Wood smells like we should be able to eat it, but we can't.

- Huh, always had Beavers down as ThinkPad T-Series users...
- To be fair like every good joke i stole this one
  
  We gotta keep it from being upvoted too far
- don't beavers eat wood

Cinnamon and sumac are two common spices that are made from grinding up tree bark.
- Also ginger.
  And technically wormwood too, although that's more you drinking water that is soaked into wood.
  
  Ginger is a root, maybe you’re thinking of something else?
- You using a different kind of sumac than the rest of us? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sumac#In_food
  
  I stand corrected on that one. I assumed it was sumac bark, and you know what they say about assumption. It makes an ass out of u and mption.
  
  The bit about powdered sumac (bark?) being a powerful dye for marble is pretty interesting. I wish there was an example photo.

That's what whiskey is for
- And smoking anything, it's definitely part of food as a taste just not the wood it self as an ingredient.
  
  Being used to make the fire/smoke that cooks the food is a really good point, wood is definitely food adjacent even if it's not strictly edible.

It what? Who thinks wood smells edible?
- We burn different kinds of wood under our food to make it taste like that wood. Mesquite, apple, hickory, all come to mind. Wood smells really good.
- it still is?
- My friend Winona for one
  
  The big brown beaver?

Maple syrup is tree blood. Kind like tree vampirism.
I don’t think wood smells like food. But I wonder… apparently termites have a bunch of gut bacteria to digest wood. Maybe if you eat raw termites and bark beetles, you can then eat some sawdust. If you continue the process eventually you may be able to eat wood or paper with your own gut biome. Maybe start with a termite, sawdust, and banana smoothie and move up from there. Best of luck.
- "Tree vampirism"? Naw dude, we boil the tree blood down first. It's concentrated tree vampirism.
  
  Kinda like centrifuge blood taffy?
  
  Oh, you mean CTV?
  
  Yeah, it stops being healthy because it's ultra processed.
- 5/7 with rice. Thank you for the suggestion.
  
  A grading scale like no other

If you've eaten shredded cheese from the store, then you've eaten wood.
- Eating shredded cheese and wood is certainly a lifestyle

U can eat it. Its just not particularly nutritious or paletable.
- I still wonder why if we need more fiber in our diets we don't just toss wood pulp in everything.
  Apparently supplemented processed fiber gives you liver cancer though.
  Tldr: Inulin bad.
  https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/diets-high-in-processed-fiber-may-increase-risk-of-liver-cancer-in-some-people
  I wonder how depression era sawdust bread would work though.
  
  The study that your article references is a mouse study, so the relevance to humans is questionable.
  In addition, fiber is shown to be beneficial to humans primarily when comparing the standard American diet to a high-fiber diet. This is likely because fiber is mostly non-digestable by humans (as we've lost the ability to digest fiber more than 2-million years ago unlike our closest living great-ape cousins), and acts as a physical barrier to the absorption of sugars and starches which also helps to lower insulin spikes.
  If you do not eat a high-carb diet (such as a ketogenic diet), then eliminating the undigestable matter (i.e. fiber) from your diet is probably beneficial because you'll be able to absorb more nutrients and get rid of constipation-related issues.
  
  A lot of processed foods do have wood pulp in it. Often labeled celulose to hide that they just putting wood pulp in ur food.

For the majority of human history, we've eaten around wood (around a campfire, a hearth, etc), it makes sense it would become intertwined with our food palette

Skill issue.

We can, and do, eat wood. It's listed as "cellulose" in the ingredients, and it's in everything. Your ice cream, your bread, probably up in yo closet doin your Mamma right now
- That’s made from plants, including trees, but that’s not really what I’m talking about.
- Daaayum

Wood is notoriously hard to digest. After wood evolved, it took millions of years before funghi and bacteria evolved the ability to decompose it. And that's why we have oil now.
- Coal, not oil, but it's still an interesting fact.
- There was a point during that millions of years where there were areas of thousands of feet deep layers of dead trees. It still boggles my mind.
  
  Would you be willing to find a good article explaining this further? This sounds really neat and I'd like to know how scientists figured this out :O
- Wood is the reason for climate change!
  
