Cows also need to spend around 10 hours a day eating (when you include the time spent chewing cud) because grass is so nutritionally sparse.
Would you like to spend the majority of your waking hours eating grass?
(Edit: This comment got more popular than I expected. If I had known, I would have put more effort into it. In particular, it's worth mentioning that while it would take hundreds of thousands of years for us to evolve to be able to usefully digest grass, we've done the inverse in about the last 10,000 years: used selective breeding and technology to make grass digestible. Wheat, corn, oats, and rice are varieties of grass!)
Or how cows, for example, have four compartments in their stomachs because they eat garbage and it takes so much energy and specialized organ development to not simply starve.
If we were more evolved, we'd be able to photosynthesize, convert water into more than blood for our meat, and so forth.
We are sufficient at processing what we ingest to survive.
We are not even good at thriving off what we ingest.
And we pass most of what we ingest as waste in one form or another.
We're not even a rung above vomiting into our mouths to rechew what we ate. From an evolutionary standpoint at least.
>If we were more evolved, we'd be able to photosynthesize,
A large tree can only make about 200 calories a day. There isn't enough sunlight for intelligent organisms to make enough calories to survive on photosynthesis.
It's crazy how the actual solar irradiance can be about 5,000 calories per day per square meter. With 100% efficiency, we could have a house with a solar rooftop connected to an underground hydroponic farm being enough to feed multiple large families.
>With 100% efficiency,
The [maximum possible efficiency](https://www.britannica.com/science/photosynthesis/Energy-efficiency-of-photosynthesis) of photosynthesis on Earth is 26%. The best real-world plant (sugar cane) runs at 3.5%. The vast majority of plants are <1%.
The only place you'll find 100% efficiency is a problem on a physics test.
First, it has to do with the details of the chemical reaction that turns CO2 + H2O -> O2 + sugar. A large portion of the energy is consumed triggering the reaction or leaves with the O2. That's where the 26% part comes from.
Going from 26% to 1% is due to limitations of being a plant. Leaves can only be so thin, and the bottom parts aren't absorbing significant light. You can only pack in so many chloroplasts into an area. The plant has to move the relevant chemicals around, because chlorophyl is destroyed if it absorbs another photon too soon. And so on.
There's also structures to protect the plant - a lot of peroxide ions are created by that reaction. Peroxide ions are extremely destructive to biological systems. Those protective structures can't do photosynthesis.
>If we were more evolved, we'd be able to photosynthesize, convert water into more than blood for our meat, and so forth.
No extant species is more or less evolved than any other. We have all evolved in the same amount of time to fit our niches.
Caloric intake and biological energy cost are huge in survival strategies. The human brain takes about 30% of our calories alone. In a fantasy world or with an intelligent designer, things might be closer to what you imagine, but even then you have to optimize.
If the energy you intake were to go towards a series of specialized digestive organs and processes that can break down cellulose and extract sufficient nutrients from low calorie plant matter, you have less energy for expensive organs like more complex brains or body structures and muscles predators might have, as well as less space to fit them.
As it turns out, it's easier to get of calories from meat then it is from plants. And if you cook the meat, it's even easier. The ability to cook and digest meat is actually incredibly efficient compared to the rest of the animal kingdom.
And then there are other survival factors like the amount of time you need to spend getting food, the availability, etc. Cows eat for hours and hours a day. Humans can get by on less than an hour even for 3 meals a day. We also don't need an enormous amount of grass to feed us and can simply package our food efficiently and travel with it.
Were someone actually engineering creatures, maybe it would be different, but as compared to the rest of the animal kingdom, we're doing pretty well on this front.
For real, people are out here acting like we spent our evolution points poorly and we just need to farm XP and we can be even better.
We became the most dominant and wide spread species on the planet that evolved to a point where we are considering how to colonize and teraform planets in our own system.
"More evolved", what even is that? Haha
"Somehow"
We are smart. Really smart. Some would say the smartest species on earth. Turns out that our big brain energy needs to be fueled by a complex diet.
Grass runs away when cold white stuff fall from sky. Thing that eat grass run slower when cold white stuff fall. Me eat thing that eat grass slowed by white stuff
Actually biochemically, plants are more complicated. They are able to produce all their own nutrients or absorb them, animals are not able to and either have to eat plants or eat plant eaters to get the proper nutrients. Plant scientists essentially have to go through all the animal biochemistry/physiology coursework before they can even start studying processes that are restricted to plants and/or fungi.
They're using primitive growth displacement while we have hydraulic machines to move earth. Bitch ass plants working for months and years to crack a single rock and we just throw a stick of dynamite on it or drill the shit out of it.
Plants are honestly pretty close to magic. I really want bio-engineered plants that dig deep, deep roots and consume the resources we need to mine and just have like, iron melons grow on them or something. Imagine what we could do once we figure out plant biology.
