Non-traditional crops for food security (human consumption focus)

Domesticating trees is hard and takes a really long time combined with the fact that oaks just aren’t a very good food source.

It’s rather telling that, despite the fact that there are hundreds of oak species, probably dozens of palatable oaks, with ranges including almost every major human civilization (Europe, the near East, China, Mezoamerica), none of them were domesticated. We domesticated filberts, walnuts, chestnuts, various pine nuts, podocarps, pecans, pistachios, torreya, macadamias, cashews, candlenut, hazelnuts, almonds, heartnuts, and who knows what else. Yet nobody ever domesticated an oak. Or beech for that matter. I doubt it was for lack of trying.

Oaks probably just aren’t actually very fit for human consumption. That’s the thing with a lot of non-traditional crops–they often aren’t traditional for a reason.

If I had to take a stab at specific reasons, oaks are usually highly alternate-bearing, have a very long juvenile stage, are wind-pollinated, and outcross and hybridize easily (bad if you are trying to stabilize traits). The nut is small, does not have a protective shell but has an adherent skin, so they suffer from animal predation while still being hard to process efficiently, and is very high in tannins. Acorns are high in unsaturated fats, which, combined with the thin skin and lack of shell, means that they go rancid quickly, and if you did breed out the tannins, they’d go rancid even faster (tannins are anti-oxidants, so they slow down the process of going rancid–tannins are also pretty toxic to the liver, so please don’t start trying to eat a bunch of acorns on the assumption that they’ll prevent cancer because of the high levels of antioxidants…).

Some crops are well-suited to domestication, some aren’t. And some crops are well-suited to feeding large numbers of people; generally speaking, crops that have a lot of calories that also store well. Which is to say, carbs. Most seeds high in oils go rancid in storage, seeds high in protein are uncommon and typically don’t have as many calories since protein is biologically “expensive” to make. That leaves carbs. Corn, wheat, barley, rice, cassava, potatoes, sweet potatoes, yams, breadfruit, the list goes on. All rich in carbs. All human staples. That wasn’t by accident.

Arguably, in the modern day and age, the parameters of what makes a good staple crop have changed. Processing and storage is vastly better now, so we can rely more on oily seeds. And now that I think about it, we actually have done some recent domestications as a result. Canola simply wasn’t edible until recently, and palm oil was of pretty iffy quality, but we’ve used breeding and better processing to make canola and palm oils into a keystone of the modern diet. For better or worse.

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I hate them so much.

And they return the favor.

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Live Oaks are great sweet meat acorns. So are White and Pin oaks.

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Low tannin white oaks have already been selected by Native American people long ago and they are grafted by few currently, to my understanding. I think what you mean to say is why haven’t the current inhabitants of North America adopted the crop of the past?

I imagine ignorance has a lot to do with the answer. Otherwise I’d be speculating and saying things that aren’t nice. And if you don’t have anything nice to say…

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I think it bears repeating: There are also low-tannin oaks in Europe (sessile and pedunculate oak and others), in North Africa (holm oak), in Mesoamerica (Mexican white oak), in Turkey (holly oak and others), northern Iran (Persian oak), Pakistan and India (Moru oak), in China (dozens of species), and in Siberia, Korea and Japan (Mongolian oak). None of them were domesticated or became an important food crop. So it seems to be more of a case of “native Americans ate white oak because they didn’t have anything better” rather than “white oaks are a good food source but people are too dumb to eat them.”

I mean, if we broaden the scope a little, there are oaks and near relatives in every major human civilization center. All the above I mentioned, plus stone oaks and tropical chinquapins in southeast Asia and Indochina, southern beaches in South America, Australia, New Zealand, and even parts of Oceana. If there are people, generally speaking there are some kind of oak or oak relatives there as well. Many species have high tannins, but some in pretty much every genera and location are low-tannin species. None were domesticated or became important food crops. Why? I’d hazard the guess that they just aren’t good crop plants, for reasons mentioned earlier.

Chestnuts are the only member of the oak family that has ever been domesticated. If we widen the scope to the order Fagales, then there are plenty more (hazels, walnuts, etc), but within the oak family itself, despite its global distribution and hundreds and hundreds of species, only a few chestnuts were domesticated and cultivated for food. What makes chestnuts different? Well, perhaps it’s because they are larger, rich in carbs, don’t have a high oil content, produce consistently and fairly early, and have a more protective shell that also naturally falls off, making them less vulnerable pre-harvest but also easy to process.

Failing one or two of these conditions is fine (hazelnuts are oily, but they bear at a very young age, for a nut anyway, walnuts store well because of their shell, etc), but oaks seem to fail just about every condition. They are edible, and that’s about it.

