[crazygringo]

Not even that much. A couple of cups of mushrooms -- a generous helping as a side dish -- has around 30 calories.

All the significant calories comes from the oil or butter they're cooked in.

I'm not sure it was ever about avoiding starvation, but rather just a different flavor to eat sometimes. When you're always eating the same local ingredients, food can get boring pretty quick. It's the same appeal of spices -- you got a new flavor!

[isk517]

Mushrooms add to the umami flavour, before salt was easily accessible this was probably your best bet for easy flavour enhansement

[mbg721]

Salt is more fundamental for the body than just flavoring. I'd hesitate even to call it a spice. That said, umami ingredients like mushrooms and seaweed are certainly used together with salt.

[BurningFrog]

Salt has always been freely available from the ocean, which I believe most people lived pretty close to.

[busterarm]

MSG is like $0.30/kg.

[steezeburger]

I don't think they had MSG before salt

[duped]

There's a long history of glutamate containing food and food products being used in place of salt across the world, before it was first chemically isolated.

[busterarm]

Who cares? We don't live "before salt". Human use of salt _predates writing_ by about 3000 years.

You wouldn't choose to do manual typesetting (or copying books by hand!!!) today either versus alternatives.

If you're _just_ looking to add umami flavor to a dish today, you'd be crazy to pick foraging for wild mushrooms over Aji no Moto.

[steezeburger]

Well you were replying to a comment about why we foraged for them before salt broski. Doesn't really make sense to bring up the price of something that wasn't isolated then.

[lithocarpus]

I'm skeptical of any food that humans only started eating since the industrial revolution, including those that are derivatives of or isolated compounds of real food. Mostly the effects on our bodies are not well studied. I haven't specifically read studies on msg though.

[mbg721]

I mean, foods like soy sauce and yogurt and sauerkraut predate industrialization, but are very processed. I wouldn't worry too much about MSG in particular, since it is also mostly made by fermentation:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monosodium_glutamate

[parineum]

How much studying of food do you think was happening before the industrial revolution?

[thaumasiotes]

> Human use of salt _predates writing_ by about 3000 years.

That looks like... an intensely conservative estimate. Deer use salt.

[thaumasiotes]

> It's the same appeal of spices -- you got a new flavor!

That's not the appeal of spices. People don't stop using the spices they like in quest of newer, worse-tasting ones. By far the most common case when a person is eating spices is that there's nothing new about the flavor.

[MisterTea]

Could also be used to mask stale or spoiled foods that if cooked enough, wont kil you and still contains nutrition. Nothing goes to waste. Another could be preservation as is the case for salt.

[thaumasiotes]

Salt is much simpler than that. It's a vital nutrient and if you don't eat enough of it, you'll die. It's useful for preservation, sure, but you're not eating it because you couldn't find fresh food. You're eating it because it's salt.

[AStonesThrow]

Many spices, as well as actual oil extracted from actual snakes by actual healers, and mushrooms as well, gained reputations in antiquity as medicinal and/or beneficial to health in some way.

And this often fueled increased trade and increased cultivation volumes and increased prices and tariffs and wars and cruel laws. In antiquity.

And often, the actual medicinal benefits became overhyped, and crept from their scope, and each nation's crown jewel of a spice became a miracle cure-all, and cue the trade wars and sword-wielding knights defending their spice.

Basically the "Snake Oil Salesmen" of the Wild West were white hucksters who diluted the actual snake oil down so much, or didn't bother adding any in the first place, then sold the elixirs on Main Street between the saloon and the whorehouse. So the Native Americans were nonplussed that their shamanistic remedies had been subverted as a trope of quacks and hoaxers.

Most of all, these spices and mushrooms have been gradually enshittified, perhaps literally, and many of them are a shadow of their former selves, bred for mass-production. And Americans sit there and dust our burger and fries with gray sand that doesn't even taste like black pepper anymore. Not to mention the salt that's been refined until there's nothing but sodium in it.

Perhaps mushrooms are the least likely food to be enshittified or deliberately commercialized, except for about 4 types in the grocery stores. From what I've learned about mushroom foraging, it's never worth it; just go buy mushrooms in the store, I mean for crying out loud. The risk is too great, and aficionados can claim "easy identification" all they want, but "easy" is relative and not for you to judge, because there's a fine line between tasty and fatal.