A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.
Rules
This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.
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. thats why poisonous plants are kinda invasive.
yes english ivy is poisonous(berries) to non-avians.
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 crops 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.
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 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...
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.
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.
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.
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 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 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.
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!
I recently found out you can eat nettles (the ones that sting you), and they actually taste nice.
lots of iron in them
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.