[washadjeffmad]

Have you ever eaten a pine cone?

Pine needles "contain more Vitamin C than an orange" (I didn't see it specified if that's by gross weight or dry mass) and make decent tea, and many cultures still boil and eat or cook with pine cones.

Modern crops are amazing, but we are literally surrounded by new and forgotten sustenance. It's not always pretty, tasty, or toothsome, but it's there if you have the time and will to turn it into food.

I'm also reminded of villages that "modernized" by trading their old fashioned cast iron cookware in for aluminum and began to suffer from anemia as a result. Iron is abundant in the crust, and eating mineral-rich clay is still practiced by humans and animals around the planet, but their solution was to put cast iron charms in the new pots for luck. It's possible they were in iron-poor areas, but if they were swayed to abandon their traditions by the appeal of commercial marketing, it seems likely they mught also eschew any dirt-eating practices they once might have had.