Mentioned in the article, but forced rhubarb grows so fast you can hear it. This soundcloud file suggests hearing it in a darkened vault by candlelight would be extraordinary experience!
I don't quite understand: constantly, for days? It seems there would be a finite # of buds to burst, and especially at the frequency (4-6 hz?) and relatively finite size of the dark greenhouse...I'm really surprised this is a phenomenon for more than hours. There must be a TON of buds?
The Rhubarb Triangle is a 9-square-mile (23 km2) area of West Yorkshire, England between Wakefield, Morley, and Rothwell famous for producing early forced rhubarb. It includes Kirkhamgate, East Ardsley, Stanley, Lofthouse and Carlton. The Rhubarb Triangle was originally much bigger, covering an area between Leeds, Bradford and Wakefield. From the 1900s to 1930s, the rhubarb industry expanded and at its peak covered an area of about 30 square miles (78 km2).
Oxalic acid is poisonous? Should I stop eating spinach then? Oh, looks like the article mentions this actually:
> Chard and spinach, in fact, contain even more oxalic acid than rhubarb—respectively, 700 and 600 mg/100 g, as opposed to rhubarb’s restrained 500. Rhubarb’s killer reputation apparently dates to World War I, when rhubarb leaves were recommended on the home front as an alternative food. At least one death was reported in the literature, an event that rhubarb has yet to live down.
> Oxalic acid does its dirty work by binding to calcium ions and yanking them out of circulation. In the worst-case scenario, it removes enough essential calcium from the blood to be lethal; in lesser amounts, it forms insoluble calcium oxalate, which can end up in the kidneys as kidney stones. In general, however, rhubarb leaves don’t pose much of a threat. Since a lethal dose of oxalic acid is somewhere between 15 and 30 grams, you’d have to eat several pounds of rhubarb leaves at a sitting to reach a toxic oxalic acid level, which is a lot more rhubarb leaves than most people care to consume.
That actually sounds like I should be careful with how I consume my spinach (or chard or rhubarb), but more for the sake of kidney stones. I wonder if adding milk or other calcium-rich foods helps?
[one search for calcium-rich foods later]
So spinach is apparently rich in calcium? I'm getting really confused now.
No, spinach is only rich in oxalic acid, not in calcium.
No vegetable is really rich in calcium, which is why it is recommended for vegans to take calcium supplements.
After you ingest oxalic acid, it will find calcium in your body, where it is abundant in blood and in the other extracellular fluids (like sodium and chloride, most calcium stays outside the cells).
Too much oxalic acid will form insoluble precipitates of calcium oxalate, i.e. small stones, which may happen to form in undesirable places, from where they cannot be eliminated.
Most living beings contain calcium, including all plants, but in quantities that are too small for the needs of anyone who has a calcium-based skeleton, unless you eat daily larger quantities of plants than are practical for most humans (e.g. eating between 1 kg and 2 kg of nuts each day, depending on what kind of nuts they are).
Dark leafy greens are not "quality sources of calcium". One would need to eat several kilograms per day. No human does that. The quantity that needs to be eaten is greater than it could seem from the elemental analysis, because a part of the calcium will be lost during cooking and another part will remain bound in insoluble compounds that will not be absorbed in the intestine. Moreover, eating many kilograms per day of dark leafy greens is guaranteed to cause health problems due to oxalic acid and other substances that are present in excess.
All the studies that I have seen have shown that the vegans who do not take calcium supplements have significantly less amounts of calcium in the body than non-vegans and are more prone to osteoporosis.
This kind of false information about plants that are "quality sources" of substances that are really deficient in all plants is very dangerous for vegans. Any vegan must take up to a dozen supplements to maintain optimal health and those who are not aware of this develop sooner or later various health problems and many go back to a traditional diet, without understanding what they did wrong.
I'd encourage you to go to cronometer.com and put in reasonable servings of the food items they listed (not several kilograms of just one food and washing your hands of the conversation) and seeing what nutrients you end up with. You may be surprised.
Add some nut milks in there, too.
> Any vegan must take up to a dozen supplements to maintain optimal health
This is some bottom tier anti-vegan flame bait. Had I seen this sooner, I wouldn't have even responded.
