h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

According to legend, Apache youths are trained to track the grasshopper, an approved between meals snack.

Grasshoppers taste like crunchy shrimp.

I'll have to remember that. I like shrimp. Do the young Apaches eat the grasshoppers raw or cooked?

Shrimps taste like crunchy shrimp when you eat them fresh off the boat, shells on. I know first hand.

Not as crunchy as when their cooked though.

Aren't shrimps closely related to ?

Nope, not that I know of. Shrimps have many more legs.

Paul! My sister has asked me ? is that cricket powder actually crickets ?. I emailed her and said that if is says cricketsthen it probably is - On that, can't say I've heard/seen anything like in any shops here

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ez0VDjtvDKI

can't cook him! That's cruel

Jiminy cricket is the only cricket I can think of in literature.

When I was a kid, I mischievously brought a few crickets into our basement. Apparently a toad hopped in as well, because there was a source of food. They all lived on there for years.

do you/have you ? really got powered cricket in some of your shops ?

Not that I'm aware of.

It's bad enough that Whole Foods has Paleo Flour . Stone Age people are not supposed to have done any baking, so why would they have needed flour? And if they did want to bake something, why would they have used ingredients that were thousands of miles outside their regions?

Paleo Flour, which is sold by red Mill, contains almond flour, coconut flour, arrowroot starch, and tapioca flour. Now, cassavas and coconuts can be grown together in tropical areas. Almonds grow best in Mediterranean climates. Apparently they will grow in tropical Nigeria as well. For arrowroot you should start with the island of Saint of Saint Vincent, in the Antilles. It has been cultivated for 7,000 years. This means that stone-agers outside the Caribbean would have had to wait 3,000 years for their Arrowroot flour to arrive.

I can imagine some of the conversations they would have had as they attempted to figure out where to move to in order to make baking easier. The Yucatan, perhaps? Coconuts grow naturally there, cassava will grow if you plant it, and Arrowroot in Saint Vincent would be a few hundred miles away. That still means a wait for almond flour from the Mediterranean.

Wait, you're in the Stone Age, so people in the mediterranean don't know you exist, and you don't know *they exist!

You can easily buy cricket flour (cricket powder, actually) on the net, Prof:

http://www.amazon.com/Cricket-powder-made-100-22/dp/B00OMCTODQ

http://www.google.com/search?q=cricket+flour&client=firefox-b&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjFjavY7uHfAhVG3iwKHXT5DTQQsAR6BAgGEAE&biw=1453&bih=1099

You are welcome!

We have produced flour here in Denmark since 10,000BC, paulh

Our stoneage lasted from 12,800BC until 1,800BC

We used tools like this:

http://denstoredanske.dk/Natur_og_milj%C3%B8/Landbrug_og_havebrug/Fodring_og_ern%C3%A6ring_af_husdyr/grutning

I purchased mine (grutning) at one of the local Mexican stores.

Still a useful tool.

In Spanish, 'metate'.

"We have produced flour here in Denmark since 10,000BC" [Pierce]

Was it wheat or one of the other cereal grains? If so, there would have been no need for coconut or cassava flour.

Your guess is as good as mine, paulh, but I believe we can agree that it can't have been neither coconut nor cassava.

Not here in Denmark anyway. We may have been a seafaring nation back then already but even Eric The Red and his son Leif The Happy waited till dugouts had been replaced with longboats before they sailed to the Faroe Islands, Iceland, Greenland, Newfoundland and beyond.

I think wheat was our first "real" cereal here but certain seeds of wild plants may have been used before wheat. I imagine a kind of porridge predated baked goods. But we need a time machine to verify that.

The oldest known archaeological traces of an agricultural plantation are of a banana plantation, in Papua-New Guinea, right in the heart of sago palm country.

Apparently there's evidence for cereal grinding as far back as 30,000 years ago
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2010/10/did-cavemen-eat-bread/#.XDewOlxKi1s

The "bread" that is referenced resembles pita, a flat, yeastless bread. No matter. If you added as many spices to it as Mahatma Gandhi did, it would be perfectly flavorful.

For most of us, getting enough food variety is as important as avoiding "bad" foods. Science has a pesky way of discovering new 'essential" nutrients that we didn't know were important. It also has a way of discovering that are legitimate uses for things we thought were bad, like saturated fat and even salt.

I like the Nordic philosophy that stresses not too much and not too little.

So, yes, I suppose I could eat like a Stone-Age man on Mondays, a Mediterranean person on Tuesdays, an Asian vegan on Wednesdays, and so on. Just about every nutrient I could want would be available on a weekly basis.

That sounds like a great idea!

Once science finds out you need "substance X", which you have never heard of before, you will find that you have eaten it for ages already

Cheers Pierce, links emailed to sister I know she'll try any types of food as such