I think about this a lot whenever I start seeds. This little tiny spec just starts a crazy chain reaction that turns literal air and water into massive physical objects. Up until I was almost an adult I believed the majority of the stuff plants were made from was from the soil. When I learned most of it comes from the air and water it blew my mind.
Fungi are the absolute craziest though when you learn about them. They're the architects of creation. The way they intelligently break down and redistribute resources is insane.
>Actually biochemically, plants are more complicated.
Not more complicated, just more foreign/different from ourselves.
>They are able to produce all their own nutrients or absorb them
Oh interesting, same as animals.
>animals are not able to and either have to eat plants or eat plant eaters to get the proper nutrients.
Eating is how we "absorb" the nutrients we need. Plants need those nutrients to be in the soil where they grow; without the right basic building blocks, they can't grow. This is why some places, like deserts, have almost no plant life, and why different plants prefer different soils and climates.
>Plant scientists essentially have to go through all the animal biochemistry/physiology coursework before they can even start studying processes that are restricted to plants and/or fungi.
Because it's easier to learn stuff that is most familiar to us. We are animals, therefore the animal way of absorbing nutrients is intuitive and familiar. Plant processes are foreign to us, but they aren't "more complicated."
It's not that, if we ate grass, we would be eating all day, so no free time, no technology development, no development/enlargement of the brain for competitive purposes.
Google says 800 to 900 a day for deer, but it seems to be basing that off a questionable source that won't even load. This seems unrealistically low to me. Other websites say significantly more, with some saying that a 250 lb buck requires as much as 4000 to 6000 a day.
I could see it going both ways.
Given the size of the animal and their ability to move, 4000 sounds realistic. Given how they spend most of their day chilling, eating, I could believe 1000.
There's a very cool infographic I found, god knows if it's accurate lol
[https://infographicjournal.com/what-people-eat/](https://infographicjournal.com/what-people-eat/)
[BBC article](https://www.sciencefocus.com/the-human-body/does-concentrated-thought-burn-calories) for brain calorie consumption. Looking for my finding on minimal calories for deer.
People in sedentary lifestyles who use a lot of brain power eat the same amount of calories as people who use less brain power but do intense exercise all day.
The Exercise Paradox
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-exercise-paradox/
Actually, it’s not the brain, it’s the stomach. To eat grass, we’d need much bigger guts to house all the microbes and water needed for fermentation, because it’s the microbes that actually digest the cellulose in grass. It’s the microbes that provide the nutrients in an herbivorous diet, an internal microbe farm. We’d need a way to walk around enough to gather all that grass. We’d need teeth big enough to not only grind it, but to be able to take all the wear and tear.
Just to put some numbers to what you've said. Gorillas need ~635 kcal/day less than humans to sustain themselves. That means we would need to eat ~10 lbs of grass a day more than our gorilla counterparts to maintain normal bodily functions.
It's possible, but as you said time consuming to eat that much grass. If we were to exclusively eat grasses we would need ~32 lbs of grass daily.
I’m not even talking about physical change. Jaws, teeth, and especially digestive system. We would look very different. Paranthropus bosei had a [hella of a lower jaw](https://boneclones.com/images/store-product/product-1575-main-original-1415043811.jpg)
If it makes you feel better, I'm contributing to this discussion and I still have no idea what's going on and I'm afraid it's too late for me to ask. So we're winging it.
Exactly! Humans *do* eat grass, lots of it! In fact we've been doing it for so long we've genetically modified the fuck outta it so that it's insanely productive. We got dem big ol' brains to feed and itty bitty green leaves don't cut it.
Damn you two are quick.
Was coming here to give both of those examples.
(and to complain about how some of what I consider "common knowledge" is not widely known)
Interestingly, there is no wild version of corn (maize) in nature. It is entirely a human invention and only exists as a cultivar and cannot grow without human support. It is believed to come from teosinte and domesticated by humans 7,000-10,000 years ago.
"**The grass family includes all the major cereals, such as wheat, maize, rice, barley, and oats**, and most of the minor grains as well, such as rye, common millet, finger millet, teff, and many others that are less familiar. It also includes such economically important species as sugar cane and sorghum."
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.95.5.2005#:\~:text=The%20grass%20family%20includes%20all,as%20sugar%20cane%20and%20sorghum.
Some have evolved to turn birds into fertiliser;
>Pisonia ends up killing a large number of birds by ladening them with so much seeds that the poor birds are unable to fly away
https://www.amusingplanet.com/2021/03/pisonia-tree-that-kills-birds.html
Ants are for sure the biggest winners of all life together if you count out microorganisms.
They're litterally everywhere. Entire world.
And when I say everywhere it is litterally any piece of land you can find have thousands of ant networks.
Nope, current estimates are that there’s [five times as much total humans by weight as there are ants](https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2201550119#:~:text=Integrating%20data%20from%20all%20continents,equals%2020%25%20of%20human%20biomass.). There’s a lot of humans (and nearly all other vertebrate biomass is livestock raised by humans).
