Lotus root is pretty common in Chinese and Japanese cuisine. I've had it pickled and in a Sichuan dry pot. It's crunchy and takes on flavors pretty well.
Lotus root is pretty common. A crunchy tuber that keeps its texture after cooking, bland taste, unique visual appeal. I threw some in the last pot of bean chili my family made, and the kids liked it.
I think this might say more about your geographic location than you think :)
People from other continents always surprise me with various fruits they taken for granted their entire life, but I've never heard about, and vice-versa.
Seeing my neighbors gathering ginkgo nuts made me curious enough to try them, and I waded right in without understanding the risks! TLDR— they're not a great food source. It's yet another one of those cases where you have to wonder what "delicacy" means.
The actual fruit (looks like a rotten plum, smells terrible) has ginkgolic acids which cause contact dermatitis (think poison ivy).
Then the nuts themselves contain Ginkgotoxin, which interferes with your B6, screwing up your nervous system and causing seizures. Cooking reduces but does not eliminate Ginkgotoxin.
I only ate one, and ate it raw. It was a delightful texture, but tasted like chewing random plant matter. Like leaves from a tree. Was maybe half a cubic centimeter of matter. Escaped any ill effects.
According to my research, kids can have seizures from as few as 10 nuts, which would probably be like 1.5 spoonfuls if you mashed them up. The guidelines I found don't seem very scientific but supposedly a kid can safely handle 3-5 nuts over the course of a day, and an adult could handle 5-10. So it doesn't seem like there is a good margin of safety.
Overall a real risk to health for an insignificant amount of food that doesn't taste special. But a nice texture.
In university, one year, our building started smelling like there had been a sewage overflow. Pretty soon, everything around started smelling like this - the stores, restaurants, cinema, etc. in central campus was stinking. It was soon found out that the decorative Ginko trees planted in the central part of campus were fruiting (probably for the first time since planting) and the fruit was getting crushed underfoot and carried everywhere. The smell took a few weeks to go away.
'eaten as a delicacy in some parts of Asia' according to Wikipedia, but to be fair OP is only asserting possibilities anyway (the criteria are 1) old enough to have been around for dinosaurs to eat; 2) edible by humans).
This is an interesting way to think about plants and animals.
I'm finding it surprisingly hard to find sources for known age of species - is that information collected somewhere? Or is it something we often just don't know because of how sparse the fossil record is?
Wondering because of trying to look up the age of fern species I do eat (no cinnamon fern near me) and I can't find out.
> I'm finding it surprisingly hard to find sources for known age of species - is that information collected somewhere? Or is it something we often just don't know because of how sparse the fossil record is?
It depends on what you mean by the age of the species. You can find the oldest known fossil occurrence at the Paleobiology Database [1] and the divergence time from molecular phylogenies via TimeTree [2].
That's because when something becomes a new species is a surprisingly difficult and contentious debate in biology.
That's simply due to the nature of evolution. It's nearly impossible to look at one past generation of chicken to the next to figure out when the ancestor was no longer a chicken. Yet, go back far enough and you'll find T-Rexes in the mix.
Every generation is a new missing link. It's an extremely fuzzy process.
> Yet, go back far enough and you'll find T-Rexes in the mix
Afaik, T-Rex was never a direct ancestor of modern birds, including chicken. T-Rex and birds are theropod dinosaurs, but it was a very large and diverse group of animals.
But as soon as you've gone up from a chicken to the ancestor of a T-Rex, you do indeed find that T-Rexes are in the mix. They look different from what you'd normally think of as a T-Rex, in the same way that they also look different from what you'd normally think of as a chicken.
It's pretty tricky to find out, yeah. And new evidence is coming in all the time. All the methods are either floors (a fossil at X date proves a species existed then, but lack of fossils found yet might be inconclusive) or estimates (like molecular clock techniques). Dating fossils themselves (or rather the rocks they're buried in) isn't always easy or possible. For more out-of-the-way species, if anyone has bothered trying to figure out the age it's likely buried in scientific sources that are tricky for novices to find or search, and maybe under debate.
That make wonder, how many fossils there might be at total on earth, and with current trend, how much time would humanity should continue to survive before those remaining will approach zero, if fossil formation as a known rate.
> how many fossils there might be at total on earth
The number is both incalculable and vague - is a shark tooth enough to count as a fossil? How about diatoms and other microfossils?
