Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Jackfruit could save millions from starvation

businessinsider.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 121 posts

Re: Jackfruit could save millions from starvation

#111

Post by shameerc »

titomc wrote: post #75

I am from the Kerala state in India where this fruit is in abundance. My home has 2 of those big trees. About the pulled pork reference , I have had pulled pork in Arizona Phoenix where I work now. The unripe jackfruit do not taste like that. Just an "unripe" taste that's all. Unripe fruit has lot of milky sticky liquid oozing from the hives inside the fruit. In its unripe form , its used for frying , something like…

I'm also from Kerala and completely agree with this. Jackfruit wood is the preferred wood for carpentry when Teak wood is not available/affordable.

Another important fact is, we don't use any fertilizer to grow Jackfruits. It's totally healthy and chemical free.

Re: Jackfruit could save millions from starvation

#112

Post by jpatokal »

plaguuuuuu wrote: post #106
angerman wrote: post #91

There are three very similar fruits I've met so far: - Durian (looks similar to Jackfruit, a little rounder, and spikier), which is very popular in Malaysia and Singapore, and has a very strong smell. It has a more creamy consistency, and tastes quite different from jackfruit. People say, it's an acquired taste. Some love it, some hate it with passion. - Jackfruit, I got to know this first in Viet Nam, but it can als…

Jackfruit is widely eaten in Asia. It's delicious and ... yeah, it's a fucking fruit, so it could technically feed hungry people. For the record, it doesn't take like pulled pork... in any respect whatsoever... Durian - good luck getting anyone to eat the bloody thing. I love it, but it's an acquired taste.

The unripe fruit tastes very different from the ripe fruit. It's common in Indonesia as well, where gudeg (unripe jackfruit curry) is the unofficial dish of Yogyakarta:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gudeg

Re: Jackfruit could save millions from starvation

#113

Post by loco5niner »

Houshalter wrote: post #68
yardie wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a movie from a decade ago called "Life and Debt." It explores how international loans and aid have actually suppressed the local economies of the countries they tried to help. For example, chicken breast meat is very popular in the western world. Once they remove the white meat where does the rest of it go. What the producers can't sell domestically in the US or Canada they export to developing countries at…

Well of course. Any attempt at helping one person hurts another person. If you give someone a free house, you put a builder out of work. If you give someone free food, you put a farmer out of work. But I don't think it's a zero-sum game. I think the total utility generated by free food is worse than the disutility of the farmer losing his business. Now those people have money to spend on other things that they would…

But in the case of the farmer losing his 'farm', you would need to continue supplying free food for the lifetime of the farmer to truly replace him.

Re: Jackfruit could save millions from starvation

#114

Post by shas3 »

lake99 wrote: post #110
shas3 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do you see the same thing happening in India, or are they managing to preserve local tradition alongside the mainstream? It is complex! Some dialects are dying out, but the regions seem to be clustering around the 22 'scheduled languages'. In Karnataka (population ~ 60 million) for example, there are at least 4 dialects of Kannada. With the proliferation of social media, TV, and cinema, two things are happening: (1…

> But the masses never 'spoke' Sanskrit, it was more of a formalized language for literature and administration. That's a strange thing to say. Panini formalized it, but the language was in widespread use for a long time before that, quite like Latin and classical Greek were. Why else would people start using it for literature and administration? Of course, using it for these two purposes gave it a certain degree of…

The common people spoke 'Prakrit's and Dravidian languages, basically ancestors of modern languages. The word 'sanskrit' itself comes from the same root as 'samskara'. One of the meanings of 'samskara' is 'purification (rite)'. In all likelihood, only Brahmins and other scholars 'spoke' Sanskrit [1]. It is also likely that all Sanskrit speakers were bilingual. This exclusivity of Sanskrit learning is also one of the likely reasons why Buddhist teachings are in Prakrits (dharma = dhamma, etc.).

[1] https://books.google.com/books?id=QYxpvZLg4hAC&pg=PA19&dq=sa...

