Submitted 5 months ago by fossilesque@mander.xyz to science_memes@mander.xyz
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Some local plants might be edible and even delicious, but they are either way to costly to grow or harvest, or they are nigh impossible to preserve.
Pearl Onions are a borderline case, for example. Between harvest and sitting in the pickling juice they only have a few hours (3-6, IIRC), or they are a case for the compost heap.
Some are acquired tastes like e.g. turnip tops. You could probably harvest tons of them, but there is no real market for it.
Transportability is a huge consideration. Pawpaws can’t be transported nationally, for example. The plants we eat have been bred for maximum marketability, which includes getting the produce from where it grows to where people need it.
Exactly. Instead of complaining people can just grow them themselves. It’s not like commercial growers have a monopoly on growing food.
I planted my garden this year and then had that realization, so I divorced my husband and lost my garden. I went back and grabbed all the veggies from it 3 months later: some small potatoes, some peppers, small onions, and I grabbed my baby strawberry plants that survived the summer without regular watering. My ex has admitted he let my garden die. Be the change you want to see in the world
I live in a subtropical climate and it seems like most typical garden plants are not really good for our weather, it’s too hot for some and too wet for many who like hot.
Our winners are:
Trees- starfruit, longan, mango, papaya all do well.
Garden -
summer, wet season - Okra mostly. Hong Tsoi, Eggplant (little ones) Watermelon (little ones) sweet potato (Stokes Purple), tomatoes, basil.
winter, dry season- Collards, peppers, broccoli (Green Magic) cauliflower, arugula, fennel, lettuce, radishes. Cilantro, or dill. A lot of the typical northern summer plants can be started in December or January to grow in the “spring” that runs from January to April ish.
In between - peppers, fennel, mustard greens, eggplant, pumpkin type squash (but bugs always eat it) tomatoes.
Can’t have biodiversity when you’re packing people to live in these rabbit hutchesbig cities ‘to save the planet’ as they say.
You need that factory farmed samey shit because without it you wouldn’t have the ability to feed the people living in these sad places.
You know who enjoys biodiversity? People who have access to their own garden to grow stuff :3 (capitalists hate this trick)
So unbelievably wrong. And don’t get me wrong I fully admire real rural farmers, the ones who make our food.
Fake rural/suburbanites though are horrible for our planet and ecosystem. I’m from the Midwest where we have perfect soil for growing. What do they do? Pave over it, create stripmalls, big box stores, single family homes, every step of the way ruining the soil and area so we can’t farm there again for hundreds of years. Meanwhile runoff from pavement and parking lots pollutes that soil, they plant non-natural lawns that take more water and ruin biodiversity. None of that adds to our food or biodiversity, it may make them feel like they are, but it is quite literally doing the opposite.
You want to be mad at city people? The people who are happy to have apartments who build up rather than our, trying to use as little space as possible? We use less electricity because we have less space. We require less heating. Less driving and polluting because we’re closer together.
It may look worse, but my current city has the same population as the entire state where I grew up in, except people don’t selfishly each need an acre of perfectly farmable land to themselves. What we do in our footprint of a city “rural” people sprawl out for hundreds of square miles. No, I say fake rural people are much, much worse for the environment.
It’s true you don’t own a selfish acre of perfectly farmable land instead you only survive because someone else is feeding you factory farmed, pesticide flavored, expensive monoculture food from their own acres moved into the city by the truckload :D so much better for the planet I agree :D :D
So… cool story
Ann Reardon from How to Cook That, took Coke, and tested it for HFCS, it of course indicated it was in there, then she took a Mexican Coke, and it also indicated, but it claims not to use it.
Apparently, the acid in the Coke breaks down the sucrose in the cane sugar, making the product very close to the HFCS variant. She followed up with a blind taste test (very limited size, just her family) and found they were very close in flavor.
It would appear that we do to some decent extent enjoy HFCS.
She’s either from Australia or Aotearoa. I don’t expect their coca cola to be the same recipe as in the US.
could be,
she was basing it on the ingredients list and she had the mexican coke shipped.
Have you seen the size of the average American?
Who is ignoring that we don’t like HFCS? It’s downright an addictive substance.
I think if you ask 100 Americans, they will overwhelmingly be down on HFCS.
I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone that’s tried coke with cane sugar and doesn’t say that it’s better than regular cook.
