DailyDirt: Strange But Sustainable Food
from the urls-we-dig-up dept
The world actually produces enough food to feed everyone, but there’s a lot of food waste and inefficient distribution in the supply chain. Obviously, it’d be nice to end world hunger, but we haven’t figured out how to do that just yet. Various solutions involve changing some of the things we eat the most — eg. eating less meat and more plants. Here are a few more wacky ideas for altering the human diet.
- The human body simply can’t digest cellulose from corn husks and wood chips, but some researchers are looking into breaking down those materials into an edible starch. Perhaps this doesn’t sound too appetizing, but it’s an interesting development that could recycle certain kinds of organic waste into more useful products. [url]
- People generate a lot of plastic trash — trash that could be digested by edible fungi. There are a few problems with trying to get rid of plastic waste with fungus, though. A small mushroom farm takes a few months to fully digest a relatively small amount of plastic, and the resulting edible fungi isn’t exactly delicious (or approved safe for human consumption yet). [url]
- Forget about fungi and turning cellulose into starch, how about eating some breadfruit from one of nature’s highest-yielding trees? A single breadfruit tree can produce 450 pounds of fruit per season, but not too many people eat this nutritious — but really bland — fruit. [url]
If you’d like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.
Filed Under: breadfruit, cellulose, diet, edible, food, food waste, fungi, mushrooms, organic waste, plastics, recycling, starch
Comments on “DailyDirt: Strange But Sustainable Food”
pig toilet - the ultimate in sustainable food
Speaking of “strange but sustainable food” perhaps one of the strangest (at least to Western sensibilities) — but indubitably sustainable — sources of food is the “pig toilet” ecosystem — raising pigs by feeding them a diet consisting of something that would normally be discarded as waste.
http://www.indiamike.com/india/goa-f23/the-sad-but-increasing-demise-of-the-goan-pig-toilets-t1127/
But sadly, the pig toilets, once a common sight in places such as Goa, India, are now considered somewhat unfashionable. Though frankly, I think I’d probably have a hard time getting down to business with a bunch of hungry pigs gathered underneath the ‘drop zone’ jockying for position and happily squealing in anticipation of an upcoming –or downcoming– meal.
The human body simply can’t digest cellulose from corn husks and wood chips, but some researchers are looking into breaking down those materials into an edible starch.
But what CAN break that down is called Mushrooms. Oyster have been grown on paper “waste” or even old sofas.
Parts of that can go to people. The rest? Other critters when can eventually end up on the dinner table.
It already is “appetizing”
http://qz.com/223742/there-is-a-secret-ingredient-in-your-burgers-wood-pulp/
McDonald’s, Burger King,Wendy’s, Taco Bell and Carl’s Jr.
Hell, its been on mainstream news as well.
Mushrooms are the great decomposition experts
Who cares if you can eat the mushrooms in question, if you break down the plastics, what you end up with when the mushroom life cycle is complete is soil that has been fertilized. That’s a win!