Alas, you will never have the fluffy tail and beady eyes of our squirrelly friends.
I read somewhere that no modern (or fairly pre-modern) cultures follow a 100% raw diet, and that there's a reason for that: cooking and agriculture have made us wimps.
Proud to be wimpy! Wimps get fewer diseases!
But you'd think there'd be some interesting wild stuff you could just grab and eat, right? Herbs, at least? ...Dandelions?
There are chapters on blackberries, blueberries, strawberries, and persimmons (which I have had straight from a tree, and which are FOUL even when ripe), so yes, there are a few things you can eat right off the vine. And there are some other plants that don't need to be cooked forever with multiple changes of water to get to an edible state. Like CATTAIL POLLEN. Apparently it can be substituted one-for-one with flour, and the author likes to make baked goods with half-flour, half-pollen. I sneezed just reading about it.
There's also a chapter on crawfish which I am not going to be foolish enough to read.
To be fair, I suppose wheat takes a lot of processing to turn into food, it's just that we don't do it ourselves.
It does take considerable processing, but less than acorns; wheat is just ground to make flour, while acorns have the whole boiling-for-hours-to-leech-out-the-tannins step before they can be ground. (I recall reading somewhere that as soon as the Native American tribes who used acorns as a staple crop were introduced to wheat flour, they abandoned the acorns with great glee because wheat was way easier, but I have no idea where I read it or if it's really true.) Though still not something I'd like to do myself every time I wanted something with flour in it, for sure.
(Did you see the article in the NYTimes about how Central Park authorities are getting mad at foragers eating all their plants?)
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2011-08-13 07:11 am (UTC)Alas, you will never have the fluffy tail and beady eyes of our squirrelly friends.
I read somewhere that no modern (or fairly pre-modern) cultures follow a 100% raw diet, and that there's a reason for that: cooking and agriculture have made us wimps.
Proud to be wimpy! Wimps get fewer diseases!
But you'd think there'd be some interesting wild stuff you could just grab and eat, right? Herbs, at least? ...Dandelions?
There are chapters on blackberries, blueberries, strawberries, and persimmons (which I have had straight from a tree, and which are FOUL even when ripe), so yes, there are a few things you can eat right off the vine. And there are some other plants that don't need to be cooked forever with multiple changes of water to get to an edible state. Like CATTAIL POLLEN. Apparently it can be substituted one-for-one with flour, and the author likes to make baked goods with half-flour, half-pollen. I sneezed just reading about it.
There's also a chapter on crawfish which I am not going to be foolish enough to read.
To be fair, I suppose wheat takes a lot of processing to turn into food, it's just that we don't do it ourselves.
It does take considerable processing, but less than acorns; wheat is just ground to make flour, while acorns have the whole boiling-for-hours-to-leech-out-the-tannins step before they can be ground. (I recall reading somewhere that as soon as the Native American tribes who used acorns as a staple crop were introduced to wheat flour, they abandoned the acorns with great glee because wheat was way easier, but I have no idea where I read it or if it's really true.) Though still not something I'd like to do myself every time I wanted something with flour in it, for sure.
(Did you see the article in the NYTimes about how Central Park authorities are getting mad at foragers eating all their plants?)
No, but that is hilarious.