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You can’t eat just any leaf (2018)
- h2odragon 4y agoSure you can. You just might not be able to digest it, or the process might be unpleasant to fatal. Take the hound approach: decide "edible" on best of 3 trials.
- dredmorbius 4y agoYou can't read just any grey-on-white text.
- chrispine 4y agoFor real. Also, why are some of the links struck-out?
- kroltan 4y agoBecause they are broken, apparently. The CSS class for those is `broken_link`, and I tried on the "Primary and secondary compounds", sure enough it leads to an "access denied" response 403.
- jacobr1 4y agoThat bothered me too. Trying a few though, it looks like they are 404s. Which is an interesting way to preserve a historical, but no longer valid link. If you are going to the trouble, it might be better to rewrite the links to point to Archive.org or something.
- dredmorbius 4y agoLinking an archived copy (and proactively making an archive submission when initially linking, which seems to be an increasingly common practice), would be preferable.
- smeagull 4y agoUgh. Links are meant to live forever.
- dredmorbius 4y agoIs/ought fallacy. They clearly don't, despite 30+ years of whinging. (I've whinged plenty myself.) Preemptive defence is justified, necessary, and strongly advised. The Web is not an archival platform, it's a publishing one. Each request is served in the moment it's requested, and absent specific measures for persistance can and will vanish at any time without notice.
- dang 4y ago"Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—things like article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- dredmorbius 4y agoI'm aware. This site takes it to the next level, and is honestly illegible. I'd hope that at some point extraordinary badness is remarkable. Something's got to give, and I'd suggest here it's the HN guidelines.
- pvg 4y agoSomething's got to give, and I'd suggest here it's the HN guidelines. What's going to be better about HN if it becomes more accepting of everyone's personal web peeve?
- dredmorbius 4y agoSlippery slope. There are peeves worth noting, and there is site breakage which crosses boundaries. I think this case crosses a line, or at least gets damnedably close. In the case of paywalls (or other forms of content-gating, such as GDPR-attributed geoblocking), for example, HN has adopted the position that those which can be reasonably bypassed are acceptable. This has become increasingly harder over the years, though there's been an ongoing arms-race with various alternative-access mechanisms, ranging from Google Cache, cookie clearing, and at least in the past couple of years, Archive.Today which often (though not always) works. Noting that a site has a hard and insurmountable paywall is a legitimate gripe. Many of my own comments are links which provide access, and I'll often include such comments with my own submissions. The article here is literally impossible for me to read on either a full-colour tablet or my preferred driver these days, a monochrome E-Ink tablet / ebook reader. The site itself further discourages feedback. In the longer term, my view is that if there's no push-back against such practices, the Web will ultimately become if not comletely unusable, then generally unreliable. It's well on its way there. Similar issues affect other realms of information and communication infrastructure and systems. Robocalls, scams, and other forms of telephone abuse. The general death of broadcast television and radio into increasingly irrelevant and bottom-fishing advertising churn. Postal mail with its junk and bulk mail and scams. Newspapers devoid of news. Ultimately people will simply desert these. And I'm not sure what replaces them, if anything, or whether or not an effective attempt can be made to keep the cycle from repeating. I'm ... getting more than a little tired of it. I also remember what the Web was promised to deliver, and helped at least in part to make it do that. I'm feeling some aspects of a life wasted in that regard.
- aaron695 4y agoIf you have browsers/grazers this is a nightmare. A lot of mis-information on the internet. Even more unknowns. You can't even assume if it doesn't kill one species it won't kill another. Sometimes it's age of leaves. If they are for meat, something's won't matter short term, but are bad long term for pets. What's interesting is you can sup up cows with a rumen bacterium Leucaena inoculum which has skyrocketed productivity on some places. This goes from harmful to productive - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8wj14UNTKpo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8wj14UNTKpo It's not the only rumen bacterium that works either, there is Fibrolytic rumen but you can't buy it yet, you just mix camels with cattle so they share it at drinking locations. I think this would be interesting to hack in humans. It'd be nice to eat grass occasionally.
- nielsbot 4y agoWouldn't you need a rumen to make it work tho? Maybe you could make some kind of bioreactor and eat from that... Appetizing!
- maxerickson 4y agoHistorically, humans have used cattle (and other ruminants) to digest cellulose.
- eru 4y agoMushrooms also work, don't they?
- aaron695 4y agoIt's thought we can digest some cellulose already. And there's no reason to not think we couldn't increase that. For the general population digesting more fibre would bad, but to be able to eat leaves and grass for a while would be interesting. Humans have intestinal bacteria that degrade the plant cell walls in herbivores https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8661373/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8661373/
- superb-owl 4y agoI've been wondering about this in the context of supply chain disruption and food security. I live far from farmland and fear what might happen if that connection were cut due to war or civil strife. How well could I survive eating local plants and whatever I can grow? How well could what we have nearby support the local population? Resources like the ones mentioned here could prove lifesaving.