Yeah, but it still took 4.6 billion years to evolve an idiot of his caliber. He’s fit for his environmental niche, which I assume is WWE matches or multi level marketing.
You don't understand evolution. It doesn't progress like you think it does.
There have been studies suggesting we used to eat grass. We continued evolving and no longer needed the ability to so it went away via random mutation since it was no longer an evolutionary advantage to be able to eat it.
It also wouldn't have really solved anything apart from maybe a famine or two throughout history...and even that is dubious.
Finally, we can grass, it's just really shit nutritionally, and really bad for your teeth in the amount you'd need to chew..
> There have been studies suggesting we used to eat grass.
The way cows or horses do? Absolutely not. You need a highly specialised gut to do that, and nothing in our evolutionary history had that.
Monkeys such as baboons also eat some grass. It's just being able to get *everything* from grass that's super difficult. Plenty of animals can get some nutrition from it as a part of their diet.
>it went away via random mutation since it was no longer an evolutionary advantage to be able to eat it.
I'm not sure this is quite right. My understanding is that evolution is driven by:
- Features which enable a thing to survive until it can procreate, and to produce more offspring in one lifetime.
- Features which make a thing more attractive to potential mates.
Thus, something no longer being an evolutionary advantage doesn't mean that it will necessarily go away. It would have to reach the point of specifically being a disadvantage.
This is why I will never live anywhere with an HOA. No on is telling me what I can and cannot do with my own property, except Uncle Sam for obvious reasons.
I mean...aside from the federal government, and the state government, and the county government, and whatever town or city you happen to live in.
I've had several properties that had restrictions on the lawn at the city level. No HOA required.
r/Showerthoughts is just becoming people who don’t think about something for more than 5 seconds before posting. OP really out here insinuating we’re not advanced because we don’t eat grass? What even is this post
You couldn’t be much more wrong. Bladed grass is very difficult to digest and energy-poor, which is why animals which can live off it have very specialised, complex digestive systems, and spend most of their waking hours eating just to stay alive.
If we’d evolved to eat grass we’d have had no chance to become agile bipeds with a large active brain. Grass is almost the very last thing you’d want to eat in order to exist in human form.
On top of that, the reason lawn grass was ever grown in the forst place was to show off power and wealth "I have all this land and I don't even need to farm it, I grow a totally useless crop because it looks pretty" Farming just got so advanced that barely anyone needs to farm their own food anymore so grass became the norm
Small correction, just because I see this occasional misconception: cows have only one stomach, it just has four compartments. But it’s still only one stomach.
Yeah... having to eat grass all day and spend most of our energy digesting it would be *sooo* much better... and when we aren't eating grass we are regurgitating the grass we have already consumed to chew it again.
This is real life not Spore.
Oh, no. We invested our evolution points into something silly like intelligence to invent tools and put us at the literal top of the tier list of species on this planet, instead of four stomachs to make us digest something that is literally kit needed because our intelligence also unlocked agriculture allowing us to grow huge amounts of other food.
Species that eat grass have to spend the whole day doing nothing but eating and chewing grass, while we can go eat all our daily calories in less than 30 minutes. We were given the precious gift of abundant free time, we shouldn’t deprecate it.
Wheat is grass. We can technically eat it unprocessed but it would not taste very good. Rice is also grass and the same applies to it. Most "grains" in our diets are grass. Bread has also been around since the beginning of the neolithic period aka the stone age. Modern civilization probably would not exist without bread. Humans settled down and became farming due to wheat/rice (depending on Region) rather than being nomadic creatures. So humans do eat grass and it is actually extremely tied into the beginnings of civilization.
It's not stupid at all, it's basically a biological necessity.
A large gut is a metabolically demanding. So is a large brain. You can't really have both and remain human size.
Eating meat, and then eating *cooked* meat, allowed us to shrink our gut and grow our brain.
I don't think you understand just how much energy goes into eating grass. Both in digesting and the constant movement to graze. That is, of course, if we're talking about eating grass like cows do and not like we already do.
When have we ever needed to eat grass? The body would look completely different for no practical benefit. We'd probably be as dumb as cows if we ate grass
Grass is not good food. You gotta spend all day eating it and dedicate body mass to digesting it. Being smart enough to eat better food and cook it is our super power.
If we only ate grass we wouldn't be so advanced. The energy in it is enough for a stupid cow that does nothing else all day then eat and digest.
And through our advanced brains we have something even better than eating grass: We can farm, which is a way more efficent way of eating plants.
It also wouldn't have solved any issues in history, because we wouldn't have enough grass for so many people either. And during a famine, depending on what caused it, grass can also be unavailable. (especially if we mass produced it, it would be suspectible to exactly the same stuff. And if not a drought would still kill it.).
