Forced rhubarb, a vegetable deprived of sunlight, is having a renaissance (2019)
bbc.comMentioned in the article, but forced rhubarb grows so fast you can hear it. This soundcloud file suggests hearing it in a darkened vault by candlelight would be extraordinary experience!
https://soundcloud.com/rhubarb-rhubarb-rhubarb/a-mass-of-pop...
Well, they definitely need to add rhubarb to Minecraft now.
The year is 2028
Minecraft update 1.22 part 1 (of 5) comes out, rhubarb and rhubarb seeds were added
The structure that rhubarb seeds are found will be added in part 2 (scheduled for 2029)
Rhubarb pie will be added in part 4 (scheduled 2032)
It's a mid tier food with worse saturation than chicken
1.22 - Strawberry and rhubarb pie update
On s calm morning, you can also hear corn growing.
I don't quite understand: constantly, for days? It seems there would be a finite # of buds to burst, and especially at the frequency (4-6 hz?) and relatively finite size of the dark greenhouse...I'm really surprised this is a phenomenon for more than hours. There must be a TON of buds?
The article stated half of a million, so very likely yes.
Thank you I missed that: though it leads me to the opposite conclusion!
That's only enough for one day at 5 hz.
5 hz * 60 seconds / min * 60 min / hr * 24 hr / day = 432000
That reminds me of cauliflowers squeaking as they grow with their florets squeezing against themselves.
That is wild, thanks for sharing the soundcloud link!
Reminds me of hearing the seedpods of gorse cracking and popping in the sunshine.
That is wild, wonder if there's an asmr for it
Time for mention of the rhubarb triangle... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhubarb_Triangle
From the Wikipedia article...
The Rhubarb Triangle is a 9-square-mile (23 km2) area of West Yorkshire, England between Wakefield, Morley, and Rothwell famous for producing early forced rhubarb. It includes Kirkhamgate, East Ardsley, Stanley, Lofthouse and Carlton. The Rhubarb Triangle was originally much bigger, covering an area between Leeds, Bradford and Wakefield. From the 1900s to 1930s, the rhubarb industry expanded and at its peak covered an area of about 30 square miles (78 km2).
They need to Champagnify that
They did: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_Kingdom_food_an...
(PDOs granted pre-Brexit continue to be in force, though new ones can't be granted for UK stuff)
I thought you meant turn it into an alcoholic beverage, so I looked it up and apparently there is such a thing as rhubarb wine.
Slightly tangential but along the same lines. Worth a read, BlackBerry Wine by Joanne Harris. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackberry_Wine
It also great in cocktails. https://lundsandbyerlys.com/rhubarb-margarita-a-tangy-twist-...
Remember that rhubarb leaves are actually poisonous due to oxalic acid (I've seen quotes of 2-5 kg od leaves being a lethal dose).
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/culture/article/does-rhub...
Oxalic acid is poisonous? Should I stop eating spinach then? Oh, looks like the article mentions this actually:
> Chard and spinach, in fact, contain even more oxalic acid than rhubarb—respectively, 700 and 600 mg/100 g, as opposed to rhubarb’s restrained 500. Rhubarb’s killer reputation apparently dates to World War I, when rhubarb leaves were recommended on the home front as an alternative food. At least one death was reported in the literature, an event that rhubarb has yet to live down.
> Oxalic acid does its dirty work by binding to calcium ions and yanking them out of circulation. In the worst-case scenario, it removes enough essential calcium from the blood to be lethal; in lesser amounts, it forms insoluble calcium oxalate, which can end up in the kidneys as kidney stones. In general, however, rhubarb leaves don’t pose much of a threat. Since a lethal dose of oxalic acid is somewhere between 15 and 30 grams, you’d have to eat several pounds of rhubarb leaves at a sitting to reach a toxic oxalic acid level, which is a lot more rhubarb leaves than most people care to consume.
That actually sounds like I should be careful with how I consume my spinach (or chard or rhubarb), but more for the sake of kidney stones. I wonder if adding milk or other calcium-rich foods helps?
[one search for calcium-rich foods later]
So spinach is apparently rich in calcium? I'm getting really confused now.
No, spinach is only rich in oxalic acid, not in calcium.
No vegetable is really rich in calcium, which is why it is recommended for vegans to take calcium supplements.
After you ingest oxalic acid, it will find calcium in your body, where it is abundant in blood and in the other extracellular fluids (like sodium and chloride, most calcium stays outside the cells).
