Vegetable Calories

While deciding on what we are going to grow, something that should be at the forefront of consideration is the amount of calories that make up the produce we are growing. This is not to say that you should only grow things that are calorically dense but also consider how you could incorporate a variety of vegetables of different calorie count in different quantities. For this upcoming movie, 200 sq ft is the plot allowance. People will be trying to grow the most calories with the least work.


Credit to Healthy Beet.

While this is not all encompassing, it gives an idea of some common ones.

What are your thoughts? Ideas on strategy?

For GAMCOD, this is a concern because you want to maximize calories. But from a nutrition standpoint, that is misleading to say the least.

I've studied this over the years, but also put it into practice. Don't count calories per meal, but nutrients per calorie (Dr. Neil Furman).

Want to know what to grow to maximize caloric density but still ensure it's nutrient packed?  Combine the recommended foods from Furman and Dr. Mike Greger of nutritionfacts.org :

Beans
Berries
Fruit
Greens *take a supergreen supplement every day
Cruciferous Veggies
Other Veggies
Nuts
Seeds
Whole Grains
Mushrooms * take an adaptogen supplement every day that includes chaga. You'll never get cancer.

Eat 1/2 tsp of turmeric every day.

Need healthy fats? Avocados.
Nuts and seeds are packed with calories.
Grains (corn include) have higher calorie content.
Fruits have more calories than most vegetables.

Just some thoughts from a guy who has been doing this for a while.

j

This video might help people who are interested in GAMCOD:


It shows how efficient gardening is.  It's beyond what most people imagine.

This man grew a year's worth of food on 1400 sq ft.  To round out the diet nutritionally, he had his "ghost acre"  - chickens that were raised off site for eggs.

GAMCOD is sort of like this project, except with the focus on calories.  Calories are what will make the GAMCOD results apply more directly to the "Feed the World" agricultural views.  I think that no matter how anyone does it, if it's in accordance with the proposed GAMCOD rules, it looks like it will be vastly more nutritionally fulfilling than the typical US diet.  So I think we are on a great track here!

I have a vegetable to propose people consider, and hopefully growers experienced in USDA zones 5 and down could give feedback on.

Chufa. Cyperus esculentus, a tuber producing sedge - a very ancient food. This is a very hardy and fast growing crop. It makes tubers in it's first year as long as you get them in early.  

In the US it grown a lot for attracting wild turkeys. But in Spain and the Mediterranean, it's been a food for millennia.  It tastes like almonds and is also called Earth Almond.  In Spain, they make a form of horchata from it - Chufa horchata.  This involves soaking the tubers, then blending and straining (just like making a nut milk). I've made it and it tastes just like almond milk.  Very tasty.

They grow from tubers and you can get started just by buying and planting raw, certified organic Tigernuts you can buy in a store or online, even on Amazon. One 5 oz bag will plant a good sized area, about a 24-30 sq ft bed in my experience. Each plant produces about a handful of tubers in a season. I haven't weighed that before  but it might be between 1/2 to 1 ounce.

One ounce (aprox 30 grams) has 120 calories including 7 grams of fat.  This may be the highest fat containing fast growing vegetable.

Tigernuts online

Cleaned chufa tubers

Our own Matthew Trotter has also created The Annual Staple Crop Calculator
 . He built that calculator after discussions with esteemed Permies like Joseph Lofthouse in the thread How Many of Each Plant To Grow As A Percentage Of Total Calories

So far, an easy pick for me is the humble Pea.

Pea Pros
Nitrogen Fixing Legume
CHEAP (I am thinking of doing a thing where I buy a dollar bag of peas and plant them.)
Straightforward harvesting/storing.

Pea Negatives
Needs trellising (have to keep it low effort/cheap)
Good for spring, not so much summer.

This can be a great early crop and depending on local climate could keep producing through the spring into parts of the summer. It pairs well with many other vegetables without issue so intermixing isn't a difficult thing.

Timothy Norton wrote:So far, an easy pick for me is the humble Pea.
...It pairs well with many other vegetables without issue so intermixing isn't a difficult thing.