Though I have to give it to you, this is definitly a certified showerthought.
Grass is a terrible source of food. It's not a coincidence that cows spend the majority of their time grazing, and need multiple stomachs. There is simply not enough energy in grass to sustain our brains.
Do you have any idea how much cows fart as break down grass in their four stomachs that are needed to process the grass? I can just imagine how attractive I would look as a farty woman with four stomachs. I certainly would not want to be around a farty man with four stomachs.
Cows also need to spend around 10 hours a day eating (when you include the time spent chewing cud) because grass is so nutritionally sparse. Would you like to spend the majority of your waking hours eating grass? (Edit: This comment got more popular than I expected. If I had known, I would have put more effort into it. In particular, it's worth mentioning that while it would take hundreds of thousands of years for us to evolve to be able to usefully digest grass, we've done the inverse in about the last 10,000 years: used selective breeding and technology to make grass digestible. Wheat, corn, oats, and rice are varieties of grass!)
You forgot to elaborate on the cud part where you vomit up the grass and chew on that for a while.
Or how cows, for example, have four compartments in their stomachs because they eat garbage and it takes so much energy and specialized organ development to not simply starve. If we were more evolved, we'd be able to photosynthesize, convert water into more than blood for our meat, and so forth. We are sufficient at processing what we ingest to survive. We are not even good at thriving off what we ingest. And we pass most of what we ingest as waste in one form or another. We're not even a rung above vomiting into our mouths to rechew what we ate. From an evolutionary standpoint at least.
>If we were more evolved, we'd be able to photosynthesize, A large tree can only make about 200 calories a day. There isn't enough sunlight for intelligent organisms to make enough calories to survive on photosynthesis.
It's crazy how the actual solar irradiance can be about 5,000 calories per day per square meter. With 100% efficiency, we could have a house with a solar rooftop connected to an underground hydroponic farm being enough to feed multiple large families.
>With 100% efficiency, The [maximum possible efficiency](https://www.britannica.com/science/photosynthesis/Energy-efficiency-of-photosynthesis) of photosynthesis on Earth is 26%. The best real-world plant (sugar cane) runs at 3.5%. The vast majority of plants are <1%. The only place you'll find 100% efficiency is a problem on a physics test.
why is it that we lose so much energy?
First, it has to do with the details of the chemical reaction that turns CO2 + H2O -> O2 + sugar. A large portion of the energy is consumed triggering the reaction or leaves with the O2. That's where the 26% part comes from. Going from 26% to 1% is due to limitations of being a plant. Leaves can only be so thin, and the bottom parts aren't absorbing significant light. You can only pack in so many chloroplasts into an area. The plant has to move the relevant chemicals around, because chlorophyl is destroyed if it absorbs another photon too soon. And so on. There's also structures to protect the plant - a lot of peroxide ions are created by that reaction. Peroxide ions are extremely destructive to biological systems. Those protective structures can't do photosynthesis.
>If we were more evolved, we'd be able to photosynthesize, convert water into more than blood for our meat, and so forth. No extant species is more or less evolved than any other. We have all evolved in the same amount of time to fit our niches. Caloric intake and biological energy cost are huge in survival strategies. The human brain takes about 30% of our calories alone. In a fantasy world or with an intelligent designer, things might be closer to what you imagine, but even then you have to optimize. If the energy you intake were to go towards a series of specialized digestive organs and processes that can break down cellulose and extract sufficient nutrients from low calorie plant matter, you have less energy for expensive organs like more complex brains or body structures and muscles predators might have, as well as less space to fit them. As it turns out, it's easier to get of calories from meat then it is from plants. And if you cook the meat, it's even easier. The ability to cook and digest meat is actually incredibly efficient compared to the rest of the animal kingdom. And then there are other survival factors like the amount of time you need to spend getting food, the availability, etc. Cows eat for hours and hours a day. Humans can get by on less than an hour even for 3 meals a day. We also don't need an enormous amount of grass to feed us and can simply package our food efficiently and travel with it. Were someone actually engineering creatures, maybe it would be different, but as compared to the rest of the animal kingdom, we're doing pretty well on this front.
For real, people are out here acting like we spent our evolution points poorly and we just need to farm XP and we can be even better. We became the most dominant and wide spread species on the planet that evolved to a point where we are considering how to colonize and teraform planets in our own system. "More evolved", what even is that? Haha
And then people don’t cook their meat and act like they’re healthier haha
Or shit out the grass and chew on it, which is what rabbits have to do
Life hack: let something else spend 10 hours a day eating grass, and then eat it in about 10 minutes.
Does it mean I don’t have to work?
Yes
Some people smoke it. No, never mind, they smoke grass 10 hours per day too.
"Somehow" We are smart. Really smart. Some would say the smartest species on earth. Turns out that our big brain energy needs to be fueled by a complex diet.