Too much oxalic acid will form insoluble precipitates of calcium oxalate, i.e. small stones, which may happen to form in undesirable places, from where they cannot be eliminated.
You are completely wrong. There are many quality sources of calcium in plants. For example legumes, nuts, seeds, dark leafy greens including spinach.
Most living beings contain calcium, including all plants, but in quantities that are too small for the needs of anyone who has a calcium-based skeleton, unless you eat daily larger quantities of plants than are practical for most humans (e.g. eating between 1 kg and 2 kg of nuts each day, depending on what kind of nuts they are).
Dark leafy greens are not "quality sources of calcium". One would need to eat several kilograms per day. No human does that. The quantity that needs to be eaten is greater than it could seem from the elemental analysis, because a part of the calcium will be lost during cooking and another part will remain bound in insoluble compounds that will not be absorbed in the intestine. Moreover, eating many kilograms per day of dark leafy greens is guaranteed to cause health problems due to oxalic acid and other substances that are present in excess.
All the studies that I have seen have shown that the vegans who do not take calcium supplements have significantly less amounts of calcium in the body than non-vegans and are more prone to osteoporosis.
This kind of false information about plants that are "quality sources" of substances that are really deficient in all plants is very dangerous for vegans. Any vegan must take up to a dozen supplements to maintain optimal health and those who are not aware of this develop sooner or later various health problems and many go back to a traditional diet, without understanding what they did wrong.
I'd encourage you to go to cronometer.com and put in reasonable servings of the food items they listed (not several kilograms of just one food and washing your hands of the conversation) and seeing what nutrients you end up with. You may be surprised.
Add some nut milks in there, too.
> Any vegan must take up to a dozen supplements to maintain optimal health
This is some bottom tier anti-vegan flame bait. Had I seen this sooner, I wouldn't have even responded.
I happen to be a vegan myself, so it is weird to be accused of "anti-vegan flame bait".
Precisely because I am a vegan and I am aware of the difficulties that I had to surpass when switching to a vegan diet and also of the health problems encountered by some relatives who followed a vegan diet, but without adequate supplementation, because they believed the bad advice that is easy to find on the Internet, I felt the need to reply to these comments that perpetuate myths.
Much of the advice for vegans that can be found on the Internet is completely BS, some of which must have been written by false vegans who have never followed their own advice, while the other suggestions must have been written by rich vegans who do not care whether they pay $5 or $50 for a meal, so they believe that e.g. buying plant protein extracts that are 5 times more expensive than animal meat is a rational food choice.
Now I am happy for switching to a vegan diet, but this change took several years, until I have found adequate methods to ensure the correct daily intake for all nutrients, without paying more for food than before and without gaining weight rapidly.
> they believed the bad advice that is easy to find on the Internet
I'm with you 100% on this. But vegans needing a dozen supplements for optimal health is a different claim than bad internet nutrition advice leading people astray from optimal health.
If you personally feel like you need a dozen supplements even as an informed vegan, I would give you some resources or at least refer you to a dietitian.
A controversial point of my own to some people is that vegans should and often must embrace "processed foods" to hit optimal protein goals. Foods like seitan, textured vegetable protein, tofu, and ultra-processed vegan products have the highest protein density. Yet the fear of processed foods is vogue on social media, and there are plenty of green mommy vegan blogs that will list a cup of lentils as a protein heavy-hitter yet never mention TVP, seitan, etc. There is also plenty of other vegan cringe online like the no-oil vegans who minimize dietary fat.
But that wouldn't mean you can't get sufficient protein on a vegan diet.
Social media and Youtube nutrition advice is horrible for everyone, I think. My own father has been convinced that butter is a superfood by Youtube quacks. They also convinced him to quit his blood pressure meds and that the carnivore diet is so healthy that you can dispose of any cautionary blood panel markers—they simply don't apply to you anymore.
If there are no constraints, then it is easy to get sufficient protein on a vegan diet.
On the other hand, with constraints, which in my case were that I was not willing to spend more money for a vegan-based diet than for a meat-based diet, and that I was not willing to spend more than one hour per day with cooking, cumulated for all the meals of a day, while also wanting to eat mostly, if not exclusively, food cooked by myself from raw ingredients, in order to have complete control over the composition of the food, then it becomes difficult to find a solution for adequate sources of vegetable proteins.
