It’s everywhere. Why not just eat it instead of searching for veggies and meat which are more difficult to have?

  • captainlezbian@lemmy.world
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    2 hours ago

    Because it requires a lot of biological investment to eat it. It’s rough on teeth and requires rumination or similar calorically expensive techniques to extract much nutrition. We evolved in the opposite path and optimized heavily for easily digested foods. We then take it a step further and cook them breaking the difficult to digest parts into an easer to digest form.

    Also we do eat grasses, but only their seeds and fruits. Wheat, maize, rice, and bananas are all grasses

      • MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip
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        2 hours ago

        Yeah, that was the lazy answer. The more correct is, because grass contains stuff (mainly lignin, reminds me of this i found this morning) that’s hard to digest with a normal stomach. So cows & co. have multiple gastric … sections(? Mägen), the first of which contains microrganisms specialized in breaking apart lignin. The following gastrics are more the usual bio-chemical kind, to digest the microorganisms.

        In short, eating grass needs a specialized process and you can’t eat anything else as main food source, (they do occasionally eat a chicken or critter).

  • FriendBesto@lemmy.ml
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    7 hours ago

    Grass is nutritionally poor. The reason we are smart in many ways is due to our varied diet. Even if we had evolutionary gone in that direction we would be dumber. Eating grass is a specialisation.

    Also, we would not look like we do. If you look at the digestive track of a horse or a cow, you will see that they are longer. Carnivores have the shortest and we as omnivores are in between. Being an omnivote is a good thing and in the end, we can get more nutrition by hunting and gathering than by grassing.

    Worth noting, while individual cows’ behaviour and preferences vary greatly, the time spent feeding and ruminating usually adds up to 4-7 hours a day. Our society would be were we are today if we spent 7 hours as a species eating grass in order to make ir worthwhile.

    Evolution can only evolve so much within an existing animal especies in order to specialise or fit in a survival niche. Hence you so not see sea crabs that can fly or flies that live in the bottom of the sea.

  • gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.de
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    1 day ago

    The thing is that cows can’t digest grass either. They have an extra stomach along their oesophagus which is basically just a pouch where the grass goes in first. There are a lot of bacteria and they can digest grass. Then these bacteria grow because they eat the grass.

    Then the cow swallows these bacteria and digests those. That’s where a cow gets their calories from.

  • Contramuffin@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    There’s a reason grass is so common - it’s because it’s a wildly effective life strategy. Grass is actually quite hard to eat - there’s basically no nutrition in the leaves themselves, and grass evolved to incorporate silica “needles” in its leaves, so that it wears down your teeth when you try to eat it anyways.

    Not to say that it’s impossible to eat grass, but you need to undergo a ton of highly specialized adaptations to make it possible. For most animals (including humans), it’s just not worth the effort

  • Quilotoa@lemmy.ca
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    1 day ago

    I’d rather evolve the ability to photosynthesize, now that we have indoor lighting. It’d save a whole bunch of time and grocery bills.

  • pineapple@lemmy.ml
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    1 day ago

    Take the tier zoo aproach. Would you rather use evelution points on grass or evolution points on being big brain.

    • Mothra@mander.xyz
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      2 days ago

      We eat the seeds, I presume OP refers to the leaves/blades of grass which are also present in species that aren’t cereals

        • CanadaPlus@futurology.today
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          2 days ago

          Plants are selected to not be great to eat, basically. Cellulose in particular is almost impossible to biochemically break back down (but not completely), and is a pretty good structural material, too.

          Seeds are often still palatable once you get through the shell, basically because turning into a baby plant is an already tough design constraint. Some plants still have tricks - notice that it’s the spiciest part of a hot pepper.

  • daannii@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    A lot of grass. Like lawn grass. Is wheat.

    If you let it grow more.

    So actually we did evolve to eat grass.

    Cat grass is wheat grass.

  • Alsjemenou@lemy.nl
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    24 hours ago

    Why? Because otherwise we wouldn’t exist and that wouldn’t be in line with the future.

  • Alcoholicorn@mander.xyz
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    2 days ago

    Grass is mostly cellulose and lignin. Those molecules are difficult to break down.

    Animals that can digest the cellulose either need a really long digestive track or to do something really gross to keep the stuff in their digestive track longer.

  • Gamma@beehaw.org
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    2 days ago

    It’s more efficient to let others eat the grass, and then eat them

  • Ada@piefed.blahaj.zone
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    2 days ago

    It’s all down to the way the brain works. Our brains use up something like 20% of our calories when standing still doing nothing.

    Grass does not supply the amount of calories and micronutrients needed to keep the human brain running, simply because it is low on both of those things.

    Grass eaters have multiple stomachs, slow digestion and graze pretty much the whole time they’re awake, and because their brains use a lot less energy than human brains, the balance works out.

  • thatsnomayo [he/him]@lemmy.ml
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    2 days ago

    Vegetables have pretty limited availability for protein, as an animal you have sit there eating grass all day. Our ways allow us plenty of time to be smart & stuff