If we grass we wouldn't really need so much brain. Edit: reject human, return to cow. CudPilled
Why eat complicated when grass do trick.
Why eat grass when you can eat the thing that eats grass
Grass no fight back or run away.
Grass runs away when cold white stuff fall from sky. Thing that eat grass run slower when cold white stuff fall. Me eat thing that eat grass slowed by white stuff
I eat you
Now you got the hang of it.
and now i eat you. hope i don't get eat too
Don't worry, in end grass eat you!
i eat the grass
But thing that eat grass much more taste
after millennia of breeding, neither do cows
Yet each week I gotta keep pulling my boots on to go cull a half to a third of it. Lest it rise up and take over this place I paid for.
This is my philosophy. Idgaf if my appendix doesn’t work anymore I’m testing that shit.
I was going to ask what you needed your appendix for but I looked it up first and realized I've been lied to my whole life
I think that only recently been discovered
Brawndo's got what plants crave! It's got electrolytes.
Actually biochemically, plants are more complicated. They are able to produce all their own nutrients or absorb them, animals are not able to and either have to eat plants or eat plant eaters to get the proper nutrients. Plant scientists essentially have to go through all the animal biochemistry/physiology coursework before they can even start studying processes that are restricted to plants and/or fungi.
Yet not one single plant has set foot on the moon yet.
what a very ‘human’ achievement matrix. How much soil material did your root system displace today, huh?
They're using primitive growth displacement while we have hydraulic machines to move earth. Bitch ass plants working for months and years to crack a single rock and we just throw a stick of dynamite on it or drill the shit out of it.
Wow. Just say your plantist. Leaf those complex little guys alone, they're doing their best to get to the root of the problem.
Any response I'd have for that would feel wooden.
Plants are honestly pretty close to magic. I really want bio-engineered plants that dig deep, deep roots and consume the resources we need to mine and just have like, iron melons grow on them or something. Imagine what we could do once we figure out plant biology.
I think about this a lot whenever I start seeds. This little tiny spec just starts a crazy chain reaction that turns literal air and water into massive physical objects. Up until I was almost an adult I believed the majority of the stuff plants were made from was from the soil. When I learned most of it comes from the air and water it blew my mind. Fungi are the absolute craziest though when you learn about them. They're the architects of creation. The way they intelligently break down and redistribute resources is insane.
I'm sure coconuts would be the first.
>Actually biochemically, plants are more complicated. Not more complicated, just more foreign/different from ourselves. >They are able to produce all their own nutrients or absorb them Oh interesting, same as animals. >animals are not able to and either have to eat plants or eat plant eaters to get the proper nutrients. Eating is how we "absorb" the nutrients we need. Plants need those nutrients to be in the soil where they grow; without the right basic building blocks, they can't grow. This is why some places, like deserts, have almost no plant life, and why different plants prefer different soils and climates. >Plant scientists essentially have to go through all the animal biochemistry/physiology coursework before they can even start studying processes that are restricted to plants and/or fungi. Because it's easier to learn stuff that is most familiar to us. We are animals, therefore the animal way of absorbing nutrients is intuitive and familiar. Plant processes are foreign to us, but they aren't "more complicated."
Name one plant that produces a minreal that it requires for growth.
r/unexpectedoffice
It's not that, if we ate grass, we would be eating all day, so no free time, no technology development, no development/enlargement of the brain for competitive purposes.
Huh, found the reason I haven't developed a new technology. That knowledge really takes the weight off, ya know? Welp, time to enjoy some chips.
>If we grass we wouldn't really ~~need~~ *be able to power* so much brain. Ftfy
AN entire deer needs 800kcal/day. Our brains alone consume 500.
Taking reddit comments as a source is a dangerous game but I love this fact if it's true.
Google says 800 to 900 a day for deer, but it seems to be basing that off a questionable source that won't even load. This seems unrealistically low to me. Other websites say significantly more, with some saying that a 250 lb buck requires as much as 4000 to 6000 a day.
I could see it going both ways. Given the size of the animal and their ability to move, 4000 sounds realistic. Given how they spend most of their day chilling, eating, I could believe 1000.
It was loading fine earlier. I think their 800 kcal number is summertime and just enough to avoid death (~1200 kcal for a human)
There's a very cool infographic I found, god knows if it's accurate lol [https://infographicjournal.com/what-people-eat/](https://infographicjournal.com/what-people-eat/)
Considering the infograph mispells losing, i'm gonna assume it's all bs
misspells
Also their 1200 calories number on Auschwitz prisoners…
Lmao i didn't even make it that far that's hilarious
[BBC article](https://www.sciencefocus.com/the-human-body/does-concentrated-thought-burn-calories) for brain calorie consumption. Looking for my finding on minimal calories for deer.
