And what do I run across today? Speculation that wild calabash seeds might have needed to run through the digestive systems of now-extinct megafauna. It’s near the end of a Carl Zimmer blog poston tracking the DNA of wild and domesticated calabashes to trace their historical spread.
Chronos, you just reminded me of an old comment my parents made. They were talking about the old days, when LA’s main sewage treatment plant would dry the final sludge after it had been through the anaerobic digesters and sell it as fertilizer. They thought it was sad that it was no longer available just because some people were easily spooked by the word sewage (now known as wastewater because the word sewage has negative connotations).
They said that the only seeds that could come through the process and still sprout were tomato seeds. Also that it was great fertilizer. I’ve heard rumors that LA might be drying sludge (now known as biosolids) again sometime, but haven’t kept in the loop.
Why do we get so much enjoyment out of hot chili peppers that most mammals find horrible? Why can we safely eat chocolate in far greater quantities than most other animals?
Every time a plant comes up with a new strategy to discourage unwanted predation some animal comes up with a counter measure.
The flavour of ruminant flesh doesn’t change based on diet because ruminants don’t live on what they swallow. Ruminants live on stomach microbes that in turn live on what the ruminant swallows. IOW ruminants don’t eat grass,they eat microbes. They just swallow grass. So with very few exception, it doesn’t mater what you feed a cow or sheep, it will taste the same. Only the speed of growth and the distance walked to find food has any real influence on flavour.
In contrast, the taste of non-ruminants is strongly influenced by diet, because non-ruminants extract nutrients directly from their food, and hence are physically constructed from the food they eat. So a human or a pig or a chicken changes flavour radically based upon diet. Even the flesh of non-ruminant grazers like horses changes markedly based on diet because they extract the available nutrients before passing on the indigestible cellulose to their gut microbes.
And yeah, grain fed chickens do taste of grain. Or at least, they have a very distinctive, bland flavour that you never get from chickens raised on anything but grain. This is also the reason why the flesh of chickens and pigs (and humans) becomes greasy and sloppy when they eat diets high in unsaturated fats. I contrast, it doesn’t matter what you feed a sheep, the flesh never becomes oily because the gut microbes convert the unsaturated fast to saturated before the sheep ever gets a chance to absorb it.
Oils and volatiles like ketones have the most dramatic influence on the taste of meat because they are usually absorbed and laid down in the cells intact with no digestion. But other compounds can also have a pronounced effect on flavour.
That did occur to me too! Otherwise, a very informative post, Blake, thank you!
However, I wasn’t trying to argue that foraging pigs (or chickens, or :eek: humans) wouldn’t taste different from grain-fed ones. I understand that the difference in diet does produce a difference in flavor (though I didn’t know about the distinction between ruminants and non-ruminants in that regard, learnsomethingneweveryday).
But I’m not convinced that the specific individual flavors of the animals’ diet would come through in the taste of the meat. Foraging chickens really don’t taste like grass and bugs (even though they may taste noticeably different from grain-fed chickens). Why would foraging pigs taste specifically like acorns?
Anyway, just my take on the matter. Please don’t eat me.
I saw a conference talk on that a few years ago. One interesting thing I remember is that the agoutis seem to spend very little time policing/defending their seed caches, possibly because it’s so easy for them to just steal from another cache instead.