You would have to eat like 5 cups of legumes every day to get enough iron that way if you're a woman. That's almost two pounds. Nuts or greens would be an even higher amount.
Moreover, the lactating dairy cows which are kept in industrial conditions usually receive mineral supplements with calcium and/or phosphorus, in variable quantities, depending on the composition of their food, to achieve a maximal milk production, unlike the cows which graze freely.
Ultrasound breaks them down, a fast non invasive procedure, much like women having an ultrasound scan (and skip over any effect on the foetus). Either way though, you'll end up with shards in your kidneys.
Do you have a source for that? Because while looking up this spinach thing I've come across half a dozen websites, most of them from health institutes that look fairly responsible, stating leafy greens do have calcium. Although in the case of spinach it's barely absorbed, apparently
Having much calcium among vegetables does not mean having enough calcium as a human food.
Your link uses the silly "cup" unit of measure from which it is hard to assess which is the real calcium content.
The right way to show the content of a nutrient in some food is to show how many kilograms or pounds you must eat daily to provide enough of that nutrient.
In the case of calcium the best case that I have seen for various vegetables is that you would need to eat at least 1 kilogram per day, based on the elemental analysis.
However this is far too optimistic, because when cooking the vegetables a part of the calcium may be lost and another part will be bound in insoluble compounds and it will not be absorbed in the intestine after eating.
So a more realistic estimation is that even for the vegetables with the highest content of calcium you might need to eat at least 2 or 3 kg per day.
For nuts and legumes it is impossible to approach even 1 kg of daily intake, as that would include too much energy in starch or fat.
So only leafy vegetables would avoid gaining weight, but eating kilograms per day would be not only unpleasant, but also harmful.
I happen to be a vegan, so I have studied carefully my alternatives and the best for me is to add some calcium phosphate powder to my food, together with the table salt. I use phosphate and not another calcium salt, because even if all seeds and nuts, including all legumes, have large amounts of phosphorus, most of it is contained in phytic acid, which is harmful, so I use preparation methods that remove much of the phytic acid, but they also remove most of the phosphorus, so I compensate that by adding the calcium as calcium phosphate.
Thanks for the information. Upon closer inspection the authors of the link are a nutritionist and an osteopath, so yeah, not quite as reliable as I thought at first.
There’s not much you can do since adding chalk (which used to be common for both spinach and rhubarb) just creates the oxalate in the pan instead of your body and you can’t remove it. But cooking with lots of water (very short in the case of spinach) and throwing out the water does help to reduce the amount of oxalic acid.
Probably in small doses (like what our ancestors 20000 years ago probably eat when they couldn't find better food) it won't do too much damage.
Cooking will also remove some oxalates.
Overall these are plants defense mechanisms. We know they work well as anti bug measures, ruminants have more complex digestive systems to break them down; it's not always clear what prolonged use on humans will cause.
Carnivores advocate against eating oxalates rich food and when you start a diet with no oxalates you will experience some weird symptoms, you can read about oxalates dumping: https://www.doctorkiltz.com/oxalate-dumping
There are plenty of people with "auto immune incurable" diseases who stopped eating vegetables and were relieved of their symptoms.
I personally started experiencing problems after 10 years of a 95% vegan diet and went carnivore, getting rid of a number of weird health issues I couldn't explain.
> I personally started experiencing problems after 10 years of a 95% vegan diet and went carnivore, getting rid of a number of weird health issues I couldn't explain.
Have you tried just eating many different things in moderation? Fiber has been repeatedly shown to decrease rates of cardiovascular disease, cancer, and all cause mortality. It’s kind of silly to “go carnivore” and use your resulting feelings as a base measurement of success after being vegan. Especially considering many of the benefits of fiber are longer term.
E.g. If you ate a diet of 100% candy bars then switched to vegan or “carnivore”, of course you would “feel better” and your “weird health issues” might go away, but that doesn’t mean either of those diets is the optimal diet for you. They are just better than eating 100% candy bars…
Following an 100% vegan diet in a healthy way requires more care in choosing some appropriate nutritional supplements and in planning what you eat than for any other kind of diet.
I am vegan and I enjoy it, but I would not recommend this for everyone, because there is no doubt that it would be too tedious for most people, who prefer to eat in a more spontaneous way, without needing to ponder whether what they happen to eat has an adequate nutritional content, taking into account what else they had eaten that day.