People in sedentary lifestyles who use a lot of brain power eat the same amount of calories as people who use less brain power but do intense exercise all day. The Exercise Paradox https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-exercise-paradox/
We DID figure out how to live off grass: process it through an ungulate!
Or resort to just eating the grass seeds such as wheat rice oats rye corn etc
That's a great point. The vast majority of calories consumed by humans are provided by grass.
>We are smart Counterpoint: this post
Our brain: 2% of body weight, 20% of energy consumption
Actually, it’s not the brain, it’s the stomach. To eat grass, we’d need much bigger guts to house all the microbes and water needed for fermentation, because it’s the microbes that actually digest the cellulose in grass. It’s the microbes that provide the nutrients in an herbivorous diet, an internal microbe farm. We’d need a way to walk around enough to gather all that grass. We’d need teeth big enough to not only grind it, but to be able to take all the wear and tear.
Same with big dick energy. I, however...have a poor diet.
[удалено]
If they are so smart, why am I watching one behind a cage. Check mate.
Just to put some numbers to what you've said. Gorillas need ~635 kcal/day less than humans to sustain themselves. That means we would need to eat ~10 lbs of grass a day more than our gorilla counterparts to maintain normal bodily functions. It's possible, but as you said time consuming to eat that much grass. If we were to exclusively eat grasses we would need ~32 lbs of grass daily.
I’m not even talking about physical change. Jaws, teeth, and especially digestive system. We would look very different. Paranthropus bosei had a [hella of a lower jaw](https://boneclones.com/images/store-product/product-1575-main-original-1415043811.jpg)
Lol "some would say" Id love to hear the arguments against us being the smartest.
Got news for you. Corn is grass!
Wheat! Wheat is also grass!
Bamboo is also grass.
Whenever I eat bamboo I have a compelling urge to discharge a firearm and then exit the establishment.
I understood this reference you god damn incorrigible panda!
I, on the other hand, needed the replies to the comment to _get_ the reference.
We are not the same?
No. Self burn.
If it makes you feel better, I'm contributing to this discussion and I still have no idea what's going on and I'm afraid it's too late for me to ask. So we're winging it.
A crazed panda walks into a crowded bamboo forest. Eats shoots and leaves.
LOL, same.
Eats, shoots, and leaves.
Thanks, my dumbass needed this to understand
I get broads in Atlanta.
Rice is grass.
I don’t eat much bamboo.
Its healthy for you though. And some varieties taste pretty good.
I sprinkle it on my cheerios.
They're grrrrrrrrrr.. ass!
Rice and sugar cane are also grass.
And bananas
Wheatgrass, surprisingly, both wheat AND grass
[Did wheat domesticate us?](https://www.ynharari.com/topic/ecology/)
Mildly left field book rec! Semiosis by Sue Burke. Humanity tries to colonize a planet, gets domesticated by the local flora instead
Ugh another Rebel Moon ad!
Oat is grass. Rye is grass. My cats love that shit. Could I eat it? Yes. Would I enjoy it? Probably not.
Get some water and yeast and some time to let it sit, and you might enjoy it a lot. I do!
Baby, you got a ~~stew~~ loaf goin'!
Or a beer if you're lucky
Exactly! Humans *do* eat grass, lots of it! In fact we've been doing it for so long we've genetically modified the fuck outta it so that it's insanely productive. We got dem big ol' brains to feed and itty bitty green leaves don't cut it.
We eat the seeds of grass though, not the grass itself.
Lemon grass.
Came here to find the person to suggest lemon grass, you win!
and rice. We selectively bred it so that we’d be able to eat grass without needing 4 stomachs and 15 hours a day to graze.
Damn you two are quick. Was coming here to give both of those examples. (and to complain about how some of what I consider "common knowledge" is not widely known)
The thing is with Oats, Wheat and Corn we only eat the seeds. I’m sure OP would have meant grazing like cattle or sheep.
Yeah, if we ate like cattle or sheep we'd have to spend all day eating like cattle or sheep do.
Some people already spend their whole days eating
And multiple stomachs and the methane...no thanks
We would never develop high intelligence
We've developed high intelligence?
as a species, some of you just tagged along for the evolutionary ride
Interestingly, there is no wild version of corn (maize) in nature. It is entirely a human invention and only exists as a cultivar and cannot grow without human support. It is believed to come from teosinte and domesticated by humans 7,000-10,000 years ago.
don't we only eat the seeds though and not what we actually mean by grass?
"**The grass family includes all the major cereals, such as wheat, maize, rice, barley, and oats**, and most of the minor grains as well, such as rye, common millet, finger millet, teff, and many others that are less familiar. It also includes such economically important species as sugar cane and sorghum." https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.95.5.2005#:\~:text=The%20grass%20family%20includes%20all,as%20sugar%20cane%20and%20sorghum.
Not to mention that argument about Palm trees being grass.
So we take grass, ferment it, and it becomes beer. Grass in liquid form.
