pomophobe

Arnold Zwicky zwicky at STANFORD.EDU
Sun May 8 00:01:19 UTC 2011


On May 7, 2011, at 4:55 PM, Larry Horn wrote:
> --------------
>
> At 4:51 PM -0400 5/7/11, Wilson Gray wrote:
>>
>>
>> ... OTOH, how did people discover that olives were safe to eat? Since UC
>> Davis is, at heart, an aggie school, in addition to the school's
>> actual arboretum, the campus itself is an arboretum, with cork oaks,
>> chinaberry trees - the only ones that I've ever seen outside of the
>> South, fig trees, and olive trees.
>>
>> Now, whether an olive is green or ripe, there isn't anything about the
>> raw fruit that would cause anyone to consider it to be edible. During
>> every olive season, the school paper publishes recipes for the use of
>> fresh olives. Apparently, among other things, the olives have to be
>> steeped in a lye solution for a certain length of time.
>>
>> WTF?! How did it ever occur to anyone to soak a foodstuff in lye?
>
>
>
> Well, if it's good enough for codfish...

then there's acorns...

arnold

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