Everybody I know that drinks Coke thinks that Mexican Coke is superior, but is hard to get in a lot more expensive.
There’s a pretty significant campaign against it.
For Polish speakers theres this: lukaszluczaj.pl/dzikie-rosliny-jadalne-polski-pel… - every plant that grows in our region and can be eaten.
Does he also document the fuckable plants? I’m asking for a friend
Oh boy are you in for a surprise… He does.
More precisely its a book about best plants to fuck on (or under). This guy is commited.
Tbf, many are kinda disgusting to modern palettes. Lamb’s quarter sucks compared to stuff like spinach, kale, or collards. Pokeweed needs extensive preparation to make it safe. Wood sorrel, horseherb, and prickly pear grows where I currently live, but I haven’t tried them yet. My dog likes horseherb despite the little spines for some reason. My grandmother used to fry dandelions and plaintain which was pretty good.
For another example of a plant that just didn’t make it into modern society at scale, there are skirrets. Carrots, parsnips, and skirrets were related umbellifer plants with edible, nutritious roots, cultivated over the centuries as food. Carrots and parsnips were responsive to breeding for root size, and could produce comparatively huge roots, but skirrets never really did. Once the potato was brought over from the new world, the skirret fell out of favor.
I always find it interesting when comparing cuisine between cultures of stuff that exists in different places but only eaten in one (or a few) of them. Like ok, I get that if you’re not used to much seafood in general you maybe will eat some grilled salmon but you’re not gonna be eating the guts out of crabs or lobsters or whatever. But then there’s something like burdock root, which grows in the US, doesn’t have a strong taste, and is just like various other root vegetables we do eat (although not as sweet as something like a carrot). But the US doesn’t eat it while east Asia does.
How do you get dandelions to not taste like poison?
She made something like this: allrecipes.com/…/fried-dandelions-appalachian-sty…
Wood sorrel is an interesting case. In the US, we don’t commonly eat our native wood sorrel, i.e. the thing that looks like clover. But we do eat starfruit. Starfruit is also a type of wood sorrel, just one that has a much larger, sweeter fruit, that’s been selectively bred for agriculture. But if you look at the fruits of our native plant, they do look like tiny starfruit! link
They’re still tasty. They’re very tart, but with no sweetness. They could be good to top a salad. But you’d have to pick hundreds of them to get as much food as you get from one starfruit, and it wouldn’t be as tasty as a fruit. Like eating a lemon instead of an orange.
That said, I still love them! The leaves and stems also have a good taste. They’re everywhere and have a lovely burst of flavor. Just be careful if you have kidney stones or kidney disease, any kind of wood sorrel - including starfruit - has oxalic acid which can be tough on kidneys.
You guys don’t eat sorrel?
It isn’t common in the US, but I was lucky enough to grow up with it as a staple in my dad’s garden. Funny thing, our family referred to it by its Polish name, so I didn’t know the English word for it until I was a teenager.
It’s really common in Eastern Europe, but you need to get it fresh (it doesn’t feel well on a market shelf for more than a few hours) or frozen. So if there’s no industry around it you either have it in your garden or don’t have it
alot of tropical ones tend to be poisonous too, because so much diversity of insects, trying to eat them develop toxins in thier parts. also some plants have to super poisonous because insects evolve to build resistance them, so plants have to respond by becoming more toxic.
I hate to bring race and racism into this, but one reason why I laugh at many racists, especially European racists, is how they claim they love their own national culture but do jack shit to have ANYTHING to do with its pre-colonial cuisine. Take British cuisine for example. While obviously people in medieval England (even the richest people at the time) had far fewer options than most people in the UK today, but they still used many herbs and plants for seasonings that are only being rediscovered by reenactors in recent years, and they are actually quite good.
More than just culture, the dangers of over-reliance on a handful of crops and cultivars is also dangerous. The Irish potato famine happened in the 1840s due to Irish potato corps just being a few kinds instead of the hundreds of varieties that you would find in South America. The result of this is that a blight that would have had a negligible effect in South America absolutely devastated Ireland. More recently in the 20th century, we have a near complete destruction of the Gros Michel banana in the 1950s. When you go to your typical supermarket, the bananas you see there are more than likely going to be Cavendish Bananas, which were considered inferior to Gros Michel in the past, but due to disease rendering Gros Michel bananas commercially nonviable they were chosen because they were all we got…
and the same shit could happen at any time to the Cavendish banana, too.