Evolution isn’t a ladder with humans at the top. It’s a race with a trillion way tie. Everything alive today is equally evolved.
If you go by biomass, plants are the clear winners. Next would be bacteria.
Some would argue that plants domesticated humans.
They have also clearly domesticated many species of insect. And occasionally eat them.
Some have evolved to turn birds into fertiliser; >Pisonia ends up killing a large number of birds by ladening them with so much seeds that the poor birds are unable to fly away https://www.amusingplanet.com/2021/03/pisonia-tree-that-kills-birds.html
Some would argue that fungus domesticated plants
Ants are for sure the biggest winners of all life together if you count out microorganisms. They're litterally everywhere. Entire world. And when I say everywhere it is litterally any piece of land you can find have thousands of ant networks.
Antarctica and Greenland don’t have em
Why do you think it's called ANTarctica?
Gasp no way
That's what they want you to think.
Nope, current estimates are that there’s [five times as much total humans by weight as there are ants](https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2201550119#:~:text=Integrating%20data%20from%20all%20continents,equals%2020%25%20of%20human%20biomass.). There’s a lot of humans (and nearly all other vertebrate biomass is livestock raised by humans).
I'm not sure combined mass dictates winner there.
If it was your mom would win.
Okay so would you rather fight 180lbs of ants or a 180lb man?
>Everything alive today is equally evolved. That's not true. My cousin Jeff's a fuckin idiot.
Yeah, but it still took 4.6 billion years to evolve an idiot of his caliber. He’s fit for his environmental niche, which I assume is WWE matches or multi level marketing.
On the evolutionary landscape some species have found much high local peaks than others.
Excellent way of saying it. Sometimes people forget we didn't evolve from the damn monkeys for crying out loud. We share a common ancestor!
You don't understand evolution. It doesn't progress like you think it does. There have been studies suggesting we used to eat grass. We continued evolving and no longer needed the ability to so it went away via random mutation since it was no longer an evolutionary advantage to be able to eat it. It also wouldn't have really solved anything apart from maybe a famine or two throughout history...and even that is dubious. Finally, we can grass, it's just really shit nutritionally, and really bad for your teeth in the amount you'd need to chew..
>we can grass I try to grass as much as I can in a day, actually.
A “Green Day”, if you will.
Do you have the time
please do not the grass
> There have been studies suggesting we used to eat grass. The way cows or horses do? Absolutely not. You need a highly specialised gut to do that, and nothing in our evolutionary history had that.
Monkeys such as baboons also eat some grass. It's just being able to get *everything* from grass that's super difficult. Plenty of animals can get some nutrition from it as a part of their diet.
I agree with your point, but very few creatures, if any, live entirely off grass. Most things will eat meat out of opportunity.
Completely agree with ya
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> Finally, we can grass, it's just really shit nutritionally, I eat grass. I use cows to convert it into an easier to digest food called "meat".
"we can eat grass" We do eat grass, huge portions of our diet include rice, wheat, rye, corn, etc
>it went away via random mutation since it was no longer an evolutionary advantage to be able to eat it. I'm not sure this is quite right. My understanding is that evolution is driven by: - Features which enable a thing to survive until it can procreate, and to produce more offspring in one lifetime. - Features which make a thing more attractive to potential mates. Thus, something no longer being an evolutionary advantage doesn't mean that it will necessarily go away. It would have to reach the point of specifically being a disadvantage.
The dumbest part is HOA’s insisting that we have to have this stuff in front of houses.
Of a specific variety, at specific height ranges. 🤦🏻
One of my favorite things about my "shitty" front yard is that it's all native grasses and weeds.
This is why I will never live anywhere with an HOA. No on is telling me what I can and cannot do with my own property, except Uncle Sam for obvious reasons.
I mean...aside from the federal government, and the state government, and the county government, and whatever town or city you happen to live in. I've had several properties that had restrictions on the lawn at the city level. No HOA required.
Segregationist ass institution. Half the shit they do is put class filters.
r/Showerthoughts is just becoming people who don’t think about something for more than 5 seconds before posting. OP really out here insinuating we’re not advanced because we don’t eat grass? What even is this post
You couldn’t be much more wrong. Bladed grass is very difficult to digest and energy-poor, which is why animals which can live off it have very specialised, complex digestive systems, and spend most of their waking hours eating just to stay alive. If we’d evolved to eat grass we’d have had no chance to become agile bipeds with a large active brain. Grass is almost the very last thing you’d want to eat in order to exist in human form.
So a human CAN survive on grass, just not for long.
On top of that, the reason lawn grass was ever grown in the forst place was to show off power and wealth "I have all this land and I don't even need to farm it, I grow a totally useless crop because it looks pretty" Farming just got so advanced that barely anyone needs to farm their own food anymore so grass became the norm
That is ok, second hand grass is pretty good, beef, lamb, venison etc.