At least in Europe, where I live and where tofu and the like are expensive, I could not find a solution within these constraints for a long time.
You have mentioned seitan, which is just another name for gluten protein extracted from wheat floor. This has been the start of my solution, because gluten is the only vegetable protein that can be extracted at home from a cheap food, without any special equipment and without any chemicals except water.
However, while gluten a.k.a. seitan is cheap, extracting pure gluten from wheat dough requires more time and more water than I was willing to spend. The breakthrough happened when I have realized that I do not have to keep washing the dough until all the starch is removed and I obtain seitan. It is enough to wash for a few minutes until I remove about 75% of the starch.
Then I can bake the dough and I obtain a home-made bread that is highly enriched in proteins, with about a 40% to 50% protein content. Now I make every morning for breakfast such a bread from 500 g of wheat floor (much of which is dumped as starch that does not remain in the baked bread), which provides a little more than a half of my daily protein intake. The rest of the proteins come from various vegetables, including enough legumes for an adequate daily intake of lysine.
The number of supplements that a vegan needs to take depend on the cooking methods that are used. For instance I use some cooking methods that remove some undesirable substances from vegetables, but they also remove some of the necessary nutrients, so I add some supplements to compensate for that.
With other cooking methods, the supplements would not be needed, but then the substances that are not removed by cooking could be harmful.
A few other supplements are optional, but without them it is difficult to compose a daily menu with enough of everything, especially when you have a sedentary work so you must eat little to keep your weight. Such optional supplements allow much more varied daily menus.
Besides the supplements mentioned above that can be omitted, there are supplements that are needed by any vegan, because they either do not exist in plants or they exist in a too small quantity and they either cannot be produced by humans or they can be produced only in a too small quantity, so the studies made on vegans have shown that these substances are present in smaller quantities in the bodies of vegans than in those following a traditional diet.
Among this last kind of supplements are: sodium (table salt is the most ancient nutritional supplement, it is strictly needed by vegans, while with enough animal food it may be not necessary) and calcium, iodine and selenium (some plants that are rich in sulfur, like garlic or onion, may contain some selenium because they extract it from the soil together with the sulfur; however this selenium content is unpredictable because it depends on the soil that happened to be used for cultivation; whoever does not own a chemical analysis laboratory cannot count on a known selenium content, so a supplement is necessary), vitamin B12, creatine and choline and taurine, DHA and EPA omega-3 fatty acids, vitamin D3 and vitamin K2 (the humans make vitamin K2 from the vitamin K1 that is found in green leaves, like they also make vitamin A from the carotene found in plants; however while the efficiency of conversion from carotene to vitamin A is known, so e.g. 100 g of carrots per day are certain to provide enough carotene to cover the need for vitamin A, the efficiency of conversion from K1 to K2 is not known and it is not known whether it is possible to eat enough K1 to eliminate the need for an addition of K2; so until further data the prudent choice is to also take K2).
So the above list counts 12 chemical substances that are needed by all vegans, at least until new studies will determine more accurately if they can be substituted in any way. That does not mean that one needs to have in house 12 different supplements, because many of them can be found combined. For instance I use an oil with DHA+EPA and another oil with D3+K2, which I mix in small quantities with the vegetable oil added to food, while the others are either powders that I mix in small quantities with the table salt, or they are taken in a capsule per day (B12, iodine and selenium).
I’m not vegan so it’s none of my business, but: Sure! if you’re not eating processed foods, and you don’t want to spend hours a day cooking, everyone needs supplements.
Don’t forget that our salt and our flour and our milk and — “raw ingredients” — are supplemented by default with micros the standard diet is deficient in.
If the standard diet was vegan, there’d be taurine in the lentils and we’d be saying a meat-and-dairy diet is impossible without “supplements”.
Which kinds of food are supplemented by default varies from country to country.
While table salt is supplemented by default with iodine almost everywhere, flour and milk are supplemented by default only in a few countries and I consider that this is a very good thing and that they should not have been supplemented by default anywhere.
This forced supplementation is stupid, because it will not achieve an appropriate daily intake, except for a few people who happen to eat a certain amount of floor and milk, while for all the others it will be either too much or too little.
The right way to help the poor is to subsidize the price of vitamins and essential minerals, not to waste them by adding them to a certain kind of food, so that everyone who eats something else will not get them.
