It’s everywhere. Why not just eat it instead of searching for veggies and meat which are more difficult to have?
The thing is that cows can’t digest grass either. They have an extra stomach along their oesophagus which is basically just a pouch where the grass goes in first. There are a lot of bacteria and they can digest grass. Then these bacteria grow because they eat the grass.
Then the cow swallows these bacteria and digests those. That’s where a cow gets their calories from.
Humans can’t digest anything without bacteria either.
they can
when you eat fruit, the sugar can enter your bloodstream directly through the mucosa in your mouth, you don’t even need to swallow it. although the main part of the absorption happens in the colon still.
I’d rather evolve the ability to photosynthesize, now that we have indoor lighting. It’d save a whole bunch of time and grocery bills.
There’s a reason grass is so common - it’s because it’s a wildly effective life strategy. Grass is actually quite hard to eat - there’s basically no nutrition in the leaves themselves, and grass evolved to incorporate silica “needles” in its leaves, so that it wears down your teeth when you try to eat it anyways.
Not to say that it’s impossible to eat grass, but you need to undergo a ton of highly specialized adaptations to make it possible. For most animals (including humans), it’s just not worth the effort
Ruminants that eat it have like several stomachs, they regurgitate the food they eat to re-eat it, and they require specialized gut bacteria to digest it. They have to spend like all of their time eating.
I’d like a source on the silica needles?
Basically all grasses contain silica phytoliths but they likely don’t significantly contribute to teeth wear. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0305440306001245
Thank you very much Sis! ✨
Interesting, thanks for sharing that. I wasn’t aware that there has been newer research countering the tooth wear model
Why? Because otherwise we wouldn’t exist and that wouldn’t be in line with the future.
Take the tier zoo aproach. Would you rather use evelution points on grass or evolution points on being big brain.
Grass.
Some of us did that and they are horses now.
big guts, short brains
Smarts required more calories.
All forms of grass:
- Corn
- Wheat
- Barley
- Rice
- etc
Every species of grain:
-
Wheat
-
etc
-
We eat the seeds, I presume OP refers to the leaves/blades of grass which are also present in species that aren’t cereals
Good point. This made me look further, but some of these also are just the seeds:
- Bamboo
- Bluegrass
- Crabgrass
- Foxtail Grass
- Goosegrass
- Lemongrass
- Wood Millet
- Orchardgrass
Bamboo shoots are a common ingredient.
Plants are selected to not be great to eat, basically. Cellulose in particular is almost impossible to biochemically break back down (but not completely), and is a pretty good structural material, too.
Seeds are often still palatable once you get through the shell, basically because turning into a baby plant is an already tough design constraint. Some plants still have tricks - notice that it’s the spiciest part of a hot pepper.
A lot of grass. Like lawn grass. Is wheat.
If you let it grow more.
So actually we did evolve to eat grass.
Cat grass is wheat grass.
Rye, barley, oats, and rice are also grasses.
Rye used to be a weed that evolved to resemble wheat so early farmers wouldn’t uproot it. But it evolved to resemble wheat so much that it became an edible crop in its own right.
they faked it until they made it!
Vavilovian mimicry goes brrr
Don’t forget corn!
Bamboo is also grass, we can eat the shoots/sprouts
It’s more efficient to let others eat the grass, and then eat them
Grass is mostly cellulose and lignin. Those molecules are difficult to break down.
Animals that can digest the cellulose either need a really long digestive track or to do something really gross to keep the stuff in their digestive track longer.
or to do something really gross to keep the stuff in their digestive track longer.
Looking at you, rabbits.
Deer too, but slightly less gross, and some others.
Any chemistry we could perform to make it more viable? E.g. cook it with alcohol?
Folks have looked at it with acid or enzymes to try and produce fuel ethanol from the sugar forming the cellulose. Humans use the chemistry of grazing animals.
Yeah the grass to milk, meat and hide pipeline is a great one
Vegetables have pretty limited availability for protein, as an animal you have sit there eating grass all day. Our ways allow us plenty of time to be smart & stuff
I mean we’ve got the time, but we still don’t do it.
I mean pandaz tried going back 2 the bark and kt takes their whole ass day. No phone time. Imagine?
It’s all down to the way the brain works. Our brains use up something like 20% of our calories when standing still doing nothing.
Grass does not supply the amount of calories and micronutrients needed to keep the human brain running, simply because it is low on both of those things.
Grass eaters have multiple stomachs, slow digestion and graze pretty much the whole time they’re awake, and because their brains use a lot less energy than human brains, the balance works out.
Return to cow
If you look at all the other animals in the world that do eat grass, we did. But the “we” that eat grass, look like those animals, with those traits.
The “we” that became smart became so due to what we evolved to eat and do.Essentially as others said, because you need to invest heavily in your gut and metabolism to get enough energy out of grass alone. You don’t evolve into what you want, you evolve into what you can while you are pressured to do so. There is currently no pressure to rely solely on grass, that pressure hasn’t been on us for millions of years. Our foods may be trickier to find but on average they yield more energy compared to grass.
But don’t get me wrong. It’s a valid strategy. Our ancestors did have the window of opportunity at some point, and they took it… We were something more like rats back then, the grass eaters niche had room. Grass was everywhere. And our cousins back then adapted and spent practically the whole day foraging for grass in order to get by. But you know what also was everywhere? Trees. And our ratlike ancestors that were more inclined to climb, jump, and spot predators from above found it easier to stick to the omnivore diet.
Adapting to trees lets you move into places with less grass… Like jungles and swamps. And while you are there for a couple million years you will have other problems to solve, problems that require wits, sharp vision, and social skills. You don’t have time to forage 18hrs every day and grass isn’t as abundant here anyway.
If you don’t rely solely on grass you will probably fare better during winter. Especially during those ice ages. By the time you have grass as an option again you are pretty much an ape and pivoting back to it makes no sense.