Extinct!
I have to correct you on your terrible misunderstanding of the Irish Genocide. Your misinformation is almost certainly not your fault, as I was uncritically taught the same utter bullshit in my primary school curriculum in the USA. The Irish genocide that you refer to as using the colonizer’s term “Irish Potato Famine” had absolutely fuckall to do with potatoes or the Irish. The absent landlords in England extracted mandatory “tax” in the form of literally every food crop that the Irish slavestenants grew. There was ALWAYS, literally at ALL POINTS IN TIME, enough food to feed the people of Ireland. The food was physically stolen with violence and exported to cover “rent” to English “landlords” that never set foot in the country. Potatoes were grown in an act of extreme desperation as they were not a crop that was considered thefttax-worthy and therefore the Irish did their best to feed themselves.
Think critically about it for like one second. Do you really believe that it was just a bunch of silly dumb Irishmen that only ever thought to grow literally a single crop for all of their food? In such a lush and nutrient rich area that is still famous for like a dozen high quality staples in different food groups? Or did you just get duped by racists that still spread their bullshit successfully?
The Irish genocide that you refer to as using the colonizer’s term “Irish Potato Famine” had absolutely fuckall to do with potatoes or the Irish.
But it has everything to do with potatoes (a particular blight that affected potato crops) and the Irish (the actual affected people of this genocide).
The social and political reasons for why the Irish ended up so dependent on a single crop for sustenance is part of the story, of course, but this discussion right here is about the fragility and brittleness of relying on a single crop.
I am aware that the Irish famine was very multi-faceted and was an act of genocide. But for the sake of this particular argument (diversity in crops) I did point out that much of the Irish potato crop was a mono-culture, and the British absolutely brought over the blight without any concern of what it might do.
I understand where your anger is coming from but it’s misplaced. Lots of people, Americans too, learn the Irish genocide as “the Irish Potato Famine”. Secondly, single crop use is ONE factor that made the situation worse in the context of anti-Irish policies by the occupying British.
I heard recently that Gros Michel can be ordered online for an arm and a leg. I’ve always wanted to try it.
They are still available,but can no longer be grown to the same scale. If you try one, tell me, I am curious as to how they taste.
Every September, I make a year’s supply of beautyberry jelly.
I do something that I don’t recommend people do: I can it. I’m like 5 years in, and I haven’t had a problem yet. There’s a series of pages in my Ball canning recipe book that the beautyberry jelly recipe I use conforms pretty close to, but it isn’t USDA approved or otherwise published by some authority as safe for canning, I’m going to recommend you avoid this.
Beautyberries, if you’re not familiar with them, are a bush/shrub native to the American southeast. The plant looks like a bunch of stems with leaves that grow along them, along with clusters of tiny white flowers in the spring at the base of each pair of leaves, that turn into vivid purple berries in the fall. The leaves can be used as a mosquito repellent if rubbed on clothing, and the berries are edible…although they’re bitter and astringent. Boiling them in water to make an extract and making jelly from that extract results in a bright red jelly that tastes like strawberry and tea.
It’s something of a pain to harvest, so it pretty much isn’t commercially done.
Everything I’ve seen from Ball/Kerr has been safe canning recipes! Love their stuff, use their website for recipes often.
Oh I’ve misread. You picked a berry close to it and are substituting that in, yeah? I’d try it on myself but probably wouldn’t give it away.
Sounds like a beautiful jelly though!
Yes, I have Ball’s Complete Book Of Home Preserving (which is a terrible title, as the book contains no information about dehydrating, freeze drying, jerking or brewing, only water bath and pressure canning). It has a procedure for “berry” jelly where it lists half a dozen different kinds of berries and how to extract juice from them, to include elderberry, and then you use a quantity of said “berry” juice in a standard jelly recipe. Independent of this, I’ve found a beautyberry jelly recipe that resembles this procedure, so I feel okay canning it, and have done so for years now. I’m going to stop short of recommending it to anyone else. By all means, if you’ve got access to beautyberries, make the jelly, but can it at your own risk.
I had native persimmons for the first time today! In Virginia.
This is a very timely meme for me. Specifically because today, after many years of trial and error, I have finally managed to successfully cook Phaseolus polystachios beans!
