fossilesquei enjoy high fructose corn syrup too
ieatpwns“ CaPiTaLiSm bReEdS InNoVaTiOn “
If the word “prefer” is in this meme, we might need another pass for tone.
MontaggeI 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!
RedSnt ♾️🦋♂️👓🖥️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!
You can make them into patties and fry them up, surprisingly good.
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.
How to harvest, dry, and make tea with nettles:
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.
irelephant [he/him]if you crush them, or flatten them, they don’t sting.
B-TR3EIf you can’t kill it or fuck it then eat it. It’s that easy.
SEX! AND VIOLENCE!
🇰 🌀 🇱 🇦 🇳 🇦 🇰 🇮 Why can’t I have 1 thing where all 3 are possible?
xepYou can if you’re a spider
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.
bleistift2Even 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.
IninewCrowOr 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.
We do both. The problem is corporations and stupid people. See Monsanto, the non-GMO push and the results of golden rice or similar.
I meant create a food crop that is actually beneficial to humanity … not some empty nutritionless white styrofoam or equally terrible frankenstein corn that simultaneously destroys the land and the people who eat this so called ‘food’.
golden rice
What’s wrong with golden rice?
vaultdweller013Nothing really it’s a GMO that was created to fill a vitamin deficiency in some parts of Asia. Can’t remember what vitamin it was though, absolutely brilliant success of a crop though. Funny enough some of the research on it may have used my 2x great grandfathers work as a baseline since he was working with some folks to do something vaguely similar with millet back in the early 1900s. It went nowhere but did lead to some success for his orange groves though.
小莱卡In a vacuum, nothing wrong with it. It was just bound to fail because it tried to fix a problem caused by poverty.
Golden rice is an example of a GMO that’s actually beneficial to humanity, or would be; anti-GMO sentiment has kept it from being grown in any significant amounts.
It’s tweaked to produce vitamin A, which rice normally does not; deficiency is a common problem in places where the poor get most of their calories from rice
JoshCodesHi, 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)
I remember reading years ago that a vegetarian diet is far more economical and sustainable than a meat based diet. Which is why I lowered my meat consumption years ago. I still eat meat, just not as much as I once did when I was younger.
Even if humanity didn’t cultivate new vegetables and fruits, the produce we have now is more than enough to feed the planet. I think I remember that it takes just a few acres of grown produce to feed one person per year if they ate a vegetarian diet … whereas it takes ten times more land area to feed a single cow to feed that one person for a year in meat and vegetables.
I try to eat my legumes, especially lentils, since they are high in protein … but by far the greatest benefit that a vegetarian diet provides is the health benefits from the consumption of fiber alone. Full vegetarian or high vegetarian diets all around are far healthier and sustainable for humanity and the environment.
I hate that i cant find anywhere studies that takes the manure used as a fertilizer account in their calculations. Atleast where i live 100% of the manure from the animals is used as a fertilizer on farms and store bought fertilizers are just supplement. Most countries cant produce fertilizer enough for their agricultural need and need to buy it from outside.
I would love some real research wich would be better for the enivorent. Stop meat produsing completelly or scale it down so farms get still some benefits like fertilizer and biogas for the vehicles, but people would not eat food on every meal.
There is one thing that people miss about that whole “10 acres to feed one cow” statement. Yep, it can take that much land. But what doesn’t get said is that one cow can take advantage of land that is unsuitable to grow crops on like tomatoes, peppers, and onions.
In the US, California produces more fresh produce every year than any other state can. But it comes at a high cost of farming land that really isn’t naturally suitable for growing those vegetables. Farmers need to pump millions of gallons of water on those acres to get those crops to grow. This in turn puts pressure on the supply of water to everyone else in the state. And much of this farmland had all it could do to grow grass in some years originally.
Aquifers are going starting to go dry because of this. The vast Ogilala aquifer that supplies water to almost all of the US west is starting to go dry. Because we now are farming land that probably be best left to growing grasses for cattle, sheep, or goats rather than tomatoes or soybeans.
The other research I remember from my reading about this subject years ago was the efficiency of industrial farming. Per acre, industrial farming produces very low or minimal yields … whereas an acre that is tended, micromanaged and monitored by small scale farmers has much high yields. It meant that the only way for industrial farms to be able to produce large amounts of produce is to farm huge acreages in order to make up for the losses or inefficiencies.
One of the reasons why the Californian desert is drying up is that industrial farming is so inefficient that in order to sustain itself as a business model is for it grow ever larger and more invasive … it needs more land and more water in order for it to continually grow as a business. It’s not a way of farming that is meant to produce food efficiently for people … it’s a type of farming that is meant to produce profit, money and control for a corporation.
It’s feeding a monolithic corporation … it’s not feeding people.
All our world problems including global warming, food production, water supply are manageable and can be dealt with to help people in very efficient and possible ways … all of it is hindered and complicated by the fact that corporations sit in opposition to all of it because of their ever wanting need to turn a profit, even if it means destroying the environment and everyone who lives in that environment.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah, some apples I bought recently weirdly last a long time. The reason I know is that they tasted bad so I didn’t feel like eating them…
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.
Yeah, I pick some every year. Also cherry plums grow quite a bit near me, along with some apple trees and loads of sloes.
RavingGrobJust to be clear, you mean blackcurrants, yes? Blackberry means something quite different, at least over here.
No I meant blackberries. We have both over here commercially available.
Ok, well I assure you, blackberries are, and never were banned in America. Blackcurrants were.
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.
giant hogweed, water hemlock
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 spoileren.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phototoxicity en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phytophotodermatitis
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
flora_exploraApiaceae are generally very hard to tell apart. Sure, the common hogweed is relatively easy to ID if you know the plant well enough. But there are sooo many species in this family that all have small white flowers and similar looking leaves…
GladaedThis 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.
Often low yield, short harvest, low yield, difficult picking or transporting.
And let’s not forget, low yield.
Let us not!
Low yield due to overly specific conditions that are hardly met
Low yield due to short production window
Low yield due to long growth time
Low yield just because
Let the deer and squirrels and wild pigs eat the acorns, then eat the deer and squirrels and wild pigs. Easy!
infinitesunriseIsn’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.
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.
I thought we eat acorns after processing them? There are cuisines which involve acorns as main ingredient.
Also acorns ain’t particularly nutritious.
Not sure that acorns are inedible. They just that they need to be processed.
ComradeSharkfuckerIsn’t that what they meant by industrial agriculture preventing widespread use?