Re: Jackfruit could save millions from starvation

#115

Post by lake99 »

shas3 wrote: post #114
lake99 wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But the masses never 'spoke' Sanskrit, it was more of a formalized language for literature and administration. That's a strange thing to say. Panini formalized it, but the language was in widespread use for a long time before that, quite like Latin and classical Greek were. Why else would people start using it for literature and administration? Of course, using it for these two purposes gave it a certain degree of…

The common people spoke 'Prakrit's and Dravidian languages, basically ancestors of modern languages. The word 'sanskrit' itself comes from the same root as 'samskara'. One of the meanings of 'samskara' is 'purification (rite)'. In all likelihood, only Brahmins and other scholars 'spoke' Sanskrit [1]. It is also likely that all Sanskrit speakers were bilingual. This exclusivity of Sanskrit learning is also one of the…

Same book page 21:

"But there are evidences to show that to all intents and purposes, Sanskrit was a living language and view that it was spoken by at least a large section of the people."

The author then writes a more nuanced answer.

> This exclusivity of Sanskrit learning is also one of the likely reasons why Buddhist teachings are in Prakrits (dharma = dhamma, etc.).

This, while possibly true, is misleading in this context. All it means is that Sanskrit was on its way out by that time period, and in that region. It does not square with your previous claim that Sanskrit was never spoken by the masses.

As another factor of note, we are talking about a large geographic region and a large time period. I am not even sure what qualifies as "Prakrit". If it just means "vernacular", it would still qualify as Sanskrit. As you mentioned previously, Kannada has at least four dialects. Raichur Kannada sounds quite different from the Kannada of textbooks or news reports. But it's still considered Kannada. Can we use a similar approach to consider Prakrit as just a dialect of Sanskrit? I don't know. I am neither a linguist, nor a Sanskrit historian.

Re: Jackfruit could save millions from starvation

#116

Post by shas3 »

lake99 wrote: post #115
shas3 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The common people spoke 'Prakrit's and Dravidian languages, basically ancestors of modern languages. The word 'sanskrit' itself comes from the same root as 'samskara'. One of the meanings of 'samskara' is 'purification (rite)'. In all likelihood, only Brahmins and other scholars 'spoke' Sanskrit [1]. It is also likely that all Sanskrit speakers were bilingual. This exclusivity of Sanskrit learning is also one of the…

Same book page 21: "But there are evidences to show that to all intents and purposes, Sanskrit was a living language and view that it was spoken by at least a large section of the people." The author then writes a more nuanced answer. > This exclusivity of Sanskrit learning is also one of the likely reasons why Buddhist teachings are in Prakrits (dharma = dhamma, etc.). This, while possibly true, is misleading in thi…

Prakrit is not one language. I was careful to use it as 'Prakrits'. Given the formality of Sanskrit, I seriously doubt Prakrits can be considered its dialects. In fact, the relationship probably goes the other way- Sanskrit is a formalized version of the Prakrits that people spoke. In fact, the names are descriptive and are indicative of the relationship: Prakrit has the same root as 'prakriti' = 'nature', Sanskrit means 'refined'.

Sanskrit and Prakrits are different enough to not be dialects. It is perhaps a relationship more like literary Kannada and Tulu, which are wholly different languages with many similarities. (A relationship also shared by (Kannada, Tamil, Tulu, Telugu, Malayalam) and (Oriya, Bengali, Gujarati, Marathi) which are all wholly different languages belonging to two families (Dravidian former, Indo-Aryan latter), with similar roots, but do not share a 'dialect' relationship between each other or with any other extant languages)

Buddhism definitely had egalitarian pan-caste aspirations compared to Vedic doctrine. It is only natural that Buddha and others preached in colloquial languages, rather than literary. It is true at the same time, that later Buddhist scholars wrote many works in literary Sanskrit.

Edit: Also, I did not claim that Brahmins were not numerous. They were probably the same percentage of the population as today, which is about 5-10%, which is still a 'large section', but far from the majority.

