Not just pick a bit and hand it to you, but wash, cook and season it?
Grandmother FTW!
the high-silica varieties (the ones that cut your arms and legs when you run through them) will wear your teeth down. in fact, that’s how some herbivores die: their teeth are ground out that they can’t chew anymore.
I thought a high fiber diet loosens up yer bowels. Like prunes do.
I’ve read about people back in the Great Depression eating grass and tree bark, It probably isn’t a mistranslation.
I don’t know about grass, but a lot of people ate dandelions .
But a laymen’s term, though. To a non-botanist/ non-herbist, all green stuff in a certain shape and size is “grass” (the rest are “flowers”). It’s like “tree bark” - which trees? Makes a difference.
Likewise with grass - some plants that can be called grass contain tiny globules of fat, so if you put those leaves into water you can add some fat to your soup while starving.
Dandelions are now fashionable as salad because they’re nutritious (you only have to avoid the white milk, but the young leaves and I think also the roots?, are good to eat).
So without clarification “what type of grass exactly” this can be both helpful or not.
It’s like eating “berries” - some are edible and nutritious, some are meant for birds and make you slightly sick, some are very poisonous. So you eat “blue berries” when you know what they are, but not general berries.
In the year 2000, the Earth will be overrun by grass eating zombies. Once the grass is gone, they will become dirt eating zombies. Once the dirt is gone, some, reluctantly, will dine at the Olive Garden.
For soluble fibre, which is mainly what you find in prunes, that’s true.
For insoluble fibre like grass, it only goes so far. Large amounts of insoluble fibre form a compact, hard mass that the gut finds very difficult to move. If the mass contains long strands, such as grass that hasn’t been well finely ground, it binds up entirely and requires surgery to remove.
Consider a horse vs. cow. Both eat grass; but a horse has the one stomach, and gets little nutrition from it. Probably a lot more of the nutrition is from the added bonus, like grass seeds, oats, etc.
Cows OTOH and other ruminants have multiple stomachs. Grass like most leaves is primarily cellulose, which is indigestible. Ruminants have bacteria in their stomachs which progressively break down the cellulose into usable nutrients as it works its way through.
The end result, cows leave big wet piles of digested matter, horses leave turds that look like compacted dried grass, the undigested cellulose. Both animals have huge torsos relative to their leg mass, probably to process the large amounts of grass requied to obtain a livable amount of nutrients.
My (non-expert, non-biologist) guess? We’d be very much like horses, but lacking the capability to put through anywhere near enough content to get enough significant nutrition out of the result; plus, both grazers have those massive molars to grind the grass to a pulp before swallowing, so we’d probably also suffer from insufficient chewing our food. There’s a reason why we grind our grain first.
And, as pointed out above, some plants may be unappetizing or outright poisonous. I had an infestation of Canada Geese for the last few years, and it’s annoying how they strip a lawn like sheep but leave certain weeds untouched to flourish. When you’re so hungry you’ll eat anything may not be the best time to figure out which plants not to eat.
But horses get *more *nutrition out of low-quality feed than cattle do.
But sheep are ruminants, and sheep dung is much drier than horse dung.
I suspect your information is a couple decades out of date.
In One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Solzhenitsyn talks about the Soviet wardens getting the idea of serving the prisoners boiled grass from the Chinese. I have no idea how much truth there is to that, but suspect that they actually did it. I note that:
1.) we certainly can’t digest cellulose, so you can’t derive sustenance from eating grass shoots, although it will probably provide bulk and fiber
2.) We do, nonetheless, eat “grass” in eating the seeds of wheat, amaranth, barley, and other grains. Maybe they’re getting some nutrition from such seeds that inevitably get in there with harvesting the grass.
Perhaps my information is out of date. However, the European Commission published a press release on 04 July 2011 about food aid being provided to North Korea that said, “Increasingly desperate and extreme measures are being taken by the hard-hit North Koreans, including the widespread consumption of grass. A large proportion of the population is lacking sufficient food intake.”
One time, as a prank, a co-worker brought in horse feed and put it out as a snack. The horse feed contained molasses and actually had a very “bet you can’t eat just one” flavor to it.
Those of us who knew who knew the main ingredient of horse feed was glorified hay forced ourselves to stop at one. Those who didn’t, let’s just say they regretted it.
Humans DO eat grass. It’s our MAIN FOOD SOURCE.
That is, grass seed. Rice, wheat, corn. We get most of our nutrition from grasses.
Well, grass is in a botanical category with the grains, right? I think that family includes grass, bamboo, wheat, oats, barley, rice, maize, and others.
What’s the point of being a cow then?
Ruminants get more nutrition out of high quality feed, are more resistant to most toxins and are better able to *survive *on less feed at the expense of reduced growth rates.
It’s all swings and roundabouts. There’s no perfect solution.
Stick with wheat grass, bro
Grass is for cows.
The Church of the Horse makes it very hard for cows wishing to convert.