- fny 4y agoYou can't. We have not engineered life to work this way.
- eru 4y agoIt's not a binary thing. There's graduations.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- swagasaurus-rex 4y agoMaybe it's not a bad idea to keep a cellar of canned, non-perishable food and water stored in containers that do not leech. You would want to replace the stockpile every few years so it doesn't spoil.
- jefftk 4y agoInstead of a stockpile you replace every so often, it's a lot cheaper to just buy extra of the long shelf life things you use. Instead of keeping one jar of peanut butter, you have ten (or however many you'll reliably use before they go bad).
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- dredmorbius 4y agoRegular rotation of shelf-stable products is the way to go. Water is often the under-appreciated stock --- people use a lot of it for drinking, cleaning, and cooking (espeically with dried / reconstituted foods). Here a supply, and means of producing more potable supply (a quality filtration system, backpacker and marine filtering systems are useful) and purification (chlorine or iodine in liquid or tablet form) help. It's possible to store grains (whole or ground, flour, wheat, rice, maize) for years, though you need to get rid of moths / worms first. That usually means freezing in smaller portions (2.5 -- 5 kg / 5--10 lb), and then transferring to airtight storage. Rodents can and will chew through both plastic and metal, isnpect frequently. Invest in a cat (or snakes). A chest freezer won't survive a long-duration power-outage, but is useful so long as juice flows, and can make this pest-proofing much more viable. These consume very little power.
- not2b 4y agoFor Californians: miner's lettuce (Claytonia perfoliata). Good stuff, similar taste to spinach. It grows all over in late winter and early spring.
- bawolff 4y agoInteresting premise for an article, but i was hoping for something a little deeper than - some leaves lack nutritional value (as being almost entirely fiber) and some leaves are poisonous.
- pessimizer 4y agoIt's debunking something nobody has said ("You can eat any leaf.") edit: Of course, they seem to be aware - "It sounds like a simple question, the work of a 6-year-old or a general interest reporter short on ideas."
- eru 4y agoLacking nutritional value might not be too bad. I guess, it's better to munch on those than eg eat potato crisps? (Assuming your are otherwise getting your nutrient..) You are rightly worried about poison.
- newaccount74 4y agoI agree, it's a very shallow article. Would have loved something more in depth.
- chanandler_bong 4y agoAnything is edible, at least once.
- istjohn 4y agoCounter example: boulders
- cowtools 4y agodepends on serving size
- fsckboy 4y agoit's not easy but you just need to grind them very finely and then eat the sandwhich results
- chanandler_bong 4y agoTrue, you can't eat a cow, but you can chop it up in to smaller pieces.
- seveneightn9ne 4y agoPine needles may be calorie-negative and unpleasant to eat, but they're very high in Vit C and available in the dead of winter. I would hardly call them inedible. You can make an oxymel to extract the vitamins & make it easier to eat.
- dredmorbius 4y agoOr brew them as a tea. The fresh shoots don't taste all bad. Definitely bitter, but not in an unpleasant way.
- cainxinth 4y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spruce_beer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spruce_beer
- echelon 4y agoTransgenic edible plants would be incredible, introducing entirely new species and flavors to the palate. Cellulose isn't the problem. Just the toxic and bitter organic compounds. Knock out a few genes and it should work. These genes shouldn't be necessary for plant growth.
- eru 4y ago> Just the toxic and bitter organic compounds. Knock out a few genes and it should work. These genes shouldn't be necessary for plant growth. Maybe; but on the other hand, genomes aren't cleanly engineered.
- phyzome 4y agoAt my house, we've largely given up on growing "greens" because there are so many edible and tasty weeds that come up all on their own without any help. Our mainstays are chickweed, broad-leaf plantain, violet, dandelion, and lamb's quarters but there are a ton of others (amaranth, galinsoga, dock, burdock...) -- and it's worth noting that many of these were actually brought over by European colonists or were cultivated by Native Americans. They're just thought of as weeds today, but they make a fine salad. Many of these would be bad to eat in large amounts, but humans are "generalists" -- we're built to eat smaller amounts of a variety of things together. The same is true for a number of our modern cultivated crops; off the top of my head the things in the mustard, spinach, and carrot families are mildly toxic, but we eat moderate amounts of each, so it works out.
- carbadtraingood 4y agoBorage, miner's lettuce, nettle too! To say nothing of the berries you can snag from things. That said, we do grow kale, as it's a pretty nutrient dense green that is mighty tasty, versatile, and hard to mess up.
- bergenty 4y agoThis entire article could have talked about only oxalic acid and it would be a better article. It’s basically what all plants have to make themselves largely inedible and it the most common toxin in plants. You can eat all of the above but oxalic acid is just not good for you even small quantities. We’ve managed to get oxalic acid out of everything we’ve domesticated.