Re: Jackfruit could save millions from starvation

#117

Post by msandford »

thedufer wrote: post #87
msandford wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I guess it depends on how you define uninhabited - if I've got a 50,000 acre ranch with a 2800 sq ft house on it, most people are going to call the bulk of that land uninhabited. Okay, but then then suburbs are uninhabited too. The neighborhood I'm in has 1500-2000 sqft houses on 10ksqft lots. That's 80-85% uninhabited, especially once you start to add up the amount of extra land for streets, ditches, canals, parks…

50,000 acres is 2 billion sq ft, for a house:land ratio of 1:1 million. The 1:10 in the suburbs is a completely different matter.

That's a silly comparison to make. 50k acres is 80 square miles, a square nearly 9 miles long on each side. At that point you're going to have dozens of people living either on that land or nearby.

Here's an agricultural company that owns 10 combines and some 20+ other trucks and they claim to harvest 1500 acres a day. If you've got a 50k acre farm you're talking spending a full month with those folks harvesting your crop. So that's probably 2-3 dozen people. http://www.frederickharvesting.com/equipment.html

Re: Jackfruit could save millions from starvation

#118

Post by lake99 »

shas3 wrote: post #116
lake99 wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same book page 21: "But there are evidences to show that to all intents and purposes, Sanskrit was a living language and view that it was spoken by at least a large section of the people." The author then writes a more nuanced answer. > This exclusivity of Sanskrit learning is also one of the likely reasons why Buddhist teachings are in Prakrits (dharma = dhamma, etc.). This, while possibly true, is misleading in thi…

Prakrit is not one language. I was careful to use it as 'Prakrits'. Given the formality of Sanskrit, I seriously doubt Prakrits can be considered its dialects. In fact, the relationship probably goes the other way- Sanskrit is a formalized version of the Prakrits that people spoke. In fact, the names are descriptive and are indicative of the relationship: Prakrit has the same root as 'prakriti' = 'nature', Sanskrit m…

> Sanskrit is a formalized version of the Prakrits that people spoke.

Panini, and to some extent, his near-contemporaries formalized Sanskrit. It wasn't formalized before that. Vedic Sanskrit was never formalized. Moreover, the book you cited says, "there are many sutras in the Astadhyayi of Panini which are meaningless unless they have any reference to a living speech".

> Sanskrit and Prakrits are different enough to not be dialects.

From the book, "It has been said in Bharata's Natyashastra that Prakrit and Sanskrit are different branches of one and the same language. In the earliest known forms of Prakrit, there are passages which can easily be translated into Sanskrit by the application of simple phonetic rules."

I agree with what you wrote about Buddha's choice of language.

But my point throughout is that there has to have been a time and a place where what was then considered Sanskrit was spoken by the masses. I'd find it hard to conceive of a situation where the educated classes created a dialect/language for themselves, and only this dialect could carry the name "Sanskrit".

Re: Jackfruit could save millions from starvation

#119

Post by theekruger »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #9

I live in Florida, and sometimes as I drive throughout the state and see the hundreds and hundreds (though it may be thousands) of oranges alongside the road I wonder just how many go to waste that could be sent to places in need, and then I wonder if there's other places that do the same... Most of the United States is uninhabited, so I always wonder how much vegetation is just sitting there that could feed others.…

You would love a project I am working on, one that has consumed the better part of the last 2 years.

Food is the tip of the iceberg, many problems we face today actually have painfully simple solutions. Food waste for instance which is at 1.3B tons for stuff before super markets feeds all the hungry people needed.

Proper management of surplus resources (in this case food) can solve a lot of problems. But we would need a transparent, robust, and powerful system to make it profitable and beneficial for people.

My project is called Woeigo, the name is an acronym for what on earth is going on.

Shameless Plug: If you want to get involved in anyway, please let me know :) We help people make a (positive) difference, simply.

chris@woeigo.com

Or, if you feel like knowing where your donation dollars go and how you can do the most good with the least amount of time... Then join our wait list. We are still testing with NFP's and small user groups at the moment to make things better before we open up completely.

Post reply on HN