If the world goes into a food crisis what odd foods would people have difficulty to eat?

It’ll be rice and potatoes for everyone.

It would depend on who you are, where you are and how your grandmother cooked.

There are no edible food sources that someone, somewhere, doesn’t eat and relish.

My fluther name is a Native American word meaning Bark Eater. Want to try that?

@Adirondackwannabe Only the boiled tea form, to keep away the scurvy.

Depending on what you mean by “food crisis”, I’m going to guess that the problem would be with eating “meals”. And it’s not that people would have difficulty in eating them, but in finding them.

But I think we’d have to be pretty far gone as a civilization for that to happen, since we eat nearly everything that grows.

@talljasperman That might be pushing it. :)

. . . since we eat nearly everything that grows.

I think that’s a bit of an extravagant statement, @CWOTUS. I find several sources that indicate we eat a very small portion of what would be edible to us—by which I mean vegetation that we can digest and that won’t harm us. Here’s one estimate:

* Of the 4 percent of the 250 000 to 300 000 known edible plant species, only 150 to 200 are used by humans. Only three – rice, maize and wheat – contribute nearly 60 percent of calories and proteins obtained by humans from plants. [ source ]

The aboriginal people in Australia eat stuff that it would be very difficult for me to stomach! Anything from file snakes, green ants and witchity grubs to plums that are so sour you think your lips are going to get whip lash! But that said, I have tasted most of those things cooked up in stews and it tastes not too bad with bush tomato chutney on the side!

So I am guessing we would adapt.

I’d draw the line at dogs, cats, horses, mules, etc. I’d go vegan before eating them. Irrational? Yeah, I guess it is. But taste isn’t a rational issue to begin with. I know tons of edible plants and can identify which fungi are safe to eat without a spore print. So as long as some bigger, badder warlord didn’t kill me for the food I had gathered, I think I could adapt.

@ETpro I draw the line at anything that I can befriend…Also anything that asks me not to eat it.

I guess it was kind of pushing the bounds of fact, @Jeruba. However, aside from the cultivated foods you mention, a huge proportion of the weeds that grow in our lawns, gardens and wooded areas are, in fact, edible. Some of them are even tasty. I had the pleasure of following Euell Gibbons around a Maine island in my youth and learning that at first hand. Not that I’ve followed up on the lesson all that much, and I do admit that most of my food nowadays comes from Stop and Shop.

If our survivalist trainer jelly ever comes back, as he does from time to time, he could back up this claim. But yeah, “nearly everything that grows” is… out there. I guess we don’t eat many trees. In my defense I was thinking fauna more than flora at that point. And that’s true enough, considering that we eat snakes, scorpions, grubs, all kinds of crustaceans and molluscs… and even things that don’t appear to be that appetizing, such as eggs, for example.

@CWOTUS Whoever first cracked open a live oyster and thought, “My, that looks good. I think I’ll eat it.” was one hungry MF. And a MF that has my undying gratitude. Despite all appearances to the contrary, they were right. Raw oysters are delicious.

I would argue that we are already in the midst of a food crisis because we have accepted that things that are not food are ok to put into food. The odd things we have difficulty eating include high fructose corn syrup, MSG, trans-fats, food dyes, and many of the other happy little chemicals you’ll see if you read past the first three ingredients on the label.

Call me a species-ist, but I’ll eat anything before I eat a primate, and I’ll eat another primate before I die of starvation.

I think insects are a much understated source of nutrients. They breed quickly, need little space and resources, and don’t taste of much. We could Soylent Green the hell out of them. Make TIP (Textured insect protein) the next big thing.

Well, that would be the end of picky eaters. After a few days I imagine you’d eat anything that you even thought might contain nutrients.

You’d eat anything that made you feel full and didn’t kill you, whether it contained nutrients or not. That’s what plenty of people in the world are doing right this minute.

Speaking of eating insects… this video was part of a special I saw and it made me gag. I think I would have a really hard time with weird protein sources. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DQeyjgSUlrk

Not if you were literally starving @cazzie….

@cazzie I guess I’d survive just fine. Those squita-burgers looked tasty to me.