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DailyDirt: Strange But Sustainable Food

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

The world actually produces enough food to feed everyone, but there’s a lot of food waste and inefficient distribution in the supply chain. Obviously, it’d be nice to end world hunger, but we haven’t figured out how to do that just yet. Various solutions involve changing some of the things we eat the most — eg. eating less meat and more plants. Here are a few more wacky ideas for altering the human diet.

• The human body simply can’t digest cellulose from corn husks and wood chips, but some researchers are looking into breaking down those materials into an edible starch. Perhaps this doesn’t sound too appetizing, but it’s an interesting development that could recycle certain kinds of organic waste into more useful products. [url]
• People generate a lot of plastic trash — trash that could be digested by edible fungi. There are a few problems with trying to get rid of plastic waste with fungus, though. A small mushroom farm takes a few months to fully digest a relatively small amount of plastic, and the resulting edible fungi isn’t exactly delicious (or approved safe for human consumption yet). [url]
• Forget about fungi and turning cellulose into starch, how about eating some breadfruit from one of nature’s highest-yielding trees? A single breadfruit tree can produce 450 pounds of fruit per season, but not too many people eat this nutritious — but really bland — fruit. [url]

If you’d like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

Filed Under: breadfruit, cellulose, diet, edible, food, food waste, fungi, mushrooms, organic waste, plastics, recycling, starch