100 Million Years of Food Quotes

“Eat good food, keep moving, and let your body take care of the rest.”
― Stephen Le, 100 Million Years of Food

“Oak trees can churn out roughly 500 to 1,000 pounds (225 to 450 kg) of acorns a year, albeit during a brief window of a few weeks. A Native American family living in California a few centuries ago, collecting over the span of two or three weeks, could set aside enough acorns to last two or three years. They could gather acorns from at least seven different species of oak trees, preferring oily acorns over sweet ones, and knew two methods to purge them of noxious tannins. The common technique was to de-hull the acorns, pound the acorn meat into mush and drop it into a pit, then douse the mush with water heated by hot stones until all the bitterness was leached. Alternatively, acorns could be buried in mud by streams or swamps for several months, after which they would become edible. To complement their protein-deficient acorn cuisine, Native Americans in California hunted salmon, deer, antelope, mountain sheep, and black bear and gathered earthworms, caterpillars (smoked and then boiled), grasshoppers (doused with salty water and roasted in earth pits), and bee and wasp larvae.15 The”
― Stephen Le, 100 Million Years of Food: What Our Ancestors Ate and Why It Matters Today

“The two palm worms are brought in separate bowls, still alive, wriggling fiercely in a bath of turpentine-colored fish sauce with a few slivers of chili. The glossy brown heads of the grubs, the larvae of a weevil that infests palm trees, glisten like popcorn seeds; the wriggling abdomens have pale rubbery ridges. The owner of the restaurant, chubby and affable, comes out to instruct Nhat and me: we are to grasp the heads, pull off the fat white bodies with our teeth, and discard the heads, taking care that the larvae do not nip our tongues with their formidable pincers in the process. Biting down on squirming larvae seems barbaric, but my brain is starting to swim due to hunger, and the fish sauce is muskily aromatic. How bad could their fat glistening bodies taste? And am I not a direct descendant of insectivores, albeit roughly 100 million years removed? I”
― Stephen Le, 100 Million Years of Food: What Our Ancestors Ate and Why It Matters Today

“Considering that crickets produce 50 percent less carbon dioxide than cattle per unit of weight gain and convert feed into food twice as efficiently as chickens, four times more efficiently than pigs, and twelve times more efficiently than cattle, insects deserve to be more popular on menus.3 Since insects aren’t warm-blooded, they don’t need to consume as many calories as warm-blooded animals when putting on weight.”
― Stephen Le, 100 Million Years of Food: What Our Ancestors Ate and Why It Matters Today