Diatomaceous earth alone contains around 10^6-10^7 frustules (the shell of a diatom) per gram. If you count them as fossils then the lower bound is 10^18 fossils per year just in diatomaceous earth production (the fossils are ancient but we produce nearly a million tons a year in diatomaceous earth).
Immense numbers. Quarries destroy them by the (enormous) truckload all the time, unexamined, god knows what cool unknown stuff has been ground up. Entire kinds of rock are basically made of fossils, not even always the really tiny kind (note: fossils can be microscopic!)
Then consider what's buried under the sea, totally inaccessible. Or under the ice at the poles.
It's a lot of fossils. And that's without even getting into questions like "what counts as a fossil for these purposes?", just any halfway sensible answer is going to leave you with an unfathomably big number, no need to even dig (ha, ha) into the specifics.
The places scientists go to dig up fossils are mostly where a particular stratum happens to exist (the crust gets recycled, so much of the oldest stuff is simply gone in most of the world) and happens to be exposed near the surface. Those same kinds of (for the more common strata, anyway) exist all over the place, just buried too deep to get at except, sometimes, during commercial excavation for things like mining (and then most of it's just gonna be destroyed without a look).
I thought avocados were where old food eaten by dinosaurs or at least very large ancient rodents. I guess it doesn't meet the 100 million year old age mark.
It was once thought that giant ground sloths were important for spreading avocados, but that seems to have been a mistake. Anyway, that was long after the dinosaurs. Flowering plants in general were still pretty new by the time the dinosaurs died out. I bet an actual dinosaur never saw an avocado. :)
Fun idea. At least one correction for the table: For wila/bryorii fremonti's age of 250mya they cite the "geologic history" of... moss. Wila is a lichen, which is primarily fungal with algal symbiotes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bryoria_fremontii And even given an edible moss, the fact that moss existed 250mya would not imply that particular species existed "morphologically unchanged". The "reindeer lichen" entry appears to have the same issue.
A lot of vegetables are toxic when raw, but safe after cooking. My favorite among these is mandioca, when it’s cooked and then fried. Goes well with churrasco.
Gnetum genom does not have a good fossil record, as is the case for many tropical species, but based on molecular clock data, the genus dates to the late Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary (66 mya). Gnetum is a really weird gymnosperm, not a flowering plant, although it does produce fleshy "cones" (strobili). In Indonesia, the seeds are smashed and deep fried to make crisps called "emping".
munificent | 5 hours ago
procaryote | 3 hours ago
austinjp | an hour ago
kleiba | 5 hours ago
mgh2 | 5 hours ago
ch4s3 | 5 hours ago
arunc | 5 hours ago
droopyEyelids | 5 hours ago
embedding-shape | 5 hours ago
People from other continents always surprise me with various fruits they taken for granted their entire life, but I've never heard about, and vice-versa.
SideburnsOfDoom | 4 hours ago
Clearly, for instance Welwitschia (1) listed. I think this says a lot about location.
It's a fascinating plant, but it is an endangered species, endemic to the Namib desert. And as far as I know, not that commonly eaten.
1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welwitschia
zdragnar | 5 hours ago
CGMthrowaway | 5 hours ago
rbanffy | 3 hours ago
I need to get food at the market, not wait for it to fall into a trap or fight it to death.
magneticnorth | 4 hours ago
I'm having trouble finding sources for other specific fern species, though many ferns have been around for hundreds of millions of years.
2OEH8eoCRo0 | 4 hours ago
heathrow83829 | 4 hours ago
On a side note there are 1000s even 10s of thousand of edible plant based species that grow on the earth. i don't know how old they are though.
droopyEyelids | 5 hours ago
The actual fruit (looks like a rotten plum, smells terrible) has ginkgolic acids which cause contact dermatitis (think poison ivy).
Then the nuts themselves contain Ginkgotoxin, which interferes with your B6, screwing up your nervous system and causing seizures. Cooking reduces but does not eliminate Ginkgotoxin.
I only ate one, and ate it raw. It was a delightful texture, but tasted like chewing random plant matter. Like leaves from a tree. Was maybe half a cubic centimeter of matter. Escaped any ill effects.
According to my research, kids can have seizures from as few as 10 nuts, which would probably be like 1.5 spoonfuls if you mashed them up. The guidelines I found don't seem very scientific but supposedly a kid can safely handle 3-5 nuts over the course of a day, and an adult could handle 5-10. So it doesn't seem like there is a good margin of safety.
