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Comment by natcombs | Hacker News Reader

A little known fact is that Germany resorted to using sawdust in bread when they had flour shortages during the world wars

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kommissbrot

Are ther any other strange flour replacements that people have heard of?

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In Scandinavia they reguarly added inner bark to flour during famine. In Russia, nettle and orache were used. There a good article which goes through what many cultures eat during famine below [1]. Some of it is pretty horrific:

> “…I have no idea how I managed to survive and stay alive. In 1933 we tried to survive the best we could. We collected grass, goose-foot, burdocks, rotten potatoes and made pancakes, soups from putrid beans or nettles.

> Collected clay from the trees and ate it, ate sparrows, pigeons, cats, dead and live dogs."

It goes further into mentions of infanticide canabilism which I won't quote directly here but is worth reading.

Birch inner bark flour seems to be "common" as far as obscure flour goes. Apparently it wasn't even a famine food as such, and just a normal part of their diet. [2]

[1] https://www.askaprepper.com/ingenious-foods-people-made-fami...

[2] https://practicalselfreliance.com/birch-bark-flour/

In some ways that's not terribly different than one of the traditional starch sources in Papau New Guinea, sago.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sago

I am not sure what to make of "collected clay from trees" - sap? Lichens? Seems like a problem with the translation.

I assumed sap too. As a kid we had a load of sycamore trees - a close relative of the maple. My dad saw a documentary about tapping maple trees and he set out to tap the sycamore - it tasted vile.

But apparently Birch sap is fine, it seems to be enjoying a fad as a successor to coconut water at the moment.

How the hell do you eat a live dog?

Err... to give you a genuine answer - by experiencing real starvation.

Have you never seen any cartel execution/torture videos? Those people are literally just doing it because a higher up told them, they're making money, and stimmed out of their minds on a daily basis.

Eating a dog alive is really nothing to a human that's actually facing death from starvation. Please don't forget we're just animals.

I believe what that means is they found the dog alive, killed it themselves, cooked it (I hope) and ate it. In contrast with finding it already dead, like a road kill, which they eat also...

I lived with Karen people in Easter Burma for several years. One year the combination of poor timing for the rains[1] and fighting with the Burmese[2] left food scarce for many, including the village I lived in. We ate thin rice soup with bamboo shoots (bamboo is all fiber and water, very little if any nutrients) and greens for the first few months, and then fresh or fermented bamboo soup.

Normally the village elders have strict rules on where and how much fishing they allow to keep it sustainable, but that year people were so desperate they fished the river clean. You couldn't catch even the smallest fish, and it took several years to recover.

[1] There was too much rain and the slash-and-burn farms never had a chance to dry out. Slash-and-burn farms are very dependent on an old forest (usually 10 to 20 years or more) and a dry period in which to burn it off and expose the rich soil underneath.

[2] The Karen would try to hide their rice silos in the forest so the Burmese troops would be able to find it. If the soldiers did find them they'd take what they wanted and burn the rest.

I wasn't familiar with the Karen people until your comment, thanks for sharing your story. What led you to live with them for several years?

Sylvester Stallone made a film about the plight of the Karen: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rambo_(2008_film)

People dismiss it as just another (bloody) action movie, but it's not - it's a moral and political condemnation

Adding sawdust to nutmeg gave nutmeg dealers a poor reputation resulting in an insult in the 1860 election of Stephen Douglas calling Abraham Lincoln a nutmeg dealer (he threw in some other insults in the same line).

horrid looking wretch, sooty and scoundrelly (sic) in aspect, a cross between the nutmeg dealer, the horse swapper and the night man

Americans basically do the same thing with their cheese, but not because of shortages, it's because they don't want to shred it themselves.

“Cellulose is cellulose,” regardless of if whether it comes from wood pulp or celery, says Michael Jacobson, executive director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a group that advocates healthier, more nutritious food. He says no research points to health problems related to consuming cellulose.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_for_Science_in_the_Publ...

https://www.thekitchn.com/cellulose-the-wood-pulp-in-you-146...

So glad I ditched pre-packaged shredded cheese - it only takes like 5 min to shred a large cheese block and that lasts for weeks in my fridge (and the cheese block lasts for even longer so I always have shredded cheese and a few blocks waiting to be shredded).

Note: means without cheese are difficult if you have kids.

I don't use a lot of shredded cheese, but grated is harder to avoid.

Some people did an (albeit informal) experiment trying to find out how much sawdust you can add to a rice krispy treat before people start to notice.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AKDal51f5LU

> A little known fact is that Germany resorted to using sawdust in bread when they had flour shortages during the world wars

That wiki article suggests the use of sawdust in bread during WWI, but for a reference uses another encyclopedia-like source [1] (which does not cite any reference, and whose about page suggests it was written by a single individual). While it may be true, I'd be very hesitant to accept it without seeing a better source (and preferably one made before the wiki-circular-citation thing started).

[1] http://www.zum.de/whkmla/economy/period/warecwwi.html

Most bread in England in Victorian times was adulterated with plaster of paris.

I think one of the British history shows mentioned gypsum, which is just a name for Plaster of Paris that sounds less like something you should keep out of your mouth.

In Scandinavia, before potatoes, people sometimes used the inner layer of bark from trees as a supplement to grains when there was a shortage.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bark_bread#Bark_bread_as_food

Survival books still sometimes refer to it.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't this layer also contain minerals and some of the sap? So it would have some value as a supplement and not just a filler.

My favorite in this category is separating the minerals from grass by chewing (not swallowing) or boiling it in a tea. Not much calorie value, but it'll prevent deficiencies while you find a staple food or burn body fat. And you can do the former while doing other survival chores (time seems to be the dominant resource you have to manage).

Also during the (US) Civil War, acorns, peas, and all kinds of other things were used as coffee additives or substitutes.

https://scholarworks.uttyler.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article...

That one is really interesting, as the US South actually does have a caffeine producing plant native to the area: Ilex vomitoria

It also goes by Yaupon, or Black Drink, and is similar to Yerba Mate.

The native americans in the area typically used it in rituals to the point of vomiting, hence the name. Due to this history, though, it was not used as a caffeine substitute during the war.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilex_vomitoria

Somewhat tangentially, the British during WWII rediscovered that rose hips contain vitamin C. I don't know the degree to which roses were embedded into the collective consciousness before but they certainly earned it at that point.

Rose hip tea helped with the supply constraint pressure of the U-Boats.

Anyone know which WWII british cookbook contained the recipe for "life sustaining glop"?

Someone once put it to me that cooking is a process of converting inedible calories (combustibles) into edible ones. Mostly by cooking difficult to digest food, but also increasing longevity of other foods (eg, smoked meat).

I'm still fascinated by the fact that the fact that cellulose is mostly sugar.

It literally is two glucose molecules bonded via a condensation reaction. The linkage between the molecules is what makes it different from starch, and subsequently what makes it not useful as a food source for most animals.

Is that linkage much more energy dense compared to starch, I always wonder why so few life forms digest cellulose.

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