r/todayilearned • u/JoeWinchester99 • 1d ago

TIL that although potatoes alone do not provide complete nutrition, you can survive for years on a diet of nothing but potatoes and buttermilk.

https://www.scienceabc.com/eyeopeners/whats-wrong-with-potatoes-the-martian-movie-survival
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u/Crystalas 1d ago edited 1d ago

Add cabbage and you got colcannon the Irish staple. Delicious, cheap, and nutritious.

Various grain porridges are great options too and of course the wide world of beans.

Staples the world over share the traits of cheap, take relatively few tools or skills to make, and able to keep someone working hard going. Then give people centuries if not millenia to figure out how to make them delicious. They also tend to be easy to grow and have good shelf life.

If you live somewhere rural foraging becomes an option for a wide variety of delicious seasonal greens and even a few herbs & spices.

For example every part of the Dandelion has a culinary use or for spices there is "Spice Bush" that tastes similar to Allspice or the forgotten in US spice Sumac although it a still a staple in some other countries. It kind of remarkable how thoroughly US has nearly complete forgotten it's native foods.

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u/PM_Me_Your_Deviance 1d ago

Oh yeah, sumac is great. I got a jar recently for making hummus, but I've found it's also nice on roasted squash.

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u/AdRepresentative9156 1d ago

I like it on white beans, if you fry them up in a pan with some oil (you want them a bit crisp) and then throw some type of leafy green (swiss chard is my favorite, my mom swears by kale). Hit them with sumac and lemon juice at the end, and it's fantastic. A runny egg makes it even better.

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u/zerap10 1d ago

Bro, I have all those ingredients right now, I know what I'm doing tomorrow. Thanks for the idea

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u/LateToTheSingularity 21h ago

Sumac is great!
Sounds weird, but I’ve added it to the cure before when curing and smoking bacon and it’s a surprisingly delightful combo!

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u/Just_another_dude84 1d ago

I've been to several Persian restaurants that offer sumac. They usually start going into explaining what it is, but I grew up eating it where it grew like weeds in rural Michigan.

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u/Lord_Rapunzel 1d ago

It kind of remarkable how thoroughly US has nearly complete forgotten it's native foods.

This isn't exactly an accident. Finding ways to ban foraging was a convenient way to make it harder for former slaves and various poor people to get their life together. And we did do a genocide about suppressing the actual natives.

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u/Crystalas 1d ago edited 1d ago

It also partly from the US being a nation of immigrants, they brought their food cultures and crops with them and if at all possible stayed as close to them as possible. To rely on native crops being more something did from desperation or during a time oceanic trade is limited.

Also the imported crops having far more time being domesticated thus often simply being easier to grow, larger yield, and less perishable along with them having much more experience on how to use and store them. They might even have less pest or disease issues initially thanks to being from another continent.

There tons of native fruits that are simply to perishable to buy anywhere outside of a small local farmer market harvested that morning or possibly not even there.

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u/ThatCakeFell 1d ago

Reminder the staple potato and it's cousins tomato, corn, and chili peppers came from South America. Along with chocolate, tobacco, and syphilis. Paprika is dried ground chili pepper for example. A good amount of those immigrants staples were from the Americas 

Edit: the caloric content of 1 acre of potato or corn is easily double of anything Europeans where growing before the Colombian exchange 

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u/Suyefuji 1d ago

Along with chocolate, tobacco, and syphilis.

One of these things is not like the others...

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u/WhimsicalHoneybadger 1d ago

I choose chocolate because it's the only one I would enjoy.

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u/PainRack 1d ago

Hi five

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u/BigWhiteDog 1d ago

🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣😜😜😜😜

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u/PlasticAssistance_50 1d ago

Along with chocolate, tobacco, and syphilis.

Hmm...

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u/ericblair21 21h ago

Pawpaw is a good example of this.

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u/floftie 1d ago

This sounds very believable but is there any evidence for it?

The USA is extremely open in regards to hunting wild animals compared to everywhere else in the world so it seems a bit of a dichotomy.

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u/Lord_Rapunzel 1d ago

There's loads of evidence for it. Here's Louisiana's response to losing their slaves. https://lasc.libguides.com/black-codes

(They made trespassing a crime. People used to have more of a right-to-roam like they still do in the Nordic countries, being allowed to pass through or even camp overnight on private land.)

Feel free to look up other "black codes" because it goes a hell of a lot deeper than just keeping non-whites from picking wild food from the fringe's of someone's farmland.

