Reintroducing Acorns Into The Human Diet

Great article on what we've been advocating for years:  It's time for humans to rediscover the food that served as Staff of Life for much of our history.

Click here... in Scientific American!

How awesome is that?

Child allergic to nuts, mom wants oaks in nearby park chopped down

It must be constantly terrifying to be the parent of a child with anaphylaxis-inducing food allergies.  Heck, it's terrifying being the parent of any child, then add to that the constant concern about exposure to foods - sometimes as hidden ingredients in seemingly innocent fare - that could have the direst consequences.

But really.  Read this. A mother of a child with severe nut allergies wants a nearby park to remove four large oak trees.  The mother says this is not a case of a parent simply wanting to bubblewrap her child.  The writer points out - correctly - that she's right; this is a case of a parent wanting to bubblewrap everything her child might be exposed to.

Is this really how we want to interact with our natural environment?

A blue jay can transport an acorn 2 miles.  OK, I made that up because I'm too lazy to find the research.  But the point is a blue jay can carry an acorn a long way.  And then drop it in this little girl's back yard.  What is the right "radius of safety?"  Do we eradicate every squirrel, chipmunk or blue jay that might spread disperse acorns?

This appears to be a case of a single mother (I mean one mother, singular - I don't know anything about her marital status ;-) misplacing her - very justifiable - concern, and it appears that the suggestion has met with an appropriate about of derision, so I won't pile on.  Which is a first for me.  I am not sure what is causing the sudden burst of understanding and kindness!

But it strikes me as terribly sad that even a single human being had this thought in the first place.

Thanks for sending this Lucas!

Ground acorn patties called Twinkies of the paleolithic...

... by a researcher who has never eaten - or even seen - one.  Actually, by a reporter making a "clever" comment based on the "research" of a researcher who has never tried one.  Read this and weep for the level of what passes for research and reportage.

Louise Humphrey, a paleo-anthropologist at the Natural History Museum of London, is shocked - SHOCKED I TELL YOU - that paleolithic people who made their home in a Moroccan cave 12,000 to 15,000 years ago exhibited significant levels of tooth decay.  I know!  I am as blown away as you that people living thousands of years before the advent of modern dental hygiene (as opposed to us, living as we are about a hundred years before the advent of modern dental hygiene) might have had the odd cavity... or ten.

To Humphrey this apparently is proof that the so-called Paleo Diet isn't as healthy as its adherents claim.  Here's a tip Louise:  NO DIET is as healthy as its adherents claim.  No eating regime with the word diet attached to it is healthy.  Apparently "we" all thought that tooth decay started after the advent of agriculture. Apparently "we" are idiots. No Louise, agriculture spawned moral decay and environmental decay, not tooth decay.

Humphrey based her conclusions on two facts:  These folks had really bad teeth (insert British dental care joke here) and they clearly ate a lot of acorns.  She added two and two... and came up with 137, that acorns cause massive tooth decay.

Here's the part that drives me crazy:

"There's not one kind of paleo diet," Humphrey says. "I think wherever people lived, they had to make best of the wild food resources available to them."

In this case, Humphrey believes, ground acorn patties. She hasn't tried them herself, but she plans to.

"I would like to," she says. "I imagine that they would be something like sweet chestnuts."

Kind of like the Twinkies of the paleolithic.

This is a perfect example of the one-two punch of modern environmental and food reportage:  The researcher with no first hand experience with the subject matter making sweeping conclusions based on what she "imagines," and the reporter summing it all up with a glib turn of phrase.

You know what causes tooth decay?  Food.

You know where paleolithic people would have been without acorns?  Dead.

You know where we would be if acorns once again became a significant part of our diet?  A whole lot better off, teeth and all.

You know where the planet would be if we relied more on permanent woody tree crops like acorns and less on beating the soil to death to grow cereal crops?

... now I am off to go eat a Twinkie.  Then visit my dentist.

Acorns a growing cash crop on the Greek island of Kea

I have been getting email updates from Red Tractor Farm about their incredible effort to restore acorns to their rightful place in the local economy (an economy, I'm guessing, which has seen better days).

I figured out how to provide links to those updates. 

