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Let's eat some cactus!

  • #21
Moo - always remove the hard center part of pineapples, unless you enjoy bleeding from your digestive tract. The core of the pineapple is made up of tough fibers and a corrosive chemical that is used to make meat tenderizer; when you eat it, the tenderizer softens your flesh and then the abrasive fibers cut it to shreds.
~Joe
Lovely.
 
  • #22
Well, you must have tougher mucous membranes than mine, because when I ate uncored pineapple my mouth was cut up bad by the time I'd had my fill. More recently, I ate pineapple and Skittles at the same time, and that was just awful. Delicious, but awful.
~Joe
 
  • #23
There is some weird...stuff...in this thread. Skittles and pineapple??

I love fresh pineapple...grilled is awesome.

I have never had cactus. I always wanted to try the fruit of a prickly pear. You see a lot of that around here.
 
  • #24
Acids, enzymes, whatever it is that's how I (mis)understood it. I guess its back to Pineapples & Human Biochemistry 101 for me ! :D

What is the difference between an acid and an enzyme? In my mind they are essentially the same thing, maybe someone can clarify?

Seed, I can cut my mouth open real easy on stuff too. I had to give up the Captain Crunch (and other good tasting sugar coated kid cereal that I love) cos it just hurt too much to eat it, what with the shredded palate after every bowl and all.

PAK, you can just think of cactus as a green pepper - that's what I was told, and what caused me to try it. I'd seen it in the stores for a long time but I never knew what people did with it! After only one dish I already like them better than GP. Instead of using a GP try a few pads of Optunia in a dish you've made before and know you like and see what you think. At least for me this is the best way to try a single new ingredient cos I know what it's supposed to taste like and I can see what this new thing does to it. It is a little stiffer than your average GP having skin on two sides. Doesn't seem to make a difference when sauteed. I don't know what it would be like baked in meatloaf or something, maybe being surrounded by juices and heated at 400*F for an hour would soften it right up... Cactusloaf! A lot of people seem to like them fried and put with scrambled eggs, I haven't tried that yet but not being a real egg fan, I may never...

Dr. Wurm, if Seeds description made you queasy what about the lyrics sheet for the first couple Carcass records (Reek of Putrefaction and Symphonies of Sickness) the ones with the autopsy collages on the covers? Those were even more uh... visually descriptive. Though you needed a medical reference and dictionary to find out just how gross some of the songs were! :D

(since someone will invariably want to look them up: http://www.lyricsty.com/lyrics/c/carcass/ You'll be able to tell the ones I'm talking about by the titles alone.)
 
  • #25
What is the difference between an acid and an enzyme? In my mind they are essentially the same thing, maybe someone can clarify?

the vast majority of enzymes are actually proteins, enzymes are also always biomolecules, as in some animal or plant makes them.....

an acid is traditionally considered any chemical compound that, when dissolved in water, gives a solution with a hydrogen ion activity greater than in pure water, i.e. a pH less than 7.0...........

enzymes kinda work like acids but the process is more complex.......and specific enzymes tend to work on specific things, almost always biologic material where acids(like hydrochloric or sulfuric) will tend to react with alot more things like inorganics......
 
  • #26
Well, you must have tougher mucous membranes than mine, because when I ate uncored pineapple my mouth was cut up bad by the time I'd had my fill.
~Joe

yeah but that doesnt get past the fact its just basic plant fiber and not something potentially dangerous..........
 
  • #27
Thanks for info Rattler. OK, so where I get my confusion on acids vs enzymes is that they call things like orange juice, lemon juice, etc "citric acids" when someone has heartburn they're said to have "acid reflux". Should it not then correctly be called "enzyme reflux" and "citric enzyme"? I realize Methylethylketone and solvents aren't natural enzymes but inorganic acids. That's why I had the confusion, cos they still call some organic enzymes acids, at least popularly...

And that article did say "the acid in the pineapple..."
(There's acid in the pineapple? Lets get some! :D)
 
  • #28
citric acid is a weak acid.....acid reflux is the hydrochloric acid produced by the stomach.......they are real acid....best example of an enzyme i can think of is snake venom.......
 
  • #29
It is just plant fiber, but it's a particularly tough, thick one with acute angles and perpendicular serrations. Treated piña fibers are pretty soft, but before rendering they're fairly structural and rigid. Combine the softness of internal tissues with the meat tenderizing effects of bromelain, then add tiny stiff fibers tougher than cellulose; do you really think you aren't going to get cut?
Think about the ecology of pineapple; it evolved in a fertile, fair-weather environment where it could grow at a good pace year-round. As a big bromeliad with a tough, waxy cuticle and fibrous tissue, it's highly resistant to attack by small herbivores. What's to worry about is giant, New-World grazing mammals that have yet to go extinct due to human activity. Tough skins on their fruit will only offer so much protection - a large enough mouth can grind down the skin with big, flat teeth, or strong teeth and jaws can be used to tear the skin open. Toxicity is also a poor defense against large herbivores, because toxic effect is in general inversely proportionate to body mass. However, the fibers of the pineapple already make them hard to digest; the addition of bromelain makes ingestion genuinely uncomfortable, and even a hazard in large quantities. By specifically targeting the mouth and digestive tract of predators, pineapples are able to skirt around the mass advantage, since the digestive organs scale as a square of body size, rather than the cubic growth of body mass. That's how it was explained to me in the book I got it from. Might not be true, but it seems consistent both internally and with my personal experiences.
~Joe
 
  • #30
why would a plant evolve defend itself against a predator and not a herbivore? and plants dont put the thier defenses in the core of a plant that is the last thing that an animal eats....thats idiotic........
 
  • #31
I figure that if a pineapple plant has any opinion at all, it wants a large animal to come along, take the pineapple and walk off with it somewhere to eat it. Core optional. Then the top can root wherever it dropped and the plant has propagated itself. Growing sweet fruit sucks up a lot of energy and the evolutionary advantage is that something will eat the fruit and help the children spread out. I've eaten pineapple core, cut up, without any ill effect ... argghhhhh ... what's happening ... I'm melting!
 
  • #32
"The Great Pineapple Controversy of 2009"

ahhhh, yes. I remember it well..... ;)
 
  • #33
If this isn't the place to debate what's on the mind of a pineapple, I don't know what is.
 
  • #34
I have some reptiles (3 Uromastyx) That I feed that exact cactus too! They are native to Africa and are herbivores. I had the hardest time trying to get them to eat anything until I tried this cactus! They just love it! Anyway I never thought of trying to eat it too. I just might have to try know.
 
  • #35
why would a plant evolve defend itself against a predator and not a herbivore? and plants dont put the thier defenses in the core of a plant that is the last thing that an animal eats....thats idiotic........

Things that prey on plants are herbivores.
~Joe
 
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