- mulvya 4y ago> oxalic acid is just not good for you even small quantities. We’ve managed to get oxalic acid out of everything we’ve domesticated Doesn't sound right. WP has this table: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxalic_acid#Content_in_food_items https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxalic_acid#Content_in_food_it.... I see a lot of commonly eaten foods with at least a small amount of it.
- 4y ago
- wyager 4y agoSpinach hardly qualifies as edible. It has essentially no nutritional value, and is poisonous/anti-nutritious due to its oxalic acid content. Most leaves are this way. The plant doesn't use them for energy storage, doesn't want animals to eat them as part of its reproductive strategy, and actively benefits from discouraging animals from doing so.
- hombre_fatal 4y agoWe are regularly wrong when we try to come up with first principles when trying to make assumptions about nutrition. Even "lectins must always be bad" turns out to be wrong. You don't necessarily complete the circle here, granted, but I've heard it claimed many times lately by Twitter carnivore-diet influencers that plants must be bad for you because they don't have claws/teeth thus they depend on chemical deterrents. It's a very arbitrary attempt at a first principle, not the least of which because it seems to suggest that we are incapable of even the most basic nutrition science.
- citizenpaul 4y agoSpinach is by a huge margin the most dense source of magnesium. Magnesium is needed for muscle growth and rebuilding. Its one of a number of nutrients that is usually under provided in supplements because it makes the pills too big and people don't like large vitamins. You'll see things like 10000% of vitamin A but the multivitamin will have like 5% for magnesium.
- downboots 4y agoRelated: This one has extensive videos foraging and cooking many plants https://youtube.com/user/EatTheWeeds https://youtube.com/user/EatTheWeeds
- tedunangst 4y agoThe same for meat? My neighborhood is teaming with uneaten squirrels and pigeons and creepy crawlers.
- eternityforest 4y agoWhat happens if people do eat the indigestible leaves? They might not get any calories from it, but people have more than enough of those already in the developed world. What's the difference between a leaf full of cellulose and something like psyllium husks? Do people get nauseated if they have too many large pieces of leaves(I would imagine so, but I've never eaten random leaves so I don't know)? What about the various chemicals in them? There's gotta be at least chlorophyll and probably some other active stuff, right? What do those do if you eat them regularly? Are any of them beneficial?
- ghostly_s 4y agowhat's up with the random crossed-out links in the article? I clicked a couple and they don't seem to be dead.
- akovaski 4y ago"Primary and Secondary compounds" => 403. "medicinal" => 200. "Monoculture leads to vulnerability" => 404. "Leaf for Life" => 404. And the "medicinal" link to science direct returns a 403 if I attempt to retrieve the page with curl. So, the sites are still up, but the links are in fact mostly dead.
- togaen 4y agoLight gray text on white background??? What kind of maniac designs a web page like that?
- ComputerCat 4y agoThe evolution of plant defense mechanisms is so fascinating. Thanks for sharing!
- jononomo 4y agoI did not consume a single calorie from a plant-based source in 2021 and I ended the year in the best shape of my life. It is astonishing how much more nutritious animal-based foods are in comparison to plant-based food.
- failedengineer 4y agoAre you consuming entire animals? Just meat? No snark there, either. Skeletal muscle alone isn't a complete diet. It's lacking in a few areas. Eating nothing but meat does seem to improve body composition, insulin sensitivity, some autoimmune conditions, some people report more steady energy levels... but, scurvy is eventually a problem, as will be hemochromatosis, among other things.
- jononomo 4y agoThis couple has eaten nothing but ribeye steaks for over 20 years: https://www.ketoforhealth.org/articles/150-joe-and-charlene-anderson-more-than-20-years-eating-only-meat https://www.ketoforhealth.org/articles/150-joe-and-charlene-... Can you tell me what areas this diet is lacking in? Scurvy is not a problem because fresh meat contains vitamin C. And hemochromatosis is not a problem either. It sounds to me like you're just hypothesizing here. In fact, people have known for centuries that fresh meat prevents scurvy.
- failedengineer 4y agoyeah, it's 90% hypothesizing. Don't take it as me saying what you should or shouldn't do. Obviously, I'm not in a position to do that. It's just... if your neighbour pulled up with a car that's powered by cooking oil, you'd probably look at it and go "really? that can't work." and hope that he understands that it's curiousity, confusion and frankly a lack of knowledge of something so foreign. I've seen a couple guys (father/son) try it out. Dad said it basically reversed his diabetes, son was pretty much OK the whole time I knew him. I dunno man. Carnivore diets aren't for me. I just don't get how it works, doesn't mean that it doesn't work though.
- abeppu 4y ago> The sad truth is that people just can’t digest cellulose. We lack the enzymes. Can we/should we try to add the enzymes? Some time back I recall an adventurous citizen scientist that did DIY gene therapy to add back his ability to digest lactose, and I think he even used a bacterial enzyme for reasons I don't recall. I think a bunch of more knowledgeable people called this reckless, but it seemed to work. Could we give ourselves a gene to break down cellulose?