It’s everywhere. Why not just eat it instead of searching for veggies and meat which are more difficult to have?
Because it requires a lot of biological investment to eat it. It’s rough on teeth and requires rumination or similar calorically expensive techniques to extract much nutrition. We evolved in the opposite path and optimized heavily for easily digested foods. We then take it a step further and cook them breaking the difficult to digest parts into an easer to digest form.
Also we do eat grasses, but only their seeds and fruits. Wheat, maize, rice, and bananas are all grasses
There’s a reason grass is so common - it’s because it’s a wildly effective life strategy. Grass is actually quite hard to eat - there’s basically no nutrition in the leaves themselves, and grass evolved to incorporate silica “needles” in its leaves, so that it wears down your teeth when you try to eat it anyways.
Not to say that it’s impossible to eat grass, but you need to undergo a ton of highly specialized adaptations to make it possible. For most animals (including humans), it’s just not worth the effort
Ruminants that eat it have like several stomachs, they regurgitate the food they eat to re-eat it, and they require specialized gut bacteria to digest it. They have to spend like all of their time eating.
I’d like a source on the silica needles?
Basically all grasses contain silica phytoliths but they likely don’t significantly contribute to teeth wear. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0305440306001245
Interesting, thanks for sharing that. I wasn’t aware that there has been newer research countering the tooth wear model
Thank you very much Sis! ✨
All forms of grass:
- Corn
- Wheat
- Barley
- Rice
- etc
We eat the seeds, I presume OP refers to the leaves/blades of grass which are also present in species that aren’t cereals
Good point. This made me look further, but some of these also are just the seeds:
- Bamboo
- Bluegrass
- Crabgrass
- Foxtail Grass
- Goosegrass
- Lemongrass
- Wood Millet
- Orchardgrass
Plants are selected to not be great to eat, basically. Cellulose in particular is almost impossible to biochemically break back down (but not completely), and is a pretty good structural material, too.
Seeds are often still palatable once you get through the shell, basically because turning into a baby plant is an already tough design constraint. Some plants still have tricks - notice that it’s the spiciest part of a hot pepper.
Bamboo shoots are a common ingredient.
Every species of grain:
-
Wheat
-
etc
-
Smarts required more calories.
The thing is that cows can’t digest grass either. They have an extra stomach along their oesophagus which is basically just a pouch where the grass goes in first. There are a lot of bacteria and they can digest grass. Then these bacteria grow because they eat the grass.
Then the cow swallows these bacteria and digests those. That’s where a cow gets their calories from.
Humans can’t digest anything without bacteria either.
they can
when you eat fruit, the sugar can enter your bloodstream directly through the mucosa in your mouth, you don’t even need to swallow it. although the main part of the absorption happens in the colon still.
Albeit true, not to the extent of cows.
Cows only have 1 stomach. That is devided in 4 compartments.
Grass is nutritionally poor. The reason we are smart in many ways is due to our varied diet. Even if we had evolutionary gone in that direction we would be dumber. Eating grass is a specialisation.
Also, we would not look like we do. If you look at the digestive track of a horse or a cow, you will see that they are longer. Carnivores have the shortest and we as omnivores are in between. Being an omnivote is a good thing and in the end, we can get more nutrition by hunting and gathering than by grassing.
Worth noting, while individual cows’ behaviour and preferences vary greatly, the time spent feeding and ruminating usually adds up to 4-7 hours a day. Our society would be were we are today if we spent 7 hours as a species eating grass in order to make ir worthwhile.
Evolution can only evolve so much within an existing animal especies in order to specialise or fit in a survival niche. Hence you do not see sea crabs that can fly or flies that live in the bottom of the sea.
A lot of grass. Like lawn grass. Is wheat.
If you let it grow more.
So actually we did evolve to eat grass.
Cat grass is wheat grass.
Rye, barley, oats, and rice are also grasses.
Rye used to be a weed that evolved to resemble wheat so early farmers wouldn’t uproot it. But it evolved to resemble wheat so much that it became an edible crop in its own right.
they faked it until they made it!
Vavilovian mimicry goes brrr
Don’t forget corn!
Bamboo is also grass, we can eat the shoots/sprouts
It’s more efficient to let others eat the grass, and then eat them
Take the tier zoo aproach. Would you rather use evelution points on grass or evolution points on being big brain.
Grass.
Some of us did that and they are horses now.
big guts, short brains
I’d rather evolve the ability to photosynthesize, now that we have indoor lighting. It’d save a whole bunch of time and grocery bills.
Grass came later.
Not after chicken nuggies tho?
Yeah, that was the lazy answer. The more correct is, because grass contains stuff (mainly lignin, reminds me of this i found this morning) that’s hard to digest with a normal stomach. So cows & co. have multiple gastric … sections(? Mägen), the first of which contains microrganisms specialized in breaking down lignin. The following gastrics are more the usual bio-chemical kind, to digest the microorganisms.
In short, eating grass needs a specialized process and you can’t eat anything else as main food source, (they do occasionally eat a chicken or critter).
Vegetables have pretty limited availability for protein, as an animal you have sit there eating grass all day. Our ways allow us plenty of time to be smart & stuff
I mean we’ve got the time, but we still don’t do it.
I mean pandaz tried going back 2 the bark and kt takes their whole ass day. No phone time. Imagine?
But at least we have the choice. Cows don’t.
Return to cow
Because yo mama so fat she’d eat it all
Essentially as others said, because you need to invest heavily in your gut and metabolism to get enough energy out of grass alone. You don’t evolve into what you want, you evolve into what you can while you are pressured to do so. There is currently no pressure to rely solely on grass, that pressure hasn’t been on us for millions of years. Our foods may be trickier to find but on average they yield more energy compared to grass.
But don’t get me wrong. It’s a valid strategy. Our ancestors did have the window of opportunity at some point, and they took it… We were something more like rats back then, the grass eaters niche had room. Grass was everywhere. And our cousins back then adapted and spent practically the whole day foraging for grass in order to get by. But you know what also was everywhere? Trees. And our ratlike ancestors that were more inclined to climb, jump, and spot predators from above found it easier to stick to the omnivore diet.
Adapting to trees lets you move into places with less grass… Like jungles and swamps. And while you are there for a couple million years you will have other problems to solve, problems that require wits, sharp vision, and social skills. You don’t have time to forage 18hrs every day and grass isn’t as abundant here anyway.
If you don’t rely solely on grass you will probably fare better during winter. Especially during those ice ages. By the time you have grass as an option again you are pretty much an ape and pivoting back to it makes no sense.
