It’s everywhere. Why not just eat it instead of searching for veggies and meat which are more difficult to have?
The thing is that cows can’t digest grass either. They have an extra stomach along their oesophagus which is basically just a pouch where the grass goes in first. There are a lot of bacteria and they can digest grass. Then these bacteria grow because they eat the grass.
Then the cow swallows these bacteria and digests those. That’s where a cow gets their calories from.
Humans can’t digest anything without bacteria either.
they can
when you eat fruit, the sugar can enter your bloodstream directly through the mucosa in your mouth, you don’t even need to swallow it. although the main part of the absorption happens in the colon still.
Why? Because otherwise we wouldn’t exist and that wouldn’t be in line with the future.
I’d rather evolve the ability to photosynthesize, now that we have indoor lighting. It’d save a whole bunch of time and grocery bills.
Take the tier zoo aproach. Would you rather use evelution points on grass or evolution points on being big brain.
Grass.
Some of us did that and they are horses now.
big guts, short brains
There’s a reason grass is so common - it’s because it’s a wildly effective life strategy. Grass is actually quite hard to eat - there’s basically no nutrition in the leaves themselves, and grass evolved to incorporate silica “needles” in its leaves, so that it wears down your teeth when you try to eat it anyways.
Not to say that it’s impossible to eat grass, but you need to undergo a ton of highly specialized adaptations to make it possible. For most animals (including humans), it’s just not worth the effort
Ruminants that eat it have like several stomachs, they regurgitate the food they eat to re-eat it, and they require specialized gut bacteria to digest it. They have to spend like all of their time eating.
I’d like a source on the silica needles?
Basically all grasses contain silica phytoliths but they likely don’t significantly contribute to teeth wear. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0305440306001245
Thank you very much Sis! ✨
Interesting, thanks for sharing that. I wasn’t aware that there has been newer research countering the tooth wear model
All forms of grass:
- Corn
- Wheat
- Barley
- Rice
- etc
Every species of grain:
-
Wheat
-
etc
-
We eat the seeds, I presume OP refers to the leaves/blades of grass which are also present in species that aren’t cereals
Good point. This made me look further, but some of these also are just the seeds:
- Bamboo
- Bluegrass
- Crabgrass
- Foxtail Grass
- Goosegrass
- Lemongrass
- Wood Millet
- Orchardgrass
Bamboo shoots are a common ingredient.
Plants are selected to not be great to eat, basically. Cellulose in particular is almost impossible to biochemically break back down (but not completely), and is a pretty good structural material, too.
Seeds are often still palatable once you get through the shell, basically because turning into a baby plant is an already tough design constraint. Some plants still have tricks - notice that it’s the spiciest part of a hot pepper.
A lot of grass. Like lawn grass. Is wheat.
If you let it grow more.
So actually we did evolve to eat grass.
Cat grass is wheat grass.
Bamboo is also grass, we can eat the shoots/sprouts
Rye, barley, oats, and rice are also grasses.
Rye used to be a weed that evolved to resemble wheat so early farmers wouldn’t uproot it. But it evolved to resemble wheat so much that it became an edible crop in its own right.
they faked it until they made it!
Don’t forget corn!
Vavilovian mimicry goes brrr
Smarts required more calories.
It’s more efficient to let others eat the grass, and then eat them
Grass is mostly cellulose and lignin. Those molecules are difficult to break down.
Animals that can digest the cellulose either need a really long digestive track or to do something really gross to keep the stuff in their digestive track longer.
or to do something really gross to keep the stuff in their digestive track longer.
Looking at you, rabbits.
Deer too, but slightly less gross, and some others.
Any chemistry we could perform to make it more viable? E.g. cook it with alcohol?
Folks have looked at it with acid or enzymes to try and produce fuel ethanol from the sugar forming the cellulose. Humans use the chemistry of grazing animals.
Yeah the grass to milk, meat and hide pipeline is a great one
Vegetables have pretty limited availability for protein, as an animal you have sit there eating grass all day. Our ways allow us plenty of time to be smart & stuff
I mean we’ve got the time, but we still don’t do it.
I mean pandaz tried going back 2 the bark and kt takes their whole ass day. No phone time. Imagine?
It’s all down to the way the brain works. Our brains use up something like 20% of our calories when standing still doing nothing.
Grass does not supply the amount of calories and micronutrients needed to keep the human brain running, simply because it is low on both of those things.
Grass eaters have multiple stomachs, slow digestion and graze pretty much the whole time they’re awake, and because their brains use a lot less energy than human brains, the balance works out.
If you look at all the other animals in the world that do eat grass, we did. But the “we” that eat grass, look like those animals, with those traits.
The “we” that became smart became so due to what we evolved to eat and do.Return to cow
Because yo mama so fat she’d eat it all
