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
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 apart 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).
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 so not see sea crabs that can fly or flies that live in the bottom of the sea.
Why? Because otherwise we wouldn’t exist and that wouldn’t be in line with the future.
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.
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.
Take the tier zoo aproach. Would you rather use evelution points on grass or evolution points on being big brain.
big guts, short brains
Grass.
Some of us did that and they are horses now.
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.We used to be able to eat grass.
Because yo mama so fat she’d eat it all
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
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
Thank you very much Sis! ✨
Interesting, thanks for sharing that. I wasn’t aware that there has been newer research countering the tooth wear model
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.
It’s more efficient to let others eat the grass, and then eat them
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.
Bamboo is also grass, we can eat the shoots/sprouts
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!
they faked it until they made it!
Vavilovian mimicry goes brrr
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?
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.
