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Dinosaur Food: 100 million year old foods we still eat today (borischerny.com)

submitted 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) by otter@lemmy.ca to c/biology@mander.xyz

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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

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[–] idiomaddict@lemmy.world 5 points 3 days ago

Hmm. Fiddleheads maybe? Ferns are some of the oldest plants and you can eat the fiddleheads of any fern that’s not poisonous (but be careful, a bunch of types are poisonous).