And the argument that the government should supplement some food ingredients because people have become too stupid to eat what they should, is even more ridiculous. Even supposing that modern people have become more helpless than their ancestors, so they would not be able to identify or catch anything edible when left alone in a forest, that does not mean that they should not be able to at least have the survival skill of buying the right food from a supermarket.
If it is believed that most people are not capable even of doing that, then they should be educated instead of hoping that the solution is that the state should feed them with food ingredients whose composition they no longer understand.
There certainly are few things more important for any human to know, than how to choose what to eat, in order to not die and to remain healthy.
Okay! I’m not here to tell anyone what to eat, so all I can say is I don’t have an opinion on that.
Do you have any source on that?
Seems quite complicated. I think you set your protein goals too high if you need to be so careful about what you eat. In general, a diverse enough diet that gives you enough calories also gives you enough protein.
There have been many studies that have discredited the older recommendation of a daily intake of protein around 0.8 g/kg. Their conclusions correspond to a recommendation around 1.1 to 1.2 g/kg.
The majority of the people living in developed countries eat 1.4 g/kg of proteins per day or more.
Eating 1.2 to 1.3 g/kg of proteins per day from a balanced diet restricted to vegetable food to which no special methods for separating the proteins from starch or fat are applied, results in over 3000 kcal per day.
If I eat more than around 1800 to 1900 kcal per day, I gain weight very quickly.
Removing about 75% of the starch from my bread removes at least 1000 kcal per day, which brings the total to less than 2000 kcal.
I have experimented twice with eating only around 0.75 g/kg of proteins per day, and after a few weeks the concentration of albumin in my blood has decreased (low albumin levels in blood can be noticed even without a blood analysis, because they cause swollen feet).
While this was a little lower than the old recommended value, it was close enough that bad effects were not expected. Now I always eat at least 1 g/kg of proteins per day, and up to 1.3 g/kg.
The only parts of plants that have high protein content are the seeds. Excluding soy, the other seeds of legumes have at least a 3 to 4 times higher calorie content than corresponding to the protein content, while most cereals have at least a 6 to 8 times higher calorie content than their protein content.
When someone does heavy physical work, so 3000 kcal per day or more is OK, then yes, a diverse vegan diet without any special cooking methods is good enough.
On the other hand, for a sedentary life it is not possible to reduce the energy intake from vegan food to 2000 kcal/day or less, without some special protein extraction method.
> until I have found adequate methods to ensure the correct daily intake for all nutrients,
I use gut feeling, but am mindful of stimulants in the diet, so I mega dose with supplements to get a better idea of what something is doing.
I can highlight the pitfills in the so called double blind placebo gold standard of scientific study on lab animals.
You would have to eat like 5 cups of legumes every day to get enough iron that way if you're a woman. That's almost two pounds. Nuts or greens would be an even higher amount.
They were talking about calcium. But let's plug some iron sources into cronometer:
- 100g lentils: 3.3mg iron, 116cal
- 100g spinach: 2.7mg iron, 23cal
- 100g cooked tofu: 2.7mg iron, 110cal
That's more than 50% of the day's iron recommendation for women in about 250 calories or about 1/8th of the day's calories for the average woman.
Isn't iron in spinach insanely difficult for humans to actually absorb? Quick googling says it's around ~2% of total iron in spinach which we can absorb, so instead of eating 100g to get 2.7g you'd need to eat 5kg of spinach per day.
The topic every vegan refuses to discuss:
Biolavailability
That might be the recommendation for a very small woman.
For men of average size, the recommended daily intake of iron varies between countries, but it can be as large as 14 mg, which would need at least 400 g of cooked lentils per day, according to your list, which corresponds to lentils cooked with an unknown amount of water, so it is difficult to compare it with lentils cooked in different ways, though it seems that these 100 g of cooked lentils correspond to about 40 g of raw lentils with about 60 g of water.
100g is a large volume of loose spinach and dry lentils. That's a hearty entree for a hungry lass once cooked.
That's 100g of cooked lentils and 100g of raw spinach. 100g of raw spinach cooks down to about the size of a deck of cards.
Though I don't see the point of quibbling here. My point only gets stronger and stronger as I add in more foods and calories, even packaged grain foods that are incidentally fortified with iron.
How does cow's milk contain so much calcium when they only eat plants?
In New Zealand where cows are all grass fed, they eat 50 kg of grass each day. Milk is concentrated nutrients.
Correct.