Here's one:  http://us6.campaign-archive1.com/?u=47137f1c34e4960098f1cf150&id=2bf8fe5b9e&e=90fb9caee5

Here's the other (that I mentioned in a recent post:  http://us6.campaign-archive1.com/?u=47137f1c34e4960098f1cf150&id=d4b5518616&e=90fb9caee5

Sign up to receive these email updates here:  http://www.redtractorfarm.com/acorn.html

Read about their Acorn Initiative here:  http://www.iloveacorns.com/

It is, without question, one of the coolest things going in the world right now... a small but critically important step toward the acorn reclaiming its place in our diets and our lives.

Huffington Post says: I love acorns!

Check this out:  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/marisa-churchill/i-love-acorns_b_4395356.html

Acorns are going mainstream.  Again.  After only a brief hiatus for a couple thousand years for a brief and failed experiment with grain crops.

Hope on the horizon - Red Tractor Farm

Red Tractor Farm in Greece is turning the dream of re-discovering acorns as a food source into a reality.  It gives me great hope for the future.  Read this, watch the video.  Looks like paradise to me!

I received a "mail chimp" email from Red Tractor Farm about their 2013 acorn harvest.  I'll try to figure out how to post it on this site.  To quote:

3000 kilos (6600 lbs) of acorn collected in 5 weeks.

We began whacking green acorn out of the trees in late September. Trees that have been harvested in this manner, in the past, are healthier and heavier with acorns this year. We've learned that the best method for whacking the trees, in order not to damage the next year's crop. is from the trunk outward. Volunteers must be fearless of heights and able to climb trees as well as swing a stick.

That whole "fearless of heights" thing rules me out of the harvest process.  Second rung on the step ladder and my knees start to quake.  I will learn more from them about methods of harvesting acorns that do not reduce the size of the following year's crop.  This is fascinating to me, and critically important.

On an unrelated - and very stupid - note, it's surprising that the Greek economy is in so much trouble.  My family alone buys about 50 tubs of their yogurt every week.

"Slow growing" oaks #863

I'm going to go all Jackie Gleason on the next person I hear say that oaks are slow growing.  Take a look at this.  Keep in mind this is from a discussion board & web site dedicated to deer hunting and creating deer habitat, and you have guys waxing rhapsodic about the growth rate of their oaks (more about Concordia oaks coming soon) and talking about cutting scion wood for grafting.  I love it!!

So to beat my two favorite dead horses yet again...

1) Oaks are capable of astounding, jaw-dropping growth.  Why does this matter?  Because people need to view oaks as food - not just for deer but for healthy-meat-producing livestock and for people.  They won't do that as long as they labor under the popular poetic misconception of oaks symbolizing slow-growing longevity.

2) Our hunting quarry eat better - and smarter - than we do.  We plant oaks to feed our prey, and corn to feed ourselves.  Doh.

(Thanks again Walter!)

Slow growing oaks #463

I spend much of my time selling tree tubes to commercial pistachio, almond and pecan growers, helping them shave a precious year or two off the time from planting to first commercial crop, while reducing the inputs of water, labor and chemicals needed to reach that point.  When planting a new pistachio orchard in the San Joaquin Valley, under drip irrigation, fertilization and with a kajillion degrees days (OK, that figure is approximate) per growing season, getting a commercial crop in the 5th growing season is considered very good.

Acorns, on the other hand, could never be a commercial crop because oak trees are so "slow growing" and because they take at least 15 to 20 years to produce a crop of acorns... right?

Wrong.  Take a look:

 (Click to enlarge)

This is a sawtooth oak tree (Quercus acutissima).  It was planted in Georgia in the spring of 2008 as an 18 inch bare root seedling.  It is now about 30 feet tall (I'll post a photo of the whole tree soon).  Sorry the foreground is a bit blurry - turns out I don't do my best photographic work with chiggers digging into my skin.

The red circles in the photo mark the locations of acorns.  Yes, acorns.  This is the 6th growing season for this tree and it is going to have a very sizable crop of acorns.

This is not a specially selected sawtooth variety - just a standard "bed run" bare root seedling.  It wasn't watered.  It wasn't fertilized.  Weed control has been sporadic at best.

With even the slightest modicum of genetic selection and 1/1,000,000th the amount of plant breeding that has gone into corn, and with only slightly more intense growing practices, I guarantee we could have oak trees producing a sizable crop of acorns in the 4th growing season, if not sooner.

Tell me this shouldn't be the basis for a viable "new" (and yet very, very old) crop.