It’s everywhere. Why not just eat it instead of searching for veggies and meat which are more difficult to have?
Return to cow
If you look at all the other animals in the world that do eat grass, we did. But the “we” that eat grass, look like those animals, with those traits.
The “we” that became smart became so due to what we evolved to eat and do.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
We evoled away from eating grass and other such things, it’s why our appendix are now almost useless.
Smarts required more calories.
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
Bamboo shoots are a common ingredient.
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.
Every species of grain:
-
Wheat
-
etc
-
Grass is mostly cellulose and lignin. Those molecules are difficult to break down.
Animals that can digest the cellulose either need a really long digestive track or to do something really gross to keep the stuff in their digestive track longer.
or to do something really gross to keep the stuff in their digestive track longer.
Looking at you, rabbits.
Deer too, but slightly less gross, and some others.
Any chemistry we could perform to make it more viable? E.g. cook it with alcohol?
Folks have looked at it with acid or enzymes to try and produce fuel ethanol from the sugar forming the cellulose. Humans use the chemistry of grazing animals.
Yeah the grass to milk, meat and hide pipeline is a great one
It’s all down to the way the brain works. Our brains use up something like 20% of our calories when standing still doing nothing.
Grass does not supply the amount of calories and micronutrients needed to keep the human brain running, simply because it is low on both of those things.
Grass eaters have multiple stomachs, slow digestion and graze pretty much the whole time they’re awake, and because their brains use a lot less energy than human brains, the balance works out.
I think that grass don’t have enough energy to sustain our brain and its development.
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
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.
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.
Don’t forget corn!
Vavilovian mimicry goes brrr
they faked it until they made it!
Bamboo is also grass, we can eat the shoots/sprouts
It’s more efficient to let others eat the grass, and then eat them
That random mutation didn’t happen, basically.
Evolution is a purely subtractive process. It doesn’t design things in, it just subtracts away poorly-designed creatures (and all hypothetical offspring) until only things equipped to survive are left. And obviously, there are things to eat that aren’t grass.
Edit: Herbivores can be smart, even the grazers. Look at elephants.
I can’t believe how many other replies heap that fallacy on top of teleological evolution. Apes are mostly herbivorous anyway, WTF.
Evolution is not subtractive. Bacteria didn’t evolve from humans
In the sense humans are “better” or “greater” or something? Well, consider the global biomass of bacteria compared to humans - they seem to be doing okay. Or that there’s more bacterial cells in you than human cells. Single-celled yeast evolved from mushrooms, barnacles evolved from something like shrimp or crabs, and there are eukaryotes that lost eukaryotic features like mitochondria because they didn’t need them to survive.
Buuut that’s besides the point. I’m not sure how to make it more clear, but I meant subtractive as in selection is just about who dies. Random mutation is what adds features and new species.
MOOOOOO MOooO MU
Justified and Ancient?