I'm starting to have some major doubts about how much you've informed yourself on the topic here when you say "carnivore" is more foolproof than a much less restrictive diet like a plant-based diet.
You can see this just by plugging 2000 calories of meat in Cronometer and viewing the nutrition holes. Even 2000 calories of bagels gives you a wider assortment of nutrients than 2000 calories of beef.
This is a popular talking point among carnivore charlatans on social media, but can you show me any meta analysis or randomized controlled trials where they found adverse health effects when humans consume whole plant foods high in oxalates such as leafy greens, beans or whole grains?
I know the charlatans won't. We'll just get petri dish and rat studies but mostly hand-waving narratives.
Though I'm not sure how people find it convincing on a rhetorical level. If these "defense chemicals" are so bad, then over what time period are they supposed to hurt us? 100 years? Because the overwhelming balance of evidence only shows improved health outcomes with the consumption of fruit and vegetables, especially the scary ones like dark leafy greens and legumes.
This just sounds like the "eek, a chemical in my food!" rebranded for the 2020s.
Finally, to circle back to the topic at hand, I just wouldn't center my diet around rhubarb leaves. They're about as enticing as celery leaves.
Yeah oxalic acid plus calcium is calcium oxalate, aka the most common form of kidney stones. Some people also seem to be sensitive to oxalates for whatever reason, and find improvements in health when broadly removing sources from their diets.
The trick is to bind the oxalates before they get absorbed in the body and require removal. So making things like traditional creamed spinach (or other things like turnip or collard greens) removes the potential hazard from chronic intake.
Incidentally the whey portion of dairy also seems to chelate the form of vitamin B12 found in plants, making it much more bioavailable. The casein portion of dairy doesn’t seem to have this same effect.
It’s fascinating to see how the preparation for so many traditional foods basically mitigates the sources of low level toxicity issues while increasing nutrient update, when as a “modern” person I tend to look at it from the perspective of taste.
There are many things which have it, particularly in the wild edible category, and those who have dietary restrictions which limit them to mostly such foods have serious consequences from the presence of it.
The article mentions the content is 500mg of oxalic acid / 100g and says the deadly dose is at 15 - 30g. That makes for 3-6kg of rhubarb leaves. Quite a serving, if you ask me.
In the original British understatement:
> Since a lethal dose of oxalic acid is somewhere between 15 and 30 grams, you’d have to eat several pounds of rhubarb leaves at a sitting to reach a toxic oxalic acid level, which is a lot more rhubarb leaves than most people care to consume.
Treating bees for varroa more takes about 25g of oxalic acid per box of bees. I’d kind of hoped the leaves might have more oxalic, then I could have tried putting rhubarb leaves in there instead of battling fumes, glycerine and strips of paper.
I've lived in fear of rhubarb leaves for 40 years since my Mum warned me about them. We used to grow rhubarb in our garden in England, which I loved, but was terrified of one day being poisoned by the leaves. Took me this long to find out I really didn't have anything to be afraid of, thank you.
This doesn't make sense to me. 200g of cooked rhubarb already has almost 400mg of calcium which is almost half of the 1000mg daily US recommendation and more than half of the 700mg daily UK recommendation.
Thinking dairy is the only source of calcium is meme-nutrition like eating bananas for potassium especially when talking about a food already high in calcium.
Do you know why doesn't the Oxalic acid bind with the calcium of the Rhubarb, and turns into a problem if consumed? Is there enough calcium to bind with the Oxalic acid? Is the calcium in Rhubarb bioavailable?
Genuine questions here, because as I understand, many of the nutricional fact sheets are calculated after the food is broken down and passed though a mass spectrometer.
I'm living in Finland, and that is where I got that knowledge from. So yes, unfortunately my source is also empirical knowledge.
But knowing how certain African cultures learned to neutralize Cassava, and that knowledge passed through generations without knowing the reason why, I learned to not fully dismiss these kinds of knowledge...
Interesting. I'm in New Zealand and hadn't come across this. Being a commonwealth country makes me suspect it's not common knowledge in England either. Or has perhaps as you mention the reasons have been lost over time.
