I just finished Oliver Sacks’ excellent Everything in Its Place. In it, he mentioned as an aside that the Ginkgo biloba tree is hundreds of millions of years old, and its phenotype has been practically frozen since then – a living fossil.

I just finished Oliver Sacks’ excellent Everything in Its Place. In it, he mentioned as an aside that the Ginkgo biloba tree is hundreds of millions of years old, and its phenotype has been practically frozen since then – a living fossil.

Of course, this is the same tree that grows ぎんなん (Ginkgo nuts), an East Asian delicacy found in many dishes, 茶碗蒸し (Chawanmushi) for example.

Ginkgo has been around so long, it predates the dinosaurs! And we still eat it! How cool is that. This got me thinking – what are the oldest foods we consume today?

Criteria:

  • Must be edible by humans
  • Must be morphologically unchanged since its fossil age
  • Otter@lemmy.caOP
    3·
    28 days ago

    They actually start producing in April, but as there’s a non-zero chance the pine nuts from April are from felled trees, I avoid it. The species is critically endangered; eating some nuts is not a big deal, but falling the tree is.

    Good to know! I’d hate for these to suddenly become a fad and then endanger the tree even more. Knowing about the issue ahead of time means that people might check for it when buying it