Moreover, the lactating dairy cows which are kept in industrial conditions usually receive mineral supplements with calcium and/or phosphorus, in variable quantities, depending on the composition of their food, to achieve a maximal milk production, unlike the cows which graze freely.
> No vegetable is really rich in calcium, which is why it is recommended for vegans to take calcium supplements
Or just drink German tap water ...
> from where they cannot be eliminated.
Ultrasound breaks them down, a fast non invasive procedure, much like women having an ultrasound scan (and skip over any effect on the foetus). Either way though, you'll end up with shards in your kidneys.
Do you have a source for that? Because while looking up this spinach thing I've come across half a dozen websites, most of them from health institutes that look fairly responsible, stating leafy greens do have calcium. Although in the case of spinach it's barely absorbed, apparently
https://www.myfooddata.com/articles/high-calcium-vegetables....
Having much calcium among vegetables does not mean having enough calcium as a human food.
Your link uses the silly "cup" unit of measure from which it is hard to assess which is the real calcium content.
The right way to show the content of a nutrient in some food is to show how many kilograms or pounds you must eat daily to provide enough of that nutrient.
In the case of calcium the best case that I have seen for various vegetables is that you would need to eat at least 1 kilogram per day, based on the elemental analysis.
However this is far too optimistic, because when cooking the vegetables a part of the calcium may be lost and another part will be bound in insoluble compounds and it will not be absorbed in the intestine after eating.
So a more realistic estimation is that even for the vegetables with the highest content of calcium you might need to eat at least 2 or 3 kg per day.
For nuts and legumes it is impossible to approach even 1 kg of daily intake, as that would include too much energy in starch or fat.
So only leafy vegetables would avoid gaining weight, but eating kilograms per day would be not only unpleasant, but also harmful.
I happen to be a vegan, so I have studied carefully my alternatives and the best for me is to add some calcium phosphate powder to my food, together with the table salt. I use phosphate and not another calcium salt, because even if all seeds and nuts, including all legumes, have large amounts of phosphorus, most of it is contained in phytic acid, which is harmful, so I use preparation methods that remove much of the phytic acid, but they also remove most of the phosphorus, so I compensate that by adding the calcium as calcium phosphate.
Thanks for the information. Upon closer inspection the authors of the link are a nutritionist and an osteopath, so yeah, not quite as reliable as I thought at first.
It's often most convenient to incorporate any fortified nut milk into your diet which is what I recommend to most vegans.
My Costco-brand soy milk gives me 60% of the day's calcium and vitamin D in my morning smoothie.
True, but I prefer to fortify my food myself, because this is not only cheaper but it also allows me to have complete certainty about the composition of the food.
Fortified food is a reasonable solution, which trades off price for convenience, so whether it is chosen or not depends on personal preferences.
do you aim for 500-700 mg/daily?
There’s not much you can do since adding chalk (which used to be common for both spinach and rhubarb) just creates the oxalate in the pan instead of your body and you can’t remove it. But cooking with lots of water (very short in the case of spinach) and throwing out the water does help to reduce the amount of oxalic acid.
> just creates the oxalate in the pan instead of your body and you can’t remove it
If that stops it from being digested and entering my blood stream that would still help though, no?
I'm just confused at how spinach can be both a calcium-rich food and rich in a chemical that extracts calcium from the blood.
Taro leaves (rourou in Fijian) are cooked for a long time (for a vegetable) in order to break down the oxalic acid.
Probably in small doses (like what our ancestors 20000 years ago probably eat when they couldn't find better food) it won't do too much damage. Cooking will also remove some oxalates.
Overall these are plants defense mechanisms. We know they work well as anti bug measures, ruminants have more complex digestive systems to break them down; it's not always clear what prolonged use on humans will cause.
Carnivores advocate against eating oxalates rich food and when you start a diet with no oxalates you will experience some weird symptoms, you can read about oxalates dumping: https://www.doctorkiltz.com/oxalate-dumping
There are plenty of people with "auto immune incurable" diseases who stopped eating vegetables and were relieved of their symptoms.
I personally started experiencing problems after 10 years of a 95% vegan diet and went carnivore, getting rid of a number of weird health issues I couldn't explain.
> I personally started experiencing problems after 10 years of a 95% vegan diet and went carnivore, getting rid of a number of weird health issues I couldn't explain.
Have you tried just eating many different things in moderation? Fiber has been repeatedly shown to decrease rates of cardiovascular disease, cancer, and all cause mortality. It’s kind of silly to “go carnivore” and use your resulting feelings as a base measurement of success after being vegan. Especially considering many of the benefits of fiber are longer term.
