Acorns

Friends, I just ate an Acorn.

I was outside on Huntington's beautiful campus and the ground beneath my feat was littered with acorns, or as I like to call them, "nature's tootsie rolls." I thought to myself "If I was a squirrel, I would be so pumped right now. There is food everywhere!" And then I wondered why squirrels get all the easy breaks. I want copious amounts of free snacks whenever I walk past Beth Hale's apartment, and since I'm a white man in America I am used to getting what I want.

So I put one in my mouth and tried to keep walking all nonchalantly. Because if anyone saw me doing it I wouldn't want to look too chalant. I crack it open with my teeth and go after the "meat" inside. And you know what I learned?

I learned that there is a reason man does not eat acorns. Evolutionary psychology states that if something tastes like a sweaty guy peed in a shell and threw it in the mud, you should not eat that thing (Ohman, Mineka, 2001).

After spitting for a while a resolved that if this "nut" or "devil-spawn" was not poisonous I would master its ways and learn to enjoy it so I could impress my friends and make them jealous as I effortlessly snacked on nature while they stood by watching like hungry cavemen unable to harness the environment to feed themselves.

Turns out they ARE poisonous. The Tome of All Knowledge and Josh Wymore's most commonly visited website told me so. But painstaking and time consuming processes can remove the poison (tannin) from the Acorn to make it an edible food. The Native Americans (or First people) ate them regularly and it was a staple in their diet. It is exactly this kind of ingenuity that allowed them to find America first.

All that to say, I probably wouldn't have been hungry enough to start eating acorns today if I hadn't eaten a stupid SALAD for dinner. I thought eating a salad would be as good as real food, but like a guy taking his cousin to prom, I found out that sometimes you're just lying to yourself.

So next time you are out on a beautiful day like today and you happen across a cache of delicious looking acorns, remember this story and the lesson we've learned. Don't eat salads.

This story is 100% true.

Ohman, A.; Mineka, S. (2001). "Fears, phobias, and preparedness: Toward an evolved module of fear and fear learning" (PDF). Psychological Review 108 (3): 483–522. doi:10.1037/0033-295X.108.3.483. Retrieved 2008-06-16.