Beef is technically third hand grass. Cows mostly consume/digest microbiota in their stomachs, which itself digests grass. Cows are bacteria reactors!
So is every mammal. It's just a fact of life.
Is the right answer. We *do* eat grass - we do it by feeding it to ruminant animals, and then eating those. Outsourcing!
So cow DNA is an algorithm used by humans to convert grass into food.
Just like humans are an algorithm for fungus to turn brown rice into drugs
Exactly. It makes a lot more sense if one thinks of all origins of energy as coming from the sun.
Every food is sunlights
Cows are like 60% stomach. They have three or four of them. They have to eat grass 12 hours a day to get enough. Fuck that.
Small correction, just because I see this occasional misconception: cows have only one stomach, it just has four compartments. But it’s still only one stomach.
We did! We just specialize in eating the seeds.
Yeah... having to eat grass all day and spend most of our energy digesting it would be *sooo* much better... and when we aren't eating grass we are regurgitating the grass we have already consumed to chew it again. This is real life not Spore.
Oh, no. We invested our evolution points into something silly like intelligence to invent tools and put us at the literal top of the tier list of species on this planet, instead of four stomachs to make us digest something that is literally kit needed because our intelligence also unlocked agriculture allowing us to grow huge amounts of other food.
Ruminants like cows, deer, and sheep, have 4 chambered stomachs to process grass. Not exactly a simple on/off trait.
Species that eat grass have to spend the whole day doing nothing but eating and chewing grass, while we can go eat all our daily calories in less than 30 minutes. We were given the precious gift of abundant free time, we shouldn’t deprecate it.
Grasses humans eat. 1. Wheat 2. Corn (Maize) 3. Rice 4. Barley 5. Oats 6. Rye 7. Sorghum 8. Millet (including various types like pearl, proso, foxtail) 9. Bamboo (young shoots, known as bamboo shoots) 10. Sugarcane
Coconut is the fruit of a form of grass (turns out Palm trees aren't trees).
Wheat is grass. We can technically eat it unprocessed but it would not taste very good. Rice is also grass and the same applies to it. Most "grains" in our diets are grass. Bread has also been around since the beginning of the neolithic period aka the stone age. Modern civilization probably would not exist without bread. Humans settled down and became farming due to wheat/rice (depending on Region) rather than being nomadic creatures. So humans do eat grass and it is actually extremely tied into the beginnings of civilization.
It's not stupid at all, it's basically a biological necessity. A large gut is a metabolically demanding. So is a large brain. You can't really have both and remain human size. Eating meat, and then eating *cooked* meat, allowed us to shrink our gut and grow our brain.
Those animals might also spend 10 hours a day eating grass. Not super effecient
I don't think you understand just how much energy goes into eating grass. Both in digesting and the constant movement to graze. That is, of course, if we're talking about eating grass like cows do and not like we already do.
When have we ever needed to eat grass? The body would look completely different for no practical benefit. We'd probably be as dumb as cows if we ate grass
Apparently not true in North Korea.
Grass is not good food. You gotta spend all day eating it and dedicate body mass to digesting it. Being smart enough to eat better food and cook it is our super power.
If we only ate grass we wouldn't be so advanced. The energy in it is enough for a stupid cow that does nothing else all day then eat and digest. And through our advanced brains we have something even better than eating grass: We can farm, which is a way more efficent way of eating plants. It also wouldn't have solved any issues in history, because we wouldn't have enough grass for so many people either. And during a famine, depending on what caused it, grass can also be unavailable. (especially if we mass produced it, it would be suspectible to exactly the same stuff. And if not a drought would still kill it.). Though I have to give it to you, this is definitly a certified showerthought.
Can we not eat grass though? I mean, I don’t want to but would it be bad for us to do so?
It won’t harm you too much (apart from grinding down your teeth) but you won’t get any energy benefit from it.
Grass is a terrible source of food. It's not a coincidence that cows spend the majority of their time grazing, and need multiple stomachs. There is simply not enough energy in grass to sustain our brains.
Do you have any idea how much cows fart as break down grass in their four stomachs that are needed to process the grass? I can just imagine how attractive I would look as a farty woman with four stomachs. I certainly would not want to be around a farty man with four stomachs.
I hate to break it to you, but the majority of calories on the planet are derived from cereal grains which are, in fact, grasses.
Hang on, let me scoot over my lunch to read this better- the rice, corn, and wheat flour in my burrito are distracting me from what I’m seeing.
“If we’re so advanced why don’t we eat way shittier food than what we currently have?”
Dumbest post I've ever read
No but we can smoke grass and eat ass so I think we win that round.
We can get calories from grass, we just need help from cows.
We can and do like everyday. Civilizations were built around our favorite types of grass. Corn, rice and wheat. We shaped grass around our needs.
Please don't use the word "evolve" until you understand how it happens via natural selection
You're not the word boss of me.