Eat the weeds?

Can you eat weeds?  TPP has been asked this question several times during his long career, and that question has been thought about quite a bit.  First, the answer is that we do eat weeds, that is, some domesticated plants have their origins as weeds.  Second, a lot of these weeds have been around for a long time, so people have had ample time to domesticate them if they were thought to have any value.  Third, think about the difference between being edible and tasting good.  Here's the list of weeds that were presented as edible in an online article on Treehugger: wild amaranth, plantain, chickweed, mallow, curlydock, dandelion, purslane, clover flowers (warning: some clovers are toxic), lamb's quarters.  Now there are "grain" amaranths grown for their seeds, and even dandelions have some cultivars.  Generally selection is on extended juvenile stages, which in general are the more edible and better tasting.  If you grow lettuces and there are wild weedy species, lettuce begins to taste bitter as they bolt before flowering because the latex producing cells proliferate at this stage. 
Once years ago the Phactors tried New Zealand "spinach" because supposedly it stayed in an edible stage in the long days of summer and tasted like spinach.  What a good deal!  The plant is Tetragonia tetragonoides, and tasted more like freshly mowed grass than any plant we had ever grown.  It became pet rabbit fodder.  TPP thinks none of these weeds tastes good enough to be domesticated and if they had some redeeming qualities then people would have already domesticated them.  Otherwise TPP does not think these weeds will make up any significant part of any rational diet.  It may be good to know what is edible so that when society collapses, your friendly neighborhood botanist can earn his place in our new society.  Other than adding a bit of garnish to a mixed salad, a hoe is the best means of dealing with weeds. Mrs. Phactor found a recipe for "shrimp rampy" and it sounded reasonably good, but wild ramps while common enough in some places are not actually very weedy, and they do taste pretty good, as good as any oniony plant.  But foraging for an edible wild plant is different that eating the weeds.

Important science - Wine Grape Genetics

The research that made Louis Pasteur famous originated with a government commission to find out why wine was spoiling leading to the discovery that things like spoilage and infections, and indeed fermentation itself, were the direct result of the metabolisms of invisibly small organisms. It's good that many scientists are focused on the public good as the driving force of their research, and this report from the proceedings of the National Academy of Science is downright scary. If grape breeders don't get busy and inject some new genetic diversity into the gene pool of wine grapes, the whole industry could be in trouble. When Mrs. Phactor, a wine survivalist, hears about this, the wine cellar which now only holds 120 or so bottles will have to be greatly enlarged. You begin to worry about the end of civilization coming when and your supply of wine being only 100 bottles or so. After all it'll take a couple of years to get your own winery going. This genetic study indicates that early in the domestication of wine grapes, some 6000-8000 years ago (this study's molecular clock suggests wine grapes arose 5000 years ago) whatever stock was successful became sort of a genetic bottle neck, a small subset of the wild grape genome, and modern varieties all trace to back to this source. Various diseases resulting from their wide-spread cultivation are catching up and the only chance of the wine industry lasting another 5000 years is to breed in new disease resistance. Worries like this can ruin your sleep. And it's probably true for any number of other domesticated plants too. Even worse when the crop is propagated asexually, like the poor Cavendish banana that is so beset with disease that you may as well kiss the most popular banana of the northern temperate zone goodbye. Fortunately better bananas exist, they just aren't part of the cultivated banana industry, although a few other varieties are beginning to appear in our markets. And this is why so much more research is necessary on the origins and domestication of those plants that feed people. And why students need access to basic botanical education, which has been systematically downsized in the USA in favor of human-biomedical biology. Why should people be impressed by physicians and befuddled by botanists. Botany what? Oh, yeah, on that great scale used to decide worth in our culture, salary, physicians get paid about half of what botanists are actually worth. Doesn't the Phactor wish. Come on! Wine! This is life and death stuff here!
HT to AoB blog.