E.g. If you ate a diet of 100% candy bars then switched to vegan or “carnivore”, of course you would “feel better” and your “weird health issues” might go away, but that doesn’t mean either of those diets is the optimal diet for you. They are just better than eating 100% candy bars…
Being “carnivore” is a more foolproof choice.
Following an 100% vegan diet in a healthy way requires more care in choosing some appropriate nutritional supplements and in planning what you eat than for any other kind of diet.
I am vegan and I enjoy it, but I would not recommend this for everyone, because there is no doubt that it would be too tedious for most people, who prefer to eat in a more spontaneous way, without needing to ponder whether what they happen to eat has an adequate nutritional content, taking into account what else they had eaten that day.
I'm starting to have some major doubts about how much you've informed yourself on the topic here when you say "carnivore" is more foolproof than a much less restrictive diet like a plant-based diet.
You can see this just by plugging 2000 calories of meat in Cronometer and viewing the nutrition holes. Even 2000 calories of bagels gives you a wider assortment of nutrients than 2000 calories of beef.
Animals are intermediaries which process low bioavailability foods and turn into a nutrient highly bioavailable source.
Bioavailability is something vegans practically refuse to acknowledge let alone discuss.
This is a popular talking point among carnivore charlatans on social media, but can you show me any meta analysis or randomized controlled trials where they found adverse health effects when humans consume whole plant foods high in oxalates such as leafy greens, beans or whole grains?
I know the charlatans won't. We'll just get petri dish and rat studies but mostly hand-waving narratives.
> Overall these are plants defense mechanisms
This doesn't mean anything. Of the "anti"-nutrients that survive basic cooking, most of them show improved health outcomes in humans: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7600777/
Though I'm not sure how people find it convincing on a rhetorical level. If these "defense chemicals" are so bad, then over what time period are they supposed to hurt us? 100 years? Because the overwhelming balance of evidence only shows improved health outcomes with the consumption of fruit and vegetables, especially the scary ones like dark leafy greens and legumes.
This just sounds like the "eek, a chemical in my food!" rebranded for the 2020s.
Finally, to circle back to the topic at hand, I just wouldn't center my diet around rhubarb leaves. They're about as enticing as celery leaves.
Yeah oxalic acid plus calcium is calcium oxalate, aka the most common form of kidney stones. Some people also seem to be sensitive to oxalates for whatever reason, and find improvements in health when broadly removing sources from their diets.
The trick is to bind the oxalates before they get absorbed in the body and require removal. So making things like traditional creamed spinach (or other things like turnip or collard greens) removes the potential hazard from chronic intake.
Incidentally the whey portion of dairy also seems to chelate the form of vitamin B12 found in plants, making it much more bioavailable. The casein portion of dairy doesn’t seem to have this same effect.
It’s fascinating to see how the preparation for so many traditional foods basically mitigates the sources of low level toxicity issues while increasing nutrient update, when as a “modern” person I tend to look at it from the perspective of taste.
> Oxalic acid is poisonous?
If you eat too much of it, yes. All Oxalis leaves are edible but only in the correct (small) dose.
Don't downplay oxalic acid.
There are many things which have it, particularly in the wild edible category, and those who have dietary restrictions which limit them to mostly such foods have serious consequences from the presence of it.
I know first hand it can do serious harm.
Do not downplay it.
This is still confusing to me. Does it mean that despite the ubiquity of the warnings, I can actually cook and consume rhubarb leaves like spinach?
The article mentions the content is 500mg of oxalic acid / 100g and says the deadly dose is at 15 - 30g. That makes for 3-6kg of rhubarb leaves. Quite a serving, if you ask me.
In the original British understatement:
> Since a lethal dose of oxalic acid is somewhere between 15 and 30 grams, you’d have to eat several pounds of rhubarb leaves at a sitting to reach a toxic oxalic acid level, which is a lot more rhubarb leaves than most people care to consume.
That’s more oxalic acid than I’d have guessed.
Treating bees for varroa more takes about 25g of oxalic acid per box of bees. I’d kind of hoped the leaves might have more oxalic, then I could have tried putting rhubarb leaves in there instead of battling fumes, glycerine and strips of paper.
Some beekeepers where I live put strips of rhubarb stalks in the hives to treat varoa. Not sure how effevtive it is though.
