Hm, interesting. I don’t know of any culture which heavily relied on nuts as a food source. I wonder why that is so. Nuts are excellent food—fairly complete nutritionally, high caloric density, don’t spoil easily, etc. Moreover, they grow on trees, so once you have a mature orchard, you don’t need to do much other than collect them. One possibility is that trees are too “inflexible” for agriculture—if your fields got destroyed (say, an army rolled through), you’ll get a new crop next year (conditional, of course, on having seed grain, labour to work the fields, etc.). But if your orchard got chopped down, well, the wait till the new crop is much longer. A counter to this line of thought is complex irrigation systems which are certainly “inflexible” and yet were very popular. I wonder how land-efficient (calories/hectare) nut trees are.
Ah, I just figured out that coconuts are nuts and there are Polynesian cultures which heavily depend on them. But still, there is nothing in temperate regions and there are a lot of nut trees and bushes growing there.
I’m aware of pre-european Californian societies whose main calorie crop was acorns, rendered edible by soaking after crushing to remove irritating tannins and then cooked, and sometimes preserved by soaking in various other substances.
Yes, a good point. But weren’t these American Indians mostly hunter-gatherers? I don’t know if you can say that they engaged in agriculture. Some other tribes did, but those didn’t rely on nuts or acorns.
Eh, to my mind the boundary between agriculture and gathering is fuzzy when your plants live a long time and grow pretty thickly and you encourage the growth of those you like.
Like, there’s 11.5k year old seedless fig trees found in the middle east, a thousand years before there’s any evidence of grain field agriculture. Those simply don’t grow unless planted by humans.
All true. Still, grain very decisively won over nuts. I wonder if there’s a good reason for that or it was just a historical accident. Maybe you can just make many more yummy things our of flour than out of nuts. Or maybe nuts don’t actually store all that well because of fats going rancid...
Hm, interesting. I don’t know of any culture which heavily relied on nuts as a food source. I wonder why that is so. Nuts are excellent food—fairly complete nutritionally, high caloric density, don’t spoil easily, etc. Moreover, they grow on trees, so once you have a mature orchard, you don’t need to do much other than collect them. One possibility is that trees are too “inflexible” for agriculture—if your fields got destroyed (say, an army rolled through), you’ll get a new crop next year (conditional, of course, on having seed grain, labour to work the fields, etc.). But if your orchard got chopped down, well, the wait till the new crop is much longer. A counter to this line of thought is complex irrigation systems which are certainly “inflexible” and yet were very popular. I wonder how land-efficient (calories/hectare) nut trees are.
Ah, I just figured out that coconuts are nuts and there are Polynesian cultures which heavily depend on them. But still, there is nothing in temperate regions and there are a lot of nut trees and bushes growing there.
I’m aware of pre-european Californian societies whose main calorie crop was acorns, rendered edible by soaking after crushing to remove irritating tannins and then cooked, and sometimes preserved by soaking in various other substances.
Yes, a good point. But weren’t these American Indians mostly hunter-gatherers? I don’t know if you can say that they engaged in agriculture. Some other tribes did, but those didn’t rely on nuts or acorns.
Eh, to my mind the boundary between agriculture and gathering is fuzzy when your plants live a long time and grow pretty thickly and you encourage the growth of those you like.
Like, there’s 11.5k year old seedless fig trees found in the middle east, a thousand years before there’s any evidence of grain field agriculture. Those simply don’t grow unless planted by humans.
All true. Still, grain very decisively won over nuts. I wonder if there’s a good reason for that or it was just a historical accident. Maybe you can just make many more yummy things our of flour than out of nuts. Or maybe nuts don’t actually store all that well because of fats going rancid...