i enjoy high fructose corn syrup too

Comments

• shalafi@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  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.

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  • RedSnt@feddit.dk ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Add something like beans to fix nitrogen and add missing nutrients, you’re all set.

    Here I go thinking about the three sisters again.

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• CrayonDevourer@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  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)

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• DarkCloud@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  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).

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• Gladaed@feddit.org ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  This is dumb. Most plants resist cultivation. Bragging about being able to afford them does not make you Superior.

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  • MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Our current style of industrialized agriculture isn’t viable long-term (meaning: millenia); too much damage to the ecosystem or too much effort with mixed crops to pay off. Either south-american style farming-with-scavenging or industrialized vertical farming is the way to go, imo.

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    • AceOnTrack@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      It’s the kind of farming you need in order to provide for the high density rabbit hutchescities that are supposed to save the planet

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  • mic_check_one_two@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    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.

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    • Gladaed@feddit.org ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      If it can’t be farmed there cannot be enough for everyone, but it will be exclusive to a select few. How they are selected is irrelevant.

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    • ayyy@sh.itjust.works ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      there are plenty of plants that you could scavenge

      But what happens when “you” becomes a million people? A hundred million people? A billion people? Where I live, we can’t even have a nice field of flowers because a hundred Instagram models will trample and ruin it before spring is over. Scavenging and foraging literally cannot feed the 7 billion human mouths on this planet.

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  • muhyb@programming.dev ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    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.

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  • sharkfucker420@lemmy.ml ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Isn’t that what they meant by industrial agriculture preventing widespread use?

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    • Donkter@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      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.

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  • Eq0@literature.cafe ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    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.

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    • rayyy@piefed.social ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Not sure that acorns are inedible. They just that they need to be processed.

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    • Gladaed@feddit.org ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Also acorns ain’t particularly nutritious.

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    • someacnt@sh.itjust.works ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      I thought we eat acorns after processing them? There are cuisines which involve acorns as main ingredient.

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    • Korhaka@sopuli.xyz ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      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.

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    • Bassman1805@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      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.

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    • infinitesunrise@slrpnk.net ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Isn’t acorn flour edible after you rinse out the toxins?

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    • shalafi@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Let the deer and squirrels and wild pigs eat the acorns, then eat the deer and squirrels and wild pigs. Easy!

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    • danekrae@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Often low yield, short harvest, low yield, difficult picking or transporting.

      And let’s not forget, low yield.

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• knowone@slrpnk.net ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  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

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  • punksnotdead@slrpnk.net ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    To clarify, when knowone says “that’s not a fun time” they don’t mean “oh it tastes bad”. They mean it’s really not a fun time, avoid going anywhere near giant hogweed!

    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heracleum_mantegazzianum

    NSFL (if you’re squeemish):

    Tap for spoiler

    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phototoxicity en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phytophotodermatitis

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    • knowone@slrpnk.net ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Thanks for clarifying for me. Yeah I should’ve maybe given a clear do NOT go picking hogweed to eat, or even that near it, unless you’re absolutely sure you can identify one from the other. Despite it’s name, giant hogweed is very often just as large as the common hogweed surrounding it. It still needs to grow to that size, after all

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  • Tollana1234567@lemmy.today ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    giant hogweed, water hemlock

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  • irelephant@anarchist.nexus ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Hey, there’s some of that in my garden!

    It’s growing right next to some giant hogweed though.

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• MrFinnbean@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  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.

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  • auraithx@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    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.

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    • RavingGrob@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Just to be clear, you mean blackcurrants, yes? Blackberry means something quite different, at least over here.

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    • Korhaka@sopuli.xyz ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Yeah, I pick some every year. Also cherry plums grow quite a bit near me, along with some apple trees and loads of sloes.

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  • jol@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    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.

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    • MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      About shelf life:
      There’s this weird little apple tree, Prime Rouge. Every two years, he’s choke full (the other empty) of perfectly formed, perfectly red apples, optical flaws are rare. They are already edible in summer but get really succulent taste and a white flesh about two months later. The best apple breed i know, in texture, taste and look.

      Buut they only keep about two months max, unlike the other breeds you have in your supermarket.

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    • vaultdweller013@sh.itjust.works ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      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.

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  • ininewcrow@lemmy.ca ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    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.

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    • MrFinnbean@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Im not geneticist, but i grew up on a farm. I always grind my teeth when people talk about miragle plants with high yields.

      The plants need to get their energy and nutritions from somewhere. If you just create gmo plant that can absorb nutrition better from soil it also means you need to fertilize that soil that much more and make the crop rotation that much faster, or risk making the fields arid.

      But plants that survive larger temperature shifts, more extreme weathers and pest might be necessary for us in the not so far future. Lets just hope in the future those are used for humanitys betterment and not making rich richer.

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    • joshcodes@programming.dev ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      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)

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    • phdepressed@sh.itjust.works ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      We do both. The problem is corporations and stupid people. See Monsanto, the non-GMO push and the results of golden rice or similar.

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  • bleistift2@sopuli.xyz ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    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.

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    • Johandea@feddit.nu ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Until a disease pops up, that targets your only crop. Example A: bananas.

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• b_tr3e@feddit.org ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  If you can’t kill it or fuck it then eat it. It’s that easy.

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  • Kolanaki@pawb.social ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Why can’t I have 1 thing where all 3 are possible?

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    • xep@discuss.online ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      You can if you’re a spider

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  • zout@fedia.io ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    SEX! AND VIOLENCE!

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• Montagge@lemmy.zip ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  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!

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  • Vathsade@lemmy.ca ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    How do they taste? Do they not, uh, sting with the little spikes?

    I got then popping up all around.

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    • irelephant@anarchist.nexus ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      if you crush them, or flatten them, they don’t sting.

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    • punksnotdead@slrpnk.net ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      How to harvest, dry, and make tea with nettles:

      slrpnk.net/comment/16978019

      If you have arthritis or hayfever they’ve been shown to help with that. Science has confirmed the old wives tales traditional herbal remedy works for this one. Not as effectively as modern medicine of course but if it’s all you can afford, or whatever, then something is better than nothing.

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    • Bluewing@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      You would harvest the leaves when they are small and young. And they would be one of the first fresh greens available in the spring. But their season quickly passes as the plants grow pretty fast.

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    • FellowEnt@sh.itjust.works ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      You can make them into patties and fry them up, surprisingly good.

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    • Montagge@lemmy.zip ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      I blanch them and then freeze them. So no stinging!

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    • Damage@feddit.it ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      If you cook them they stop stinging.

      My mother makes pasta with them too, puts them in the dough.

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  • RedSnt@feddit.dk ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    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.

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• jaggedrobotpubes@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  If the word “prefer” is in this meme, we might need another pass for tone.

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• ieatpwns@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  “ CaPiTaLiSm bReEdS InNoVaTiOn “

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