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
  • JohnnyEnzyme@piefed.socialEnglish
    1·
    28 days ago

    Must be morphologically unchanged since its fossil age

    That’s interesting. So, genetically it could be significantly changed, but shape-wise, it must appear the same? In any case, I’m thinking certain molluscs might work. Sharks also might fit the bill, altho AFAIK they don’t fossilize well. Or, are there other gymnosperms beside ferns and Araucaria that could fit the bill? I suspect so…

    Now, feel free to hate on this, but I’ve found GPT pretty useful for issues like this. Evidently, there’s quite a few more candidates.