I've lived in fear of rhubarb leaves for 40 years since my Mum warned me about them. We used to grow rhubarb in our garden in England, which I loved, but was terrified of one day being poisoned by the leaves. Took me this long to find out I really didn't have anything to be afraid of, thank you.
That is why so many rhubarb dishes (rhubarb pies, and desserts) are so often served with ice cream and vanilla sauce based on milk products.
The calcium in those neutralize any potential issues of the oxalic acid.
This doesn't make sense to me. 200g of cooked rhubarb already has almost 400mg of calcium which is almost half of the 1000mg daily US recommendation and more than half of the 700mg daily UK recommendation.
Thinking dairy is the only source of calcium is meme-nutrition like eating bananas for potassium especially when talking about a food already high in calcium.
Do you know why doesn't the Oxalic acid bind with the calcium of the Rhubarb, and turns into a problem if consumed? Is there enough calcium to bind with the Oxalic acid? Is the calcium in Rhubarb bioavailable?
Genuine questions here, because as I understand, many of the nutricional fact sheets are calculated after the food is broken down and passed though a mass spectrometer.
The calcium in Rhubarb is Calcium Oxalate, which is not likely to be highly bioavailable. Not all calcium is equal in this case.
I think more likely it's because they taste delicious together
I would be interested to see a source for the claim that milk products are paired with rhubarb for that reason.
At least in Finland this is common knowledge and pretty much every house has rhubarb growing in the yard somewhere.
I'm living in Finland, and that is where I got that knowledge from. So yes, unfortunately my source is also empirical knowledge.
But knowing how certain African cultures learned to neutralize Cassava, and that knowledge passed through generations without knowing the reason why, I learned to not fully dismiss these kinds of knowledge...
Interesting. I'm in New Zealand and hadn't come across this. Being a commonwealth country makes me suspect it's not common knowledge in England either. Or has perhaps as you mention the reasons have been lost over time.
Thank you for your reply.
This is an enjoyable article from 2017 about the role of Edinburgh in the history of rhubarb in the UK. (I think I may even have originally discovered it on HN). Abstract:
Rhubarb was grown and used throughout China for thousands of years. It then found its way to St Petersburg where the Romanovs developed a flourishing trade in the plant to the rest of Europe. James Mounsey, a physician to the Tsar, brought back seeds from Russia to Scotland at considerable risk to himself. He passed some of the seeds to Alexander Dick and John Hope. Both these physicians then grew rhubarb at Prestonfield and the Botanic Garden (both in Edinburgh), respectively. Eventually rhubarb, in the form of Gregory’s powder, became a common and popular medicine throughout the UK.
[PDF] https://www.rcpe.ac.uk/sites/default/files/jrcpe_47_1_lee.pd...
I was actually able to visit the annual Rhubarb festival down in Wetherby and it was much more interesting than expected. In addition to learning about the unusual growing method, it was also surprising the number of rhubarb products for sale (like enough to fill an entire market).
My biggest take-away was that Slingbys Rhubarb Gin is delicious!
According to my father, "rhubarb" is what the extras say in crowd scenes in TV and film. They mumble, "rhubarb, rhubarb, rhubarb" and it gives the impression of muted, indistinct background conversations.
By the same token, the choral singer who forgets the lyrics during a performance can sing "watermelon, watermelon" until she gets to a place where she recalls the words. The philosophy is that, as long as you get a convincing vowel in there, people will believe anything you sing.
There’s a whole film about ‘Rhubarb’, prompted in part, I think, by that premise.
Also "peas and carrots, peas and carrots."
Source: was married to a professional actor; saw this used on sets many times.
Belgian endive is another vegetable grown in the dark. Vertical farming, no LEDs needed, harvest in 25 days: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jPr06HDnttU
But first the crop needs a whole season in the sun. You grow normal green endive, pull the whole plant, chop the head, then you’re growing the second flush in the dark from the root mass. Effectively using all the stored energy from the root for one final round of leaf production, but no light prevents photosynthesis and you get Belgian endive.
Just like with rhubarb.
Similar. Rhubarb is perennial. You're forcing the first flush of growth for the year but you can't force it all season. Later harvests will look different. Still edible, but you're never pulling the entire plant out of the ground with rhubarb like you have to do for Belgian endive.
Traditional recipe https://www.meilleurduchef.com/en/recipe/endive-ham-gratin.h...