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@disc4tw – No, I draw a distinction between (1) low intensity use of a plant as a food source, which is what you describe re Native Americans and oaks; and (2) high intensity use of a plant source, which is what happened with such New World crops as teosinte/maize, squashes, beans, and potatoes. High intensity use has consequences. For example, a domesticated plant is often so radically changed that it looks completely different and it cannot survive in the wild. Probably none of us would see any similarity between teosinte and maize.

I suspect that @a_Vivaldi hits on many of the serious issues above, but I’ll have to take some time to read his comments.

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Speaking as someone who occasionally utilizes native White Oaks; the worst probably is bearing in alternate years for some. But where there are copious amounts of white oaks; that really is not a problem. Next to that; there is a general lack of knowledge harvesting them, floating off bad kernels, leaching them and processing them into a usable form.

For some; maybe decapping and cracking them free is a deterrent. But it is nothing an enterprising mechanical engineer can not solve.

Live Oak saplings provide plenty edible tubers. And the oil is not bad for cooking either.

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Just conjecture on my part, but I think chestnuts won out over acorns across the world. If you look at everywhere chestnuts and oaks coexist, even if both were gathered and eaten at one point, chestnuts have endured as a food source while acorns have been forgotten. Even in Korea, one of the few places where acorns are commonly eaten, they are still less popular than chestnuts.

Chestnuts also tend to have much shorter generation times than most oaks.

I don’t know where I read this but I think the answer is yes.

I think an important thing to consider also is that there isn’t much to gain from domesticating oaks. Assuming that tannins improve storage and reduce predation, since acorns have to be processed anyway, there’s little advantage over increasing size. Most acorns are large enough to handle already, and increasing size comes at a cost for quantity.

There’s evidence that native Californians massively increased the ranges of oak species as the Ice Age ended. And some species were favored over others. IIRC, lower tannin blue oaks were consumed first and high tannin live oaks were stored longer. So while people weren’t necessarily selectively breeding them, there was some selective planting of favored species.

Provided there are animals around for seed dispersal, I can’t think of any tree species where domestication has changed them so much they can’t go feral in the right conditions. Maybe coconuts that are too big to float to another beach.

In annual crops, modern domesticated varieties are thousands of generations away from their wild ancestors. Fruits and nuts, especially those that can be propagated by cuttings, can be just a hundred or fewer generations away.

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I prefer crops that require no processing…like Hickories, American Persimmons, Texas Persimmons, Pawpaw, etc.

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We have loads of American Persimmons here. Bug ate to hades and back though. I’m not a fan of Pecans and Hickories due to the crud they leave on everything.

We have wild bush paw paw on the property too. One year I might beat the wildlife to getting a fruit. My wife thinks I’m crazy because I religiously keep them clear of invasive vines and cage them. To no avail.

I’m convinced the Paw Paw texts the deer and tells them it’s ripe enough to eat or something.

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Another very overlooked southern favorite. Sugarberry. A teaspoon of berries has 15 calories. Can have up to 20% protein if eaten whole. And phosphorus, and calcium. Good baked or in meatloaf/balls.

Most folks dismiss them as just huge astringent Choke Cherries.

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What is the genus/species?

Celtis laevigata

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Wow really? The ones here have zero “pest” damage because I guess they’re so astringent until they ripen and fall off…

Sugarberries are nice, but small with very little flesh. Sideroxylon lanuginosum is another native with a similarly sweet, small fruit.

Morus rubra and Rusty Blackhaw have a little more flesh. And some other good native forbs are groundcherries, dewberries, and various native alliums…

But yes, Pawpaws would be the other top-tier native fruit (big & sweet!) up there with Persimmons, if they’ll grow in your area!

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Sideroxylon is a genus I rarely see mentioned in any contexts. It’s a fairly widespread genus, and one of the very, very few members of Sapotaceae that ranges into cold climates. Cool to know gum bully has sweet fruit.

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I was just pruning away vines from my little wild Paw Paw shrubs. We have Asimina parviflora and Asimina pygmea here. The must taste great because the wildlife always gets them.

The Sugarberries here do not seem bad tasting when ripe. I agree there is not a lot of meat on them.

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I really like the taste of pawpaw, but I wouldn’t consider pawpaw a top-tier native fruit for food security. Unless you have a way to freeze it, you will have a more difficult time processing it since it can’t be dehydrated. Persimmons on the other hand can be dehydrated, so I would consider them top-tier.

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True, but they do provide a lot of great-tasting calories when picked fresh. And there’s not that many native fruits that provide that. I mean, what other large, native fruits are there besides Pawpaws & American Persimmons?

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Mulberries, both fruit and leaves. Also passiflora incarnata.

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Until more evidence is uncovered to support or refute the link between consumption of pawpaw fruit and atypical Parkinson’s Disease I’d recommend moderating consumption of pawpaw fruit.
Perhaps there’s a reason the harvest window is so short and prior to the advent of refrigerators/freezers and there was no way to preserve pawpaw for consumption outside of that small harvest window.

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