  And now these hippies want to plant even more trees.
- (the oil helps us digest wood)

OP confirmed for beaver with dental issues.
It might interest you to know that we do eat wood when we eat that sprinkled parmesan or romano cheese in the plastic containers: It contains wood to prevent the cheese from clumping (and it counts as fiber)
- Thank God I can eat cheese to get my fill of wood for the day.
  
  Mmm, anti caking agents...
- If you consider cellulose to be wood, sure. They don't put actual wood in there.
  
  What cellulose do they use then?
- All shredded cheeses, I believe.
  
  Many shredded cheeses are mixed with corn and/or potato starches rather than cellulose (which is not wood either)

You can. I know a guy who eats a birch log every year. He literally sits on the couch pulling splinters from the log and chews on them while watching tv. He also grinds his egg shells and mixes with oatmeal.
- Are you sure your friend isn't just three beavers in a long coat?
- This sounds like a terrible idea in the long-term.
  
  Why? It's basically just fiber.
  
  Wood is a renewable resource
- Why wood he do such a thing?
- Is this a thing? Why does he do it?
  
  He believes there's some health benefits to it
- A friend of mine doesn't peel shrimp tails
  
  🤢

I’m guessing it sort of came from the fact that we cook food with burning wood. Less so now, but burning wood meant cooked food for 200k years.
I don’t think wood smells like it is edible, but a fire can remind me of food through smell.

I'm... not so sure about this. Also we can eat paper and that's just mashed up wood, right?
- We can consume it, but we can’t digest it.
  
  Also, we should consume it (or other types of dietary fibre)
  https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3614039/
  Dietary fibre is that part of plant material in the diet which is resistant to enzymatic digestion which includes cellulose, noncellulosic polysaccharides such as hemicellulose, pectic substances, gums, mucilages and a non-carbohydrate component lignin. The diets rich in fibre such as cereals, nuts, fruits and vegetables have a positive effect on health since their consumption has been related to decreased incidence of several diseases. Dietary fibre can be used in various functional foods like bakery, drinks, beverages and meat products. Influence of different processing treatments (like extrusion-cooking, canning, grinding, boiling, frying) alters the physico- chemical properties of dietary fibre and improves their functionality. Dietary fibre can be determined by different methods, mainly by: enzymic gravimetric and enzymic—chemical methods. This paper presents the recent developments in the extraction, applications and functions of dietary fibre in different food products.
  Not that we should go around gnawing on wood like beavers, but maybe that's why some indigestible foods seem like we should be able to eat it

You can bake sawdust into bread lol https://youtu.be/MTC_ETWa3JA
- Or a Rice Crispy if you'd rather
  https://youtu.be/AKDal51f5LU?si=mhnNuCnT4FCiUHxe
- Also if you believe the stories ive heard from pizza chains like Papa Johns and Domino's, sawdust is regularly added to pizza dough to make it cheaper to produce

There are plenty alcohols, like whiskey and wine, that are supposed to have "oaky" flavors due to the barrels they're kept in.

No it doesn’t

is your pizza made of.... wood?

uhhhhh what

Hey nobody's stopping you from gnawing on some cedar shavings my dude.

Have you ever made love to a greased up knot in a tree trunk?
- Tek-knight has
- Not yet.

This comes to mind: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bark_bread

I spent the day making a planter box out of cedar, and it doesn't smell like food even a little.

who smells wood and thinks "you know what? I want to slap that pine tree on my pancake"?
- Maybe not a pine tree, but I love birch beer. My parents cut down an old birch tree years ago, and it smelled AWESOME!
- Beavers.
- You mean like maple syrup?
- I’m not a huge fan of pine, but maple smells delicious.

I'm not sure I agree about the smell of wooe, but the cambium of many different tree species is perfectly edible. Have at it, my friend!

This should be an unpopular opinion instead, because almost no one associates the smell with a desire to eat it.

Liquid smoke has warning labels on it

Call me weird, but I have never once salivated to the smell of any wood.
- weird.

Maple syrup?

Please don't make this reddit.

All the 10s in my neighborhood love to gobble on my wood, though?
Edit: It was a joke. There are no 10s in my neighborhoods, and if there were, they would probably not choose to have intimate relations with me.

Antifreeze

That's what coffee is for.