How do you like to eat rhubarb? I mostly know it from rhubarb pie
The classic is rhubarb crumble, a baked dessert typically eaten with custard. It's delightfully sweet and sour, a favourite of mine as a kid.
I grew up eating the Rhubarb plant by tipping the root side (stem?) In sugar and just eating it like that. It's very sour like that, which as a kid I loved.
Same here - the sugar offsets the sourness just enough. Is it a Polish/Eastern European thing?
It's done in Ireland too, and I would assume anywhere rhubarb is grown, given it's the one of the most trivial ways to turn it into a treat.
I don't think so, that's a thing in England too.
Rhubarb pie. Rhubarb cake. Rhubarb bread. Rhubarb cookies. Rhubarb crisp/crumble/grunt. Rhubarb jam. Rhubarb chutney. Stewed rhubarb (used anywhere you'd use applesauce including standalone in a bowl, with plain yogurt, swirled into rice pudding, or baked over pork chops). Raw rhubarb dipped in sugar.
We have a very productive rhubarb patch. Right beside the zucchini patch.
I just stew it and then eat it with custard.
Chop it into pieces, put it in a pan with some sugar and possible a little bit of water. Heat it up and the sugar should help draw out some liquid and cook it until the pieces become soft or disintegrate. Takes about 5-10 minutes.
In The Netherlands ate Rhubarb for dinner. Cooked with crumbled rusk (beschuit [0]) mixed with sugar and eaten with cooked potatoes. And some meat (e.g. steak or sausage).
The crumbled rusk is meant to give the cooked rhubarb a thicker structure and the sugar is meant to counter the sourness.
Quite delicious imho.
———
[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rusk#Netherlands_and_Belgium...
In Germany it's eaten either as a pie - which is usually quite dry and with crumble or meringue on top [0] - or as a compote.
[0] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhabarberkuchen#/media/Datei:R...
Since it is quite sour and fresh, apart from sweet dishes like pie or crumble, it pairs quite well with heavy meat dishes like venison. Basically you make a glaze with the rhubarb and can use the stems as a garnish/veggie side. Still needs quite a bit of sugar to tone down the sourness, but it is great.
In general you can often use it as an alternative for lemon zest or juice. I'd say though that it is one of those veggies you buy when it grows locally. I love rhubarb, but if you have to import it, there is probably a better local alternative.
I recently learned of, and attempted, an Iranian savory stew of beans, herbs, and rhubarb. I enjoyed it!
https://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/1023153-khoresh-rivas-sa...
Also rhubarb jam.
Pie, jam, crumble, stewed over vanilla ice cream and (best of all) Slingsbury Rhubarb Gin!
It needs a lot of sugar to become palatable.
Stewed, with Greek yoghurt and honey.
I spontaneously became allergic to rhubarb in my teens. Damn shame. It was my favorite pie!
If it's been more than a decade get tested to see if it's gone.
I had a huge list of allergies developed in my late teens but now they're gone after a couple decades, due to natural age related changes in biochemistry according to the docs.
White asparagus is similarly grown in the dark.
This kind of sounds like torture, even though it's directed at plants rather than animals or other humans...
I live in Spain but I had the chance to travel to northern Europe dozens of times, where I learned to love rhubarb.
I really would love rhubarb to grow here but it is almost impossible to find, even in big cities.
my wife got a patch growing in the back garden after a few failed attempts now we have lots, it's also readily available in supermarkets here in the UK. https://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/rhubarb-crumble
Very common in France if you ever drive by. Usually sold as a small 30cm^3 plant which will probably grown up to 1.5m in diameter the first year. I used to have 7 in 12m2. It’s also possible to grow from seeds, which you can buy online. It will require some dedication.
IME a very easy perennial, if you can prevent drought. Plant and forget. Like artichokes.
From what I know, not everywhere in France but in the north. It was impossible to me to find this month in Occitane, at least.
Much sweeter sounds suspicious. I love ordinary rhubarb but add baking soda to bind much of the acid and then still lots of sugar.
I’ve read one needs to be careful with that because the resulting oxalate isn’t healthy (increases kidney stone risk, for example).
Massive kudos to the BBC, for the editorial discipline required here to avoid "[…] is having its moment in the sun"
Oxalate sticks.
Remember: never rub another man's rhubarbs.
I was also thinking of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VC1a48_mCVM
reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_FBQetJqAwk
Have you ever danced with the Devil in the pale moonlight?
Batman haters, here.