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Comment by jonplackett | Hacker News Reader

I once went on a foraging walk with an expert forager. It was fun and entertaining and sort-of-useful. But he’d say things like “see this seed” holds up VERY tiny plant with VERY tiny seed “if you collect enough of these you can grind then up to make flour and then make bread.”

The whole thing made me less excited about foraging and more excited about how frikkin amazing a supermarket and global supply chain is.

This video gives me the same feeling. Thank fuck people figured all this out for us a long time ago.

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I was in Costa Rica recently and a tour guide pulled a fruit about the size of my fist from a tree. He quizzed us on what the top of the fruit was. We could not identify it. We ended up feeding it to a cow.

It was a single cashew.

That experience changed my perception of supply chain, you can buy thousands of those for very low price. The fruit is huge and you get just one nut!

Was he wearing gloves ? I understand the cashew fruit is kinda gnarly to work with. But you can make a liqueur from it: see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feni_(liquor)

The fruit itself is not too bad as long as you can avoid touching the saps residue on the base of the fruit. We had a cashew tree when I was growing up. We usually eat the fruit as a spicy fruit salad (mixed with other tropical fruits). One day, my dad decided to harvest the dried cashew nuts he's been collecting, cracked them open with a machete. Took a while to crack them all and we did get some tasty nuts, but he didn't wear a glove while doing it so the skin on his palms were peeling. The dried shells basically contains concentrated sap which is really bad to your skin. Several months later we no longer have a cashew tree :)

I think cashew nuts are the strongest proof that we must be living in a simulation.

we've been getting into gardening a bit more this year and looking at all that's involved with buying a can of beans or veggies or whatever I look at those things with a whole new appreciation. We don't just pay for the raw produce from some place, we pay for all the labor that went into cleaning and packaging, and everything that brought that piece to us. When you grow your own you need to do all the prep and washing and canning etc if you so choose. It's quite a chunk of labor to commit to.

But its a real pledge for the environment. Not just words.

Everyone wants green but refuses to do the work.

A lot of home gardeners drive their SUV to the box store to buy plant saplings in plastic pots and small plastic bags of compost/manure/fertilizer, then in a separate trip to the big box hardware store to buy kiln dried dimensional lumber for a raised bed, then pay a contractor to drop off a few tonnes of soil for that raised bed, then plant their saplings in their brand new garden. Then harvest time comes around and if they're really committed, they'll can their own tomatoes! Boiling a huge stock pot of water on their gas stove to pasteurize their 6 quarts of sauce. On the net, this type of home gardening uses dramatically more resources per unit of output than production farms. It can be worth it because of the freshness and quality that you can gain, but unless you're paying a lot of attention and effort (saving seeds, using more natural nutrient sources to amend the soil, etc), you're not doing the environment many favours by gardening.

That said, topsoil loss is one part of commercial farming that is not nearly addressed enough - it's a nonrenewable resource being squandered and literally washed away every season.

yah my thoughts wandered into that territory a bit wondering about economies of scale etc by leaving it up to the professional farmers. It's definitely something to think about.

I think the freshness/quality is a real draw. All our multiplying strawberry plants give such a punchy berry--store bought just can't compete. There's an independence aspect too to contemplate in light of food security and rising food prices and shortages and that sort of thing. One other thing that's popped up is the garden created all this food for bugs too. I see a bunch of lady bugs, praying mantises, and just today this white butterfly was hopping around laying single eggs beneath a broccoli leaf. I think I'm going to let those lil caterpillars grow to maturity.

The benefit to the environment is nonexistent. 99% of the benefit is an increased appreciation of how food is grown and the work it takes to do it right and how easily it all goes wrong.

There is something that changes when you get into how much things can go wrong. I've been explaining to my kids that we're taking care of living things. And living things have their own clocks and times that draw us out of ourselves in the care of them. It's kind of hardened me up to reality somewhat after having watched so many seedlings not make it and watching others not thrive. I've become for lack of a better word more ruthless in cutting short plants that aren't going to produce. There's some kind of mental change that occurred I want to say over this process. I've lost patience for the straggler, for the stunted, for the sick. I think there was some unrealistic mush in me before that was rooted in a completely unreasonable expectation for how things work. It was a very startling discovery to say the least.

There are ways to do it right. In the suburban context (as long as you have decent soil and keep inputs out of it), whatever you grow is an improvement on grass or weeds. If you grow from seed, compost your own fruit and veg waste, maybe raise some chickens and use their manure - you can grow a lot of food from what would otherwise be unproductive space. I was just pointing out that that isn't what happens for most people.

At this point I don't think we should go green. I think we should go atomic.

Green energy is mostly the path to hell being paved with good intentions.

i agree. nuclear.

and coal.

and develop fusion in the meantime. a well funded global effort.

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