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driving down the road I was inspired to taste some fresh wheat grains in a field: tasted a lot like flour. what is that "thing"? an attractive tasty flour nodul
by fsckboy 2y ago
driving down the road I was inspired to taste some fresh wheat grains in a field: tasted a lot like flour. what is that "thing"? an attractive tasty flour nodule? the energy yolk to the seed's egg?
- meindnoch 2y agoIt's called endosperm. A bunch of starch that nourishes the embryo when the seed germinates.
- nkrisc 2y agoBasically, yes. Though wheat didn’t look like that initially. We’ve cultivated it to become like that over thousands of years. Same for corn (maize). There is no naturally occurring plant that looks like what we’ve turned it into.
- eru 2y agoWild potatoes look pretty close to some domesticated potatoes I had. Also I had lots of wild berries (of various species) in forests, and they look pretty much like the berries you can find in a garden. (Though probably not like the berries you can get in a supermarket?) Wild grass also looks pretty much like some of the domesticated variety. (Well, some varieties do.)
- msrenee 2y agoWild corn relatives, however, just look like most other grass.
- eru 2y agoYes. I agree that most domesticated plants look rather different from their wild ancestors. Just not all.
- nkrisc 2y agoMy understanding is that most berries weren’t farmed until recently because they couldn’t be domesticated like other plants, rather they were typically foraged. I remember reading that initially wild blueberry bushes were simply dug up and replanted. Not certain of the veracity of this, however. Wheat still generally looks like wild grasses, but like maize its seeds are much larger than you’ll find on wild grasses.
- ASalazarMX 2y agoI picture your ancestors impulsively tasting mushrooms, and figuring out which ones were not poisonous enough to kill them. Thank you for your lineage! In Mexico, our ancestors cultivated corn despite not knowing fungicides to prevent mycotoxin contamination. Somehow they discovered nixtamalization, which is boiling corn in an alkaline solution that destroys mycotoxins and improves nutritional value. Guess they really loved corn. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixtamalization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixtamalization
- lawlessone 2y ago>Somehow they discovered nixtamalization, which is boiling corn in an alkaline solution that destroys mycotoxins and improves nutritional value. that one always amazes me. How did they figure it out? it's not exactly intuitive, especially when they wouldn't have known about the chemistry underneath. It would probably take weeks or months to notice if doing A instead of B was making people sick or not
- smegsicle 2y agoboiling corn in limestone pots makes it taste better
- kjellsbells 2y agoIt might not be that the process was discovered so much as the method of cooking pot production happened to suit the food being cooked. In particular, lots of civilizations learned to strengthen the basic clay pot by the addition of lime-y things, eg burnt mussel shells. If all your pots are made in this manner then you dont so much discover nixtamalization as experience it only by its absence when you meet settlers that have pellagra and dont use your style of pot. See [0] for a technical write up on this and many other pot themes. [0] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/arcm.12986 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/arcm.12986
- simondotau 2y agoAnd also the tribes which used other pots didn’t thrive as much.
- nemosaltat 2y agoI was in Cape Cod for a wedding late last year with some friends, and came across what we later learned was a Yew. Some of us had popped into an ice cream shop, and one of the members of my party apparently decided to eat a sweet berry while they waited. When we came out, we were initially incredulous but they clarified that the flesh of the berry was sweet, but the seed was disgustingly bitter. Which prompted the rest of us to quickly do some research on what this plant was. The mood was initially somewhat light-hearted, however articles with titles like “Why is the Yew Berry sometimes called the Death Berry?” had us on the phone with poison control pretty quickly. Poison control was very professional, and once they confirmed that it was indeed a Yew Berry that had been ingested, things got pretty serious. Apparently even small doses can quickly cause irreversible heart failure, with death the earliest “symptom” in some cases. My friend didn’t die— just experienced some terror and gastric distress— the latter likely exacerbated by the terror). No drugs or alcohol or involved, just an impulsive decision, and a sobering reminder about the fragility of life. One of the other replies in this thread mentions mushrooms. Which reminds of the aphorism: _There are old mushroom foragers, and bold mushroom foragers, but there are no old AND bold mushroom foragers._
- klik99 2y agoYikes - I love foraging, but I am extremely conservative about what I eat. This makes me thankful I'm not a bold forager. My friend has a running joke calling Yew poison berries, but I never looked up the effects before. Great that you called poison control.
- ascorbic 2y agoOh wow that was a journey. As soon as I saw "yew" I started internally screaming. The route that my kids walk to school took us underneath a large yew tree, and the road underneath is often covered in hundreds of delicious-looking pink berries. Since they were tiny they have had to know all about how yew berries look lovely but even one can kill you. What I didn't ever tell them is how apparently the flesh is actually not toxic and is tasty, and it's the seed that will kill you.
- drjasonharrison 2y ago
- Terr_ 2y ago> driving down the road I was inspired to taste some fresh wheat grains in a field Fun fact: The danger in eating raw cookie-dough isn't primarily from fresh eggs (though they can have problems too) but rather from the raw flour, which before cooking may have a bunch of bacterial nastiness in it.
- nkozyra 2y agoRaw flour is generally not pasteurized, it's true, but most cookie dough mixes are. The eggs are a far more likely vector for illness unless you're making the cookies yourself from scratch.
- Terr_ 2y ago> most cookie dough mixes are At least where I live, only a minority are advertised as "ready to eat". It's more common to see the opposite, an explicit warning that it must be cooked.
- shermantanktop 2y agoThat just puts a frisson of risk into your decision to eat the raw dough, which wasn’t a good idea to begin with.
- philsnow 2y agoYou can easily pasteurize both eggs* and flour at home, and make Cookie Dough That Won't Kill You (Nearly As Quickly) * with the right equipment