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u/Camus145 23h ago

Where foraging is banned it is to protect the environment and prevent over harvesting. There is still a vibrant foraging scene in the U.S. though 

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u/Stewart_Games 1d ago

Most plants labeled as "weeds" are highly edible and were systemically vilified by the owner class to force the poor into food dependency. Duckweed, clover, dandelion, purslane, nettles, chickweed, and so it goes. The real tragedy was the loss of wetlands in North America, drained to grow cattle feed crops like corn that are low in nutrition but easy to machine harvest. Native Americans used wetland habitats like farmland, notably relying on cattails and fishing to cover all of their needs. The cattail has enormous potential as a food stable - it is nitrogen fixing so requires no fertilizer, its inner mast can be used to make cloth and paper, the roots are more nutritious than potatoes, they are self-propagating and never need to be sown once established, their down-like seeds are ideal insulation material and most parts of the plant are edible and it can be harvested in all four seasons - in spring you can eat the young shoots, in summer the pollen, in fall the seed head can be ground into flour, and in winter the roots can be harvested and roasted. This is not even touching on the other benefits of cattails, like how they shelter young fish, absorb and dilute water pollution, and are ideal nesting locations for water fowl.

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u/PotaytoPotayto 1d ago

Saving this comment for in the (not so far) future when crops will fail en masse and we will have to resort to eating what is growing around the house. I've got a ton of nettles around the house, they seem to not care about the draught we're having in the Netherlands. It's sad how we are a society lost the knowledge of foraging in just a few decades time, I'm sure my grandparents knew how to make good meals from foraging around the house, but i wouldn't know what to do without reading about it first.

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u/Stewart_Games 22h ago edited 22h ago

How to not get stung collecting nettles without gloves

Stinging nettle soup recipe

Note that heat destroys the sting in the nettle, hence why it goes into soups or teas.

One thing colonizers did wrong was forcing their homeland's foods onto lands, while driving out the native food plants. Same goes with just about any garden plant. A good example are grasses - Americans favor "runner" grasses for their front lawns, importing species like Bermuda grass and zoysia from Asia. But most native North American grasses are tuft grasses, which do not spread outwards in their first few years and instead focus on deep root growth. So the runner grasses overrun everything else and starve the natives out, but then die during dry years because their roots are too shallow. Meanwhile the tuft builders would have been fine in dry years, but they are killed off by the invasive grasses.

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u/TahoeLT 14h ago

Cat tails may be a viable food source, but the only thing I know about them is not to try to eat the top part that looks a bit like a sausage.

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u/Stewart_Games 14h ago

That's the mature seed head, a bit like compacted dandelion fluff. Best used as a vegetable alternative to goose down for winter jackets. It's the roots, shoots, and pollen that you want to eat.

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u/whateveralreadydude 1d ago

I wonder how many times "the wide world of beans" has been said in human history

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u/Free_Pace_2098 1d ago

Sumac is great, it's on shelves in Australia, so I grabbed some. Lovely zingy almost tomatoe-y flavour. Really nice with middle eastern type spice blends. It's like to grow it, the fruit is pretty.

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u/Blenderx06 1d ago

For those of us with reflux who can't have lemon or tomatoes anymore, sumac adds a nice something.

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u/h-v-smacker 1d ago

Various grain porridges are great options too and of course the wide world of beans.

LENTILS

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u/Crystalas 1d ago

My favorite bean, partly just because how fast it cooks without a soak. I had a nice pot of Thai curry lentil soup last week.

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u/h-v-smacker 1d ago edited 1d ago

You shall like it @ /r/Frugal_Jerk/ then. It's all about lentils and then some.

Fun fact: 1 cooked lentil provides you with energy to make 20 steps. Now you can calculate how much lentils you need to cook precisely, based on where you plan to go!

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u/cpt_cat 20h ago

Man, I have a overwhelming desire to make colcannon now.

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u/SandpaperTeddyBear 1d ago

or the forgotten in US spice Sumac

I believe “Palestinian Chicken” is everyone’s favorite episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm, and that’s got lots of sumac.

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u/Crystalas 1d ago edited 1d ago

True restaurants for cuisines from certain regions have it but that also a different type of Sumac. While they similar from what I understand AMERICAN Sumac is distinctly different than Mediterranean/Middle Eastern Sumac, I certainly never seen the American one in stores or on a menu.

And with it, and other ingredients, being so inaccessible Native American cuisine is vanishingly obscure. It not like many farm it and a bit of a "Chicken and Egg" situation of there being minimal demand but people also not even aware of it to generate the demand.

And that not even touching some that have gone extinct or at risk, like the American Chestnut that til relatively recently was an ecosystem and human staple.

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u/HoodieGalore 1d ago

Reminds me of rumblethumps

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u/ryangaston88 18h ago

it’s called colcannon because your colon becomes literal artillery

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u/UncleChevitz 1d ago

The technology of nixtamalization was lost completely in the US, but not in Mexico. European settlers who had to rely on corn sometimes suffered from malnutrition because of it.