months ago
If you consider cellulose to be wood, sure. They don’t put actual wood in there.
Pandantic@midwest.social 3 months ago
All shredded cheeses, I believe.
scutiger@lemmy.world 3 months ago
Many shredded cheeses are mixed with corn and/or potato starches rather than cellulose (which is not wood either)
Ballistic_86@lemmy.world 3 months ago
I’m guessing it sort of came from the fact that we cook food with burning wood. Less so now, but burning wood meant cooked food for 200k years.
I don’t think wood smells like it is edible, but a fire can remind me of food through smell.
GraniteM@lemmy.world 3 months ago
There are plenty alcohols, like whiskey and wine, that are supposed to have “oaky” flavors due to the barrels they’re kept in.
SatansMaggotyCumFart@lemmy.world 3 months ago
Have you ever made love to a greased up knot in a tree trunk?
Zahille7@lemmy.world 3 months ago
Tek-knight has
pyre@lemmy.world 3 months ago
uhhhhh what
thorbot@lemmy.world 3 months ago
No it doesn’t
cupcakezealot@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 months ago
Etterra@lemmy.world 3 months ago
Hey nobody’s stopping you from gnawing on some cedar shavings my dude.
captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works 3 months ago
I spent the day making a planter box out of cedar, and it doesn’t smell like food even a little.
ascense@lemm.ee 3 months ago
This comes to mind: en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bark_bread
systemglitch@lemmy.world 3 months ago
This should be an unpopular opinion instead, because almost no one associates the smell with a desire to eat it.
rozodru@lemmy.world 3 months ago
who smells wood and thinks “you know what? I want to slap that pine tree on my pancake”?
EnderWiggin@lemmy.world 3 months ago
The cambium of many different trees is perfectly edible.
suction@lemmy.world 3 months ago
Please don’t make this reddit.
hogmomma@lemmy.world 3 months ago
Call me weird, but I have never once salivated to the smell of any wood.
suction@lemmy.world 3 months ago
All the 10s in my neighborhood love to gobble on my wood, though?
MHanak@lemmy.world 3 months ago
A beaver wrote this
levi@awful.systems 3 months ago
😆😆… This is so creative…
MHanak@lemmy.world 3 months ago
To be fair like every good joke i stole this one
intensely_human@lemm.ee 3 months ago
We gotta keep it from being upvoted too far
suction@lemmy.world 3 months ago
Huh, always had Beavers down as ThinkPad T-Series users…
TimewornTraveler@lemm.ee 3 months ago
don’t beavers eat wood