This is an enjoyable article from 2017 about the role of Edinburgh in the history of rhubarb in the UK. (I think I may even have originally discovered it on HN). Abstract:
Rhubarb was grown and used throughout China for thousands of years. It then found its way to St Petersburg where the Romanovs developed a flourishing trade in the plant to the rest of Europe. James Mounsey, a physician to the Tsar, brought back seeds from Russia to Scotland at considerable risk to himself. He passed some of the seeds to Alexander Dick and John Hope. Both these physicians then grew rhubarb at Prestonfield and the Botanic Garden (both in Edinburgh), respectively. Eventually rhubarb, in the form of Gregory’s powder, became a common and popular medicine throughout the UK.
I was actually able to visit the annual Rhubarb festival down in Wetherby and it was much more interesting than expected. In addition to learning about the unusual growing method, it was also surprising the number of rhubarb products for sale (like enough to fill an entire market).
My biggest take-away was that Slingbys Rhubarb Gin is delicious!
According to my father, "rhubarb" is what the extras say in crowd scenes in TV and film. They mumble, "rhubarb, rhubarb, rhubarb" and it gives the impression of muted, indistinct background conversations.
By the same token, the choral singer who forgets the lyrics during a performance can sing "watermelon, watermelon" until she gets to a place where she recalls the words. The philosophy is that, as long as you get a convincing vowel in there, people will believe anything you sing.
But first the crop needs a whole season in the sun. You grow normal green endive, pull the whole plant, chop the head, then you’re growing the second flush in the dark from the root mass. Effectively using all the stored energy from the root for one final round of leaf production, but no light prevents photosynthesis and you get Belgian endive.
Similar. Rhubarb is perennial. You're forcing the first flush of growth for the year but you can't force it all season. Later harvests will look different. Still edible, but you're never pulling the entire plant out of the ground with rhubarb like you have to do for Belgian endive.
I grew up eating the Rhubarb plant by tipping the root side (stem?) In sugar and just eating it like that. It's very sour like that, which as a kid I loved.
Rhubarb pie. Rhubarb cake. Rhubarb bread. Rhubarb cookies. Rhubarb crisp/crumble/grunt. Rhubarb jam. Rhubarb chutney. Stewed rhubarb (used anywhere you'd use applesauce including standalone in a bowl, with plain yogurt, swirled into rice pudding, or baked over pork chops). Raw rhubarb dipped in sugar.
We have a very productive rhubarb patch. Right beside the zucchini patch.
Chop it into pieces, put it in a pan with some sugar and possible a little bit of water. Heat it up and the sugar should help draw out some liquid and cook it until the pieces become soft or disintegrate. Takes about 5-10 minutes.
In The Netherlands ate Rhubarb for dinner. Cooked with crumbled rusk (beschuit [0]) mixed with sugar and eaten with cooked potatoes. And some meat (e.g. steak or sausage).
The crumbled rusk is meant to give the cooked rhubarb a thicker structure and the sugar is meant to counter the sourness.
Since it is quite sour and fresh, apart from sweet dishes like pie or crumble, it pairs quite well with heavy meat dishes like venison. Basically you make a glaze with the rhubarb and can use the stems as a garnish/veggie side. Still needs quite a bit of sugar to tone down the sourness, but it is great.
In general you can often use it as an alternative for lemon zest or juice. I'd say though that it is one of those veggies you buy when it grows locally. I love rhubarb, but if you have to import it, there is probably a better local alternative.
If it's been more than a decade get tested to see if it's gone.
I had a huge list of allergies developed in my late teens but now they're gone after a couple decades, due to natural age related changes in biochemistry according to the docs.
my wife got a patch growing in the back garden after a few failed attempts now we have lots, it's also readily available in supermarkets here in the UK. https://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/rhubarb-crumble
Very common in France if you ever drive by.
Usually sold as a small 30cm^3 plant which will probably grown up to 1.5m in diameter the first year. I used to have 7 in 12m2.
It’s also possible to grow from seeds, which you can buy online. It will require some dedication.
IME a very easy perennial, if you can prevent drought. Plant and forget. Like artichokes.
https://soundcloud.com/rhubarb-rhubarb-rhubarb/a-mass-of-pop...