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A street snack that has baffled botanists

atlasobscura.com

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Re: A street snack that has baffled botanists

#111

Post by mPReDiToR »

daxfohl wrote: post #89

> "We are professors, busy between teaching and administrative work, so we rely on existing literature to come to conclusions" Is this really what academia is like?

In the Foundation series by Isaac Asimov this exact meme is lampooned.

A character describes how they went to the library, read all the old books, wrote a paper and called it new research.

Dr Asimov may have seen the bleak future of academia, what with it being his other trade.

Mayhap we need more Dr Indiana Jones types with tenure?

Re: A street snack that has baffled botanists

#112

Post by mPReDiToR »

a_bonobo wrote: post #20

Isn't it a bit... terrifying to buy and eat food, when nobody wants to tell you what that food actually is??

Cut Me Own Throat Dibbler made an entire business of selling "meat" pies.

On several continents. In differing time periods.

People eat "kebab" "gyro" or whatever the local term is for doner (suspiciously has a single n, shouldn't be pronounced the way it is) meat in a pitta regularly after large quantities of alcohol, whereas they eschew the things when sober.

Re: A street snack that has baffled botanists

#113

Post by jorams »

wombatmobile wrote: post #60
rsynnott wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure what your point is; the title is an entirely accurate summary of the content of the article.

> I'm not sure what your point is; the title is an entirely accurate summary of the content of the article. You may not have seen this before, but that doesn't mean it is "mysterious". Do you find Coke or KFC "mysterious"? Those are snack foods with trade secret recipes. Your story is about something similar. A simple google search will take you to this youtube video, posted in 2015. Read the comments to dispel the "…

The comments don't mention anything that isn't in the article.

Re: A street snack that has baffled botanists

#114

Post by convery »

singularity2001 wrote: post #110

meta: how can atlasobscura.com operate legally in Europe when the only cookie option is 'confirm'?

In the same way popups saying "by continuing to view this site you consent to cookies" do? The user is informed and the cookie is(/should be) only set once they click a link / button / scroll past the initial view, which means they have taken an 'informed' action regarding cookies.

Re: A street snack that has baffled botanists

#115

Post by NavinF »

wombatmobile wrote: post #84
a_bonobo wrote: post #20

Isn't it a bit... terrifying to buy and eat food, when nobody wants to tell you what that food actually is??

Do you feel that way when you walk into a Subway? https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jun/22/subway-sandw...

Does cooked and processed food normally contain intact DNA that can be sequenced? Seems like those researchers suck at their job if they failed to figure out what the tuna is made of and still insist on drawing a conclusion based on their lack of success.

Re: A street snack that has baffled botanists

#116

Post by mandeville »

I have a hypothesis. What if this were agave root, but bathed/stored in something that broke down the cellulose. This would give a second reason they cut only an outside layer, in addition to being against the grain. Also it would explain the secrecy as the chemicals might be harmful.

Re: A street snack that has baffled botanists

#117

Post by stinos »

daxfohl wrote: post #89

> "We are professors, busy between teaching and administrative work, so we rely on existing literature to come to conclusions" Is this really what academia is like?

Depends, mainly because 'academia' is far too broad of a term. For starters not all professors teach the same amount of hours (don't know all rules across all universities but there might very well be professors who do not teach at all but instead have PhD students do it, or post-docs). Professors which have anough funding can hire people for administrative work; though they'd still have to take care of getting funding usually whih is also a huge time sink. In some fields professors actually do practical work themselves, or are very close to it. Not all fields can realy on the same amount of literature-only studies. In some fields with novel research there might not even be literature to use. And so on.

Re: A street snack that has baffled botanists

#118

Post by chidg »

barkha2803 wrote: post #82
nathanvanfleet wrote: post #23

I read this article elsewhere. I don't quite get why it says no one know's, then it's genetically and visually matched to a type of agave, and then they go back to not knowing? It seems some of the counter argument is assuming that "Agave" are all the same when specific types will have specific traits. Otherwise it's an interesting read.

Hi. I am the author of this article :) To sum up, most research as of now points to Agave but botanists who did the DNA barcoding don't want to commit to Agave. For two reasons: 1) It is 89% close to Agave, the Sisalana variety but 11% is open to doubts and research. 2)The Agave expert, who tried to make a beverage out of it and has worked on it for years, says it's can't be agave. He has eaten both the snack, as wel…

Hi, I appreciated your article. Do you know when Agave was introduced to India? Perhaps a timeline may assist with determining the identity of the food, since Agaves are from central and South America and were presumably brought to India sometime in the past few hundred years. Is this a food item that has a long tradition?

Small note of feedback since I couldn't find a way to comment on the Atlas Obscura site. Species names are conventionally written with the specific epithet entirely in lower case, like 'Genus species'. In the article, you have frequently capitalised the specific epithet. This is a small issue but made the article quite hard to read for a details-focused botanist such as myself.

Re: A street snack that has baffled botanists

#119

Post by andybak »

mPReDiToR wrote: post #112
a_bonobo wrote: post #20

Isn't it a bit... terrifying to buy and eat food, when nobody wants to tell you what that food actually is??

Cut Me Own Throat Dibbler made an entire business of selling "meat" pies. On several continents. In differing time periods. People eat "kebab" "gyro" or whatever the local term is for doner (suspiciously has a single n, shouldn't be pronounced the way it is) meat in a pitta regularly after large quantities of alcohol, whereas they eschew the things when sober.

I'll eat shawarma, gyros any time day or night. Food of the gods.

UK style doner I'm a little more circumspect about but that's mainly because of processing rather than provence.

Re: A street snack that has baffled botanists

#120

Post by amelius »

dandelany wrote: post #105
girishso wrote: post #10

I have eaten it many times, vendors say it's a root. But the last time I ate it, it was little more fibrous and hard and I ate little more than the usual. For the next couple of days my tongue was itching and I had little difficulty speaking. Then I googled it and read somewhere that it's not edible. It's surprising experts don't know what the thing is given it's so commonly available.

Yikes. Your symptoms were likely caused by calcium oxalate raphides, little mineral needles present in raw agave (and several other plants). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raphide

Your linked article says at the bottom that these things are also present in spinach, beets and pineapple.
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