Mine are natirally very bitter and tough, not sure how widely that varies from specimen to specimen. Also presumably chock full of toxins/anti-nutrients… I’ve been taking the bitterness as an analogue for how much of that remains, for lack of any other other way to tell.
Today, for the first time, I’ve managed to make them tender and not bitter at all. They taste pretty good!
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.
which is why we need to normalize street markets like most tropical countries have, sure you can’t buy it at the store but you can buy it from a dude who went into the forest with a big basket a few hours ago.
My grandpa had a pawpaw tree in his garden in rural MO and I always wondered how they taste.
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.
My dad has a tree in his garden, and a friend has made pawpaw moonshine!
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)
Maple syrup could have worked. But yeah, it’s often also worth changing up plans, like maybe just roast the nuts as well and put them on top with some chives or balsamico creme for the looks. Of course, I don’t know what kind of constraints you’re working with, though…
I work at a private college and i’m not in a management position so I don’t do any ordering and am constrained by budget but everyone loves, respects and fears my powerful ability to cook so I can pretty much freestyle dishes however I want to as long as i’m getting the food out on time and it tastes good
I haven’t asked about honey substitutes yet but I’ve recently gotten them to try a vegan chicken stock that has proven really adequate for adding a lot of flavor to risotto or fake chicken dishes, and i just got them to try a different vegan mozzarella that turned out to be better than the sysco brand shit they were getting
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.
For those in the UK: www.wildfooduk.com
For me, it helped expand my cosmos by leaving things out and looking for alternatives.
Like, I found out about a world of legumes by going vegan. And earlier this year, I stopped eating wheat for health reasons, and only then started to appreciate the existence of millet, quinoa, amaranth, buckwheat etc…
I am probably still within the range of “usual” foods, all things considered, but at least I’m breaking out of a tiny subset of those…
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.
Please do not consume plants based on a visual ID by a convolutional neural network. It’s a dangerous idea. Many plants can only be properly identified by observing specific parts that don’t turn out from a single angle photo, such as formations on the underside of leaves, or a specific curl direction of a flower stamen etc. etc.
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.
Define edible
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.
It isn’t all industrial agriculture. There is also the enclosure of the commons meaning that foraging is illegal in a lot of places.
and even if you have the right to roam, and commons exist, we fucking refuse to plant edible things in them!
i straight up do not think we should plant things that don’t produce food unless there’s a really good reason to plant something else, sure maples look nice but plum trees also look nice and THEY PRODUCE PLUMS
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.
Depends if you count spices I guess but most people only consume like a handful of different veggies all year long
I’m tempted to start a list. Sure, the majority of our food will be a handful of staples, but I feel like the average person from a rich country must eat quite a variety between seasonal variations of the food they eat at home, eating out, eating at a friends place, fast food, slow food, etc.
If I wrote a list, I think I would find over 100 different plants in the last year. If I have take out dumplings, I’d probably be eating onion, garlic, a couple of kinds of cabbage, soy sauce, sesame oil, pepper, carrot, ginger, maybe more.
It might be a shorter list without the flavourings but I still think I’d hit 100.
Might be considering all Brassica as one.
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.
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.
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.
Why is there a crummy phone ad in your picture?
Samsung’s pre-installed photo apps do that by default, I believe, unless you spot it and go digging where to turn it off (which seems do differ between some models, if I recall correctly)
probably dont eat ones growing on the streets.
Omg people can eat these??? My horse goes absolutely crazy for these things
Now I gotta try some and see what all the fuss is about
I want to see your horse face when it sees you eating it!
Gotta make sure it’s actually the edible specie tho.
I pulled so many of these boogers out of the garden this summer
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!
There are fairly similar plants, so make sure to do your research. I get similar plants each year in my garden but I know they’re not purslane.
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.
Non-vegans when you let them know there’s more you can eat outside meat and dairy products
Can anyone recommend anything to watch out for in BCs lower mainland? (Climate similar to Seattle)
I recently found out you can eat nettles (the ones that sting you), and they actually taste nice.
lots of iron in them
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.
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 😔
Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de 5 months ago
PSA: serviceberry is a very very very common decorative hedge, the berries are extremely tasty.
It absolutely baffles me how no one is growing them commercially to sell in grocery stores, they’re clearly grown commercially to some degree for use in juices and stuff, but i guess selling to individuals is just a step too far? It’s not like they’re even remotely difficult to grow or harvest…