So we can’t eat grass. But my Thai wife is always bringing home some strange leafs to eat, most of which are delicious. Pak Boong, Dom Loong, etc. One type of ivy complete with the curly tendrils.
Check out these photos, especially the bottom of page one and the next pages. If I saw them growing it would never occur to me to try eating them.
The leafy parts of plants can add flavor and fiber (and micronutrients like vitamins), but you can’t really survive on them, because they’re mostly cellulose. Cellulose isn’t inedible, it’s simply indigestible for humans. And we have plenty of leafy things we eat in the West that are “inedible”: lettuce, cabbage, greens, spinach, the outer hulls of peas and corn…all of which generally show up in our stool unchanged except for what our teeth did to it when it went in.
What are you talking about? Of course lettuce, cabbage, spinach, and the like are digestible. They might not give as many useful Calories as grains or potatoes do, but we can get plenty of other nutrients out of them.
And of course there are edible leaves that grow wild in the US, too. There’s dandelions, purslane, chickweed, various wild onions, various mints…
Pokeweed. Although it does take a couple hours to process to remove the naturally occurring toxins. Gotta wonder how anyone figured out how to make it edible.
My mother-in-law used to make a pretty tasty poke sallet.
I mean, you can eat leaves, but they’re not going to sustain you.
A head of Romaine lettuce has about 100 calories so to get to a fairly basic 2000 calories a day, you’d have to eat 20 heads a day.
Unless you’re standing in the middle of a commercial lettuce farm, the amount of exertion required to gather enough edible leaves to eat in some kind of emergency would almost certainly leave you net-negative from a caloric perspective.
You need nuts, beans, starches, and grains to survive on plants. Leaves aren’t going to cut it.
I rented a house some years back that had virtually no “grass,” but we discovered most of the weeds were edible. Two of the biggest crops were lambsquarter and garlic mustard, both of which are easily distinguishable (e.g., you don’t have to worry that you are eating something poisonous) and they were plentiful enough to pick daily for a vegetable all summer. Others were purslane and lemon sorrel (looks kinds like clover), and were enough for accents a few times per week. I went out out with my kitchen shears almost every day for “yard salad.” It was fun and tasty. We also had poke and wild plantain (not bananas) but I was too wary to eat those, and a decrepit mulberry tree that still produced off a few branches, plus innumerable things of the cat’s-ear/dandelion family that I occasionally played with.
You couldn’t live off of them, but certainly would keep scurvy at bay for 6 months of the year from a small 1/4 acre yard. Frankly, I thought it was a lot nicer than grass (we did mow the front for the neighbors’ sake) overall.
you most certainly can, you just don’t derive much if any nutrition from it.
we can, however, eat (and get calories from) grass seeds, which is what e.g. wheat and rice are.
leafy greens are valuable because many of them are rich in micronutrients (vitamins and minerals) and some (herbs) for the aromatic compounds they contain.
huh. in spring and early summer I’ve got purslane all over my patio, growing in between the paver stones. I’d heard it was edible, but read elsewhere it contains oxalic acid which I thought was bad.
I found purslane very tasty, but it had a certain, uh, laxative effect on me.
Oxalic acid isn’t “bad” per se, though it can contribute to kidney stones and strip your tooth enamel a bit. Spinach, chard, kale, etc are chock full of it. You can mitigate the bad effects by cooking them with a bit of acid and fat, or so I’ve heard…like most people do anyway (lemon juice or vinegar sauce plus some pork fat, for example), and not drinking the “pot likker.” But don’t quote me on that one; I’m not seeing any clear evidence proving it one way or another, now that I look.
Lots of commonly consumed plants contain oxalic acid at various concentrations; it’s fine in small quantities. It’d be pretty hard to eat enough purslane for it to be an issue.
Oh, yeah, I forgot about garlic mustard. My mom makes a delicious pesto out of that stuff.
I think I know of a weed called “lambsquarter” around here, but I doubt it’s the same one you’re referring to: The one I’m thinking of would be far too tough for humans.
I stuffed grape leaves for Mrs. Plant (v.2.0). She liked them so much that unbeknownst to her, I substituted mustard and various other greens eaten in the South.
Grape leaves are another one I know of, but they’re not really a thing in my family (we stuff cabbage, instead), and so I don’t know how much (if any) processing they need to be edible.
I bought a jar once, pickled.
Fresh mustard or collard is less expensive, and being from NH, I doubt she could tell the difference after they were stuffed with spicy ground beef and cooked.
To make sure we’re on the same page, by “nutrition”, do you mean “calories”? It’s true that there’s lots of good stuff in leafy greens, but is there any functional human diet that gets a majority of its calories from leaves?
By contrast, you can eat almost nothing but potatoes, or beans+corn, and survive for quite a long time.
Potatoes will leave you low on some essential amino acids, and both of those diets will be missing some vitamins. Beans, corn, and cabbage, though, will between them cover all of the bases except for relief of boredom.
It was fun and tasty. We also had poke and wild plantain (not bananas) but I was too wary to eat those, and a decrepit mulberry tree that still produced off a few branches, plus innumerable things of the cat’s-ear/dandelion family that I occasionally played with.