Overall a real risk to health for an insignificant amount of food that doesn't taste special. But a nice texture.
BigTTYGothGF | 4 hours ago
Lots of food is like this, for example mangoes.
fellowniusmonk | 4 hours ago
Barley and Yogurt, they are the dogs we domesticated from wolves that changed us too.
Daily barley water is a life changer, I don't think our digestive systems really function without a smidgen of daily barley.
groos | 3 hours ago
ge96 | 5 hours ago
OJFord | 5 hours ago
throwup238 | 4 hours ago
irishcoffee | 5 hours ago
notorandit | 4 hours ago
plaguna | 4 hours ago
JohnMakin | 4 hours ago
rbanffy | 3 hours ago
icameron | 4 hours ago
seszett | 2 hours ago
magneticnorth | 4 hours ago
I'm finding it surprisingly hard to find sources for known age of species - is that information collected somewhere? Or is it something we often just don't know because of how sparse the fossil record is?
Wondering because of trying to look up the age of fern species I do eat (no cinnamon fern near me) and I can't find out.
throwup238 | 4 hours ago
It depends on what you mean by the age of the species. You can find the oldest known fossil occurrence at the Paleobiology Database [1] and the divergence time from molecular phylogenies via TimeTree [2].
[1] https://paleobiodb.org/
[2] https://timetree.org/
cogman10 | 4 hours ago
That's simply due to the nature of evolution. It's nearly impossible to look at one past generation of chicken to the next to figure out when the ancestor was no longer a chicken. Yet, go back far enough and you'll find T-Rexes in the mix.
Every generation is a new missing link. It's an extremely fuzzy process.
b112 | 4 hours ago
usrnm | 3 hours ago
Afaik, T-Rex was never a direct ancestor of modern birds, including chicken. T-Rex and birds are theropod dinosaurs, but it was a very large and diverse group of animals.
thaumasiotes | 2 hours ago
b00ty4breakfast | 2 hours ago
technothrasher | an hour ago
andrewflnr | 4 hours ago
psychoslave | 4 hours ago
throwup238 | 4 hours ago
The number is both incalculable and vague - is a shark tooth enough to count as a fossil? How about diatoms and other microfossils?
Diatomaceous earth alone contains around 10^6-10^7 frustules (the shell of a diatom) per gram. If you count them as fossils then the lower bound is 10^18 fossils per year just in diatomaceous earth production (the fossils are ancient but we produce nearly a million tons a year in diatomaceous earth).
hnlmorg | 3 hours ago
bubblewand | 3 hours ago
Then consider what's buried under the sea, totally inaccessible. Or under the ice at the poles.
It's a lot of fossils. And that's without even getting into questions like "what counts as a fossil for these purposes?", just any halfway sensible answer is going to leave you with an unfathomably big number, no need to even dig (ha, ha) into the specifics.
The places scientists go to dig up fossils are mostly where a particular stratum happens to exist (the crust gets recycled, so much of the oldest stuff is simply gone in most of the world) and happens to be exposed near the surface. Those same kinds of (for the more common strata, anyway) exist all over the place, just buried too deep to get at except, sometimes, during commercial excavation for things like mining (and then most of it's just gonna be destroyed without a look).
2OEH8eoCRo0 | 4 hours ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiddlehead
smm11 | 4 hours ago
neuroelectron | 4 hours ago
andrewflnr | 4 hours ago
Edit: transcript of a video about the sloth/avocado thing: https://nerdfighteria.info/v/jpcBgYYFS8o
andrewflnr | 4 hours ago
kilpikaarna | 4 hours ago
smoll | 3 hours ago
procaryote | 3 hours ago
rbanffy | 3 hours ago
hnlmorg | 3 hours ago
trilogic | 3 hours ago
rbanffy | 3 hours ago
whyenot | 3 hours ago
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.12705/642.12
rbanffy | 3 hours ago
zkmon | 3 hours ago
SAI_Peregrinus | 3 hours ago
SideburnsOfDoom | 3 hours ago
Nope, and this is trivial to check. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avocado#Taxonomy_and_evolution
The proposed seed dispersers are now-extinct mammalian megafauna. Much more recent than the dinosaurs - 10k to 100k years ago.
tgbugs | an hour ago
golem14 | 3 hours ago
kazinator | an hour ago
gpt5 | 54 minutes ago
whyenot | 42 minutes ago