What we really need is to get rid of spines and thorns in blackberry bushes.
we already have thornless blackberry varieties…
I’d have so many blackberry bushes in the backyard if they stopped trying to eat my hands!
But wouldn’t that change the flavor? You wouldn’t get the authentic experience that way.
My chemistry prof would repeat over and over that “bitter is poison”. Bitter is one of my favorite flavor types, after spicy. If I lived before the internet I totally would have died after eating a tasty salad of poison xD
Dose makes the poison. Most bitter flavors (that you eat) aren’t really meant to discourage you from eating them, it’s really meant for insects.
Plant: I will make an unappetizing flavor to prevent myself from getting eaten
Humans: finally, some good fucking food
And that’s how allium and cabbage conquered the world
Almonds over here telling everyone that the poison plant is totally fine and tasty! xD
I agree though bitter is part of the spice of life and a very good flavor
Try the impossible™ nightshade salad
If you’re really looking to spit in the eyes of Death:
Mince some destroying angel and deadly webcap and cook into a nice mushroom ranch, sliver some bitter almonds and untreated cashew nuts over a nice hemlock cress with some of the shaved hemlock roots mixed in. Mix in thinly sliced manchineel apple and add belladonna berries on the top for additional sweetness. From what I understand, all of those actually taste pretty decent, so without the deadly poisons this’d be a bomb salad.
Nightshade salad is just salsa
the poison is the point on a lot of the delicious stuff we eat
I think we already have that, it’s called grass
Potatoes and tomatoes are from nightshade.
Almonds contain arsenic.
Cherries contain cyanide.
But Ricin isn’t derived from rice.
Ricin comes from beans.
A certain amount of bitter is needed to fend off the insects.
I guess it’s just a choice of what kind and what amount of bitterness is in the plants.
Maybe you can remove the original poison and replace it with a different kind of poison that’s non-toxic to humans, but still fends of other potential eaters.
Just floating ideas here, but maybe a type of poison exists that can be deactivated by cooking the plants? That way, it could be eaten by humans, but would still fend off other invaders.
Why can’t they use genetic engineering to make a tree that can absorb like 100x more CO2 than any other tree? Like, are they even trying?
Because the tree would need to grow 100x as big. People often forget, that the carbon needs to go somewhere and in a tree that is mostly the wood.
A fully grown forest is just full and can’t take up more CO2 unless you take some wood out. That wood need to be used in construction or turned into charcoal and buried to make sure it can’t be turned back into CO2 by rotting.
