Can you survive on Jerusalem Artichoke?

I love Jerusalem Artichoke AKA sunroots and I think most people feel the same way here. But, my concern is whether they can actually serve as a staple crop like potatoes and wheat. Can sunroots really provide the calories required for people to survive with this as their main food? Before you all just say yes, let me put in the caveats first. Sunroots have their carbs in the form of inulin which cannot be digested by the human gut - instead microbes eat it. So is the human actually getting those calories? Could you starve eating sunroots? Has anyone tried to make them a significant part of their diet?

So I have some evidence that it can be staple crop. Lewis and Clark recorded that the Hidatsa tribe were cultivating sunroots. Though this does not tell us if sunroot was the primary staple or a supplement to corn and sunflower seeds. Two - it is obvious that sunroot has been been bred and domesticated for large production by Native Americans. Why would they do that if it had the caloric content of celery?

A way around the indigestability is to feed it to animals and then eat the animals. My chickens prefer sunroots to standard chicken feed and I don't even have to cut up the roots as the chickens work hard to peck apart solid chunks. Or maybe fermenting the roots will cause some of that inulin to become digestable.

fermenting can help with digestibility, for sure. the classic way to convert inulin to more digestible form , is like with camas - low, slow cooking. that kind of cooking does tend to make sunroots a food to slurp rather than crunch on.

More importantly, can those you interact regularly with survive if you are on a diet of sunchokes? My diet was heavy on lentils and other pulses for a while, and it threw my gut flora right out of whack after a month or so. I suspect that a diet overly heavy on inulin would have a similar impact.

I guess you could live outdoors? Or find someone affected by post-covid anosmia to live with?

My wife is writing a book about her maternal grandparents' experience during WWII. They were Polish Jews living in Brussels when the Nazis invaded. They escaped to France and hid out in the countryside until after the war was over. During an interview, he revealed that they survived one winter eating mostly topinambour (sunchokes) which were normally just cattle feed and some sugar beets.

I'm sure it's not great to eat such an unvaried diet, but I think they work fine as a survival food.

My other half is affected by gluten. I pickle sunchokes and it  reduces the inulin issues. I dehydrate and make flour out of the chokes. The added neccessity and labor to dehydrate before grinding makes it too labor intensive for me to use it as a sole flour. They make a nutty slightly sweet pasta. They are water hogs and I am monitoring my water useage much more carefully these days. I've taken to planting them under an eave so morning dew gives them a drink almost daily. Like potatoes they are versatile and with other foraged plants you could cook them many ways.  1 cup raw has 110 calories, 26g carbs, 14g sugar, 3g protein, Compared to a cup of garbonza beans sunchokes are roughly 1/3 less across the board. They don't store well for me unlike a potato, squash or bean. as an addition to a diet for me I'd pick something else as a sole or main component.

Skyler Weber wrote:I love Jerusalem Artichoke AKA sunroots and I think most people feel the same way here. But, my concern is whether they can actually serve as a staple crop like potatoes and wheat. Can sunroots really provide the calories required for people to survive with this as their main food? Before you all just say yes, let me put in the caveats first. Sunroots have their carbs in the form of inulin which cannot be digested by the human gut - instead microbes eat it. So is the human actually getting those calories? Could you starve eating sunroots? Has anyone tried to make them a significant part of their diet?

So I have some evidence that it can be staple crop. Lewis and Clark recorded that the Hidatsa tribe were cultivating sunroots. Though this does not tell us if sunroot was the primary staple or a supplement to corn and sunflower seeds. Two - it is obvious that sunroot has been been bred and domesticated for large production by Native Americans. Why would they do that if it had the caloric content of celery?

A way around the indigestability is to feed it to animals and then eat the animals. My chickens prefer sunroots to standard chicken feed and I don't even have to cut up the roots as the chickens work hard to peck apart solid chunks. Or maybe fermenting the roots will cause some of that inulin to become digestable.

I have eaten sunroots quite a bit.  Could a person eat enough to survive?  My own opinion is, no way on earth.  It's very easy to eat too many and most people pay the price to varying degrees.  I get a bloated upset stomach.  My significant others gets terrible cramps that leave her in pain for hours.  All that said, I still grow them and we eat them.  We both enjoy them.  I simply think that they are best enjoyed in moderation.

I don't think whether or not someone cultivated a crop has much to do with whether you could survive on it.  Most all of the vegetables we have today have been bred and cultivated for greater production, including the celery that you mention. Why would they do that?  Because having varied sources of food is a good thing.  

Once you make the jump to something being a survival food because you can feed it to an animal and then eat the animal, nearly anything becomes a staple.  Pigs will happily eat most anything.  That doesn't mean your idea is bad.  I think you could live a lot longer and more happily on chicken or pork than you could on sunroots.  

I've been chomping down a vegan sun choke pasta sauce with rigatoni ever since I got the book that contains it. One of my favorite, rather subtle flavors. I have a bag of them in the fridge, I am going to make the sauce tomorrow.

I tried growing them in FL but they seemed to get rust quite badly. A few produced flowers. The soil here is so poor unlike anywhere else in the USA. Sometimes I will read something does well in dry and well drained soils but that's not the same as pure sand.

Perhaps I will make a bed and try again, I sure love them.

Another recipe is BBQ sun choke chips sliced on a mandoline. That recipe is forever ingrained in my memory as the time I cut half my thumb off through the nail. I will never use a mandoline bare handed again...

I think something more neutral, focused on calories rather than slightly out of the ordinary nutrients might help... Cassava is my survival crop here, maybe sweet potato. All you would have to do is be able to hunt for some protein. The village mindset doesn't exist much anymore, if we were all to barter what we can grow survival would be healthier than wondering specifically "what can I alone grow to survive"? Perhaps this is the state of society in general.

Yes, you can!  The inulin can be converted to digestible sugars through a few pathways such as boiling, soaking in something acid like lemon juice or vinegar (pickling), or freezing (you can toss them in the freezer but I just let our frosts take care of that).  After that the calories are closer to those produced by potatoes.  

How do I know?  I grew a lot and ate a lot this winter.  Usually we have a cold January and very cold February so I loaded up heavily during December.  By that I mean my main food in most of my meals were usually sunchokes.  I fixed them up in many, many ways (soup, bread, pizza crust and toppings, sunchoke taco with the sunchoke shells, crackers, toppings, fried like hash browns, fries, hash brown casserole,  fruit salad after they were cooked a bit, ate them raw but I ate a huge bowl early on in the year and got cleaned out but your body adapts to the inulin over time but I'll start small next year and work up lol).  What happened is that I gained ten pounds going from a very active 140 to 150 male!  

Our January and February was mild this year and I had greens (brassicas, dock, etc) all year but I had stored a lot of sorghum, amaranth, sweet potatoes and potatoes and decided to stop digging sunchokes as much during those months.   I plan on canning some but not enough for the year.