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i enjoy high fructose corn syrup too
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this post was submitted on 11 Oct 2025
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This is dumb. Most plants resist cultivation. Bragging about being able to afford them does not make you Superior.
Also yields are important
Our current style of industrialized agriculture isn't viable long-term (meaning: millenia); too much damage to the ecosystem.
It's the kind of farming you need in order to provide for the high density ~~rabbit hutches~~cities that are supposed to save the planet
No, obviously it is just the most profitable, which is the only thing that matters under capitalism. With better planning we could totally use sustainable farming techniques, and have comparable yields.
And I don't know what you are on about with cities. Cities are the densest, and thus most efficient way of human settlement. Other forms of settlement are less dense, therefore require more land, therefore leave less land for agriculture (and result in higher transportation costs) which means agriculture has to have higher yield per unit of area.
Resist cultivation or have some other undesirable properties. Often low yield, short harvest, low yield, difficult picking or transporting.
A favorite example of mine: oak’s acorns are sometimes edible. Roughly one in ten oaks produce edible acorns. They are indistinguishable from inedible ones unless you try them out - but inedible ones are fairly poisonous. The gene for edible acorns is recessive and it takes at least a decade before you know if a newly planted oak produces edible acorns or not, with a 10% probability of the former. It is just practically impossible to select for this criterion. Thus, we don’t eat acorns.
Not sure that acorns are inedible. They just need to be processed.
And let's not forget, low yield.
Let us not!
Low yield due to overly specific conditions that are hardly met
Low yield due to short production window
Low yield due to long growth time
Low yield just because
Also acorns ain't particularly nutritious.
You just remove the tannins by soaking them, it's not really a major problem. I tried it before, they were fine but fairly bland.
Isn't acorn flour edible after you rinse out the toxins? Some north american tribes did essentially "farm" acorns (They managed groves of oak) and iirc that's how they dealt with the toxicity.
Acorns are like the easiest thing to forage, though. I agree that foraging isn't as simple for many people as the OP makes it out to be, but acorns are a bad counter example.
They are high in tannins, which your body is pretty good at processing in reasonable quantities (they're in tea, coffee, and wine), but many acorns DO have unreasonable quantities of them and they can cause organ damage. Luckily, tannins are water soluble, so you just need to crack them open and soak them in water for a few days, then rinse and they're safe to eat.
I thought we eat acorns after processing them? There are cuisines which involve acorns as main ingredient.
Let the deer and squirrels and wild pigs eat the acorns, then eat the deer and squirrels and wild pigs. Easy!
I mean, I think that goes back to the whole “industrial farming” point. If it can’t be farmed, it won’t be commercially available. But there are plenty of plants that you could scavenge, if you knew what to look for.
One of my personal favorite niche plants is osha root. It’s one of the best cures for a sore throat. It tastes a little bit like dirty root beer, and it’ll numb your entire throat when you chew on it. Native Americans kept some around for medicine. You can even grind it up and smear it on shallow scrapes to numb the area. You can find it in teas like Throat Coat, which is a sort of secret weapon for performers and public speakers whenever they have a sore throat.
But it can’t be commercially farmed, because it exclusively grows in the Rocky Mountains where a specific type of fungus helps it thrive. It isn’t commercially viable to market to the masses like throat lozenges, (even though it is just as effective in reducing sore throats) because it has to be scavenged.
But what happens when “you” becomes a million people? A hundred million people? A billion people? Where I live, we can’t even have a nice field of flowers because a hundred Instagram models will trample and ruin it before spring is over. Scavenging and foraging literally cannot feed the 7 billion human mouths on this planet.
8 billion now.
If it can't be farmed there cannot be enough for everyone, but it will be exclusive to a select few. How they are selected is irrelevant.
My point wasn’t that commercial farming is bad. With 8 billion people on the planet, it’s a necessity. My point was simply that scavenging to supplant your needs should be more encouraged, and the knowledge should be passed down.
Most people live in large cities where this is not feasible for everyone at once. Also transportation is expensive.
If you have a garden (I recommend far from the street to avoid pollution), some wild plants will grow in it. It's good to know which ones you can eat and to be able to distinguish them from poisonnous ones. This way, weeding can become a sort of harvest.
Isn't that what they meant by industrial agriculture preventing widespread use?
I think the point is it doesn't prevent wide spread use. If a plant resists cultivation then it's not worth it to try to farm, either industrially or in your back yard. Especially if you're trying to farm for sustenance.
Lamb's lettuce superiority! They don't need cultivation, grow everywhere even if you don't want them to grow, and they are quite edible, also delicious.