The point about it "playing well with others" is a very good one.  And the polyculture layer ability, going vertical.  Vertical farming is definitely the productive way to go.  I get a lot more production off my 7 row garden by having four of the rows with trellises, running north/south, positioned on one side of the bed.  It's like having an 11 row garden from 7 this way.

Each bed gets the same amount of sun this way, plus I can have beans, peas, melons, etc up the trellises, and still have lots of crops on the ground.

Jim Garlits wrote:For GAMCOD, this is a concern because you want to maximize calories. But from a nutrition standpoint, that is misleading to say the least.

Then "misleading" (by your standards) is exactly what I am shooting for.  

If you feel you would like to see a movie featuring six gardeners growing something by your standards, I encourage you to work toward that goal.  

As for me, my flawed thinking is that there are people that are NOT gardening for a buffet of reasons.  I think (again, surely flawed) that if I can make movie focused on counting calories produced, with secondary goals of cheap and easy, combined with purely permaculture standards, then I think it could make a huge permaculture difference.  

Definitely far from perfect, and therefore "misleading".  After all, the world of horticulture is about a million times bigger than what can fit into a two hour movie.  

Adding for my benefit (because I could see it being a major player for me if I were taking part!)

Swede/rutabaga 1 cup = 140g = 50 kcal

Thinks...you'd have to estimate how much of the harvest is usable. Some vegetables need peeling, others you could get extra food from the leaves and other parts (beet leaves, pea pods)

Thank you for the fantastic information Tim et al!  My only current input is yum, yum, yum, yum, yum, yum, yum!!!

I propose a GAMCOD species food calories wiki page.  

Perhaps organized by plant families, and then species in alphabetical order. Also separated categories for animals and fungi.  Each species could have a caloric value associated with it per gram, tablespoon, lbs, liter, or whatever you all think is best.  

Focus mainly on what can be produced within one year?

For example:

Plants:

Asteraceae -

Helianthus annuus Sunflower

Seeds - 1 cup - 820 calories

Leaves - ?

Petals - ?

Roots - ?

Stalks - ?

Pedaliaceae -

Sesamum indicum Sesame

Seeds - 1 cup = 800 calories.

Animals

Apidae -
Apis mellifera Honey bee

Honey - 1 cup = 1000 calories. 1 year potential..?

Phasianidae -
Gallus gallus domesticus Chicken

Meat - 100g = 240 calories. 1 chicken, 2000g..?

Eggs - 1 egg = 150 calories. 1 year, 1 chicken, 200 eggs

Fungi

Arthur Wierzchos wrote:I propose a GAMCOD species food calories wiki page.  

You, Arthur, have the power!

I think anyone can make a wiki with a table? Have a go and start a new thread!
Post in the tinkering forum if you need help. I'm not sure if we have a 'how to' for table making and it can get messy (ask me how I know!)

I wonder if some people might do something like fukuoka:  two or three crops in one year on the same patch.

paul wheaton wrote:I wonder if some people might do something like fukuoka:  two or three crops in one year on the same patch.

Peas could be grown in the spring, and by the time it is being harvested, there could already be something else growing amongst the peas.

Peas are (apparently) 2 to 4 million calories per acre.

Carrots might product 2 to 4 million calories per acre ...

I asked google about the three sisters

According to research by Dr. Jane Mt. Pleasant of Cornell University, the Three Sisters yields 12.25 x 106 kcal/ha. This is more energy than other crop monocultures or mixtures.

That's 1.3 million calories per hectare.  So half a million calories per acre.  That doesn't sound super amazing.

Maybe these were dry land crop experiments?

This page has an interesting chart of nutrition per hectare - Nutrition per Hectare for staple crops

The last column shows calories per square metre, which is a bit over ten square feet.

Some ones that I find of interest...

sweet potatoes - 1140 kcal per square metre
pumpkin - 1270
peanut - 923
maize - 1847
flaxseed - 1106
chickpea - 275
chiaseed - 751
green beans - 249
dry beans - 229
lentils - 322
potato - 1318

edited to add chufa, which I've just realised are tigernuts and should grow well here, at a whopping 3290 kcal per square meter!

my only complaint about that page is that they are saying "kcal" when I think they mean "cal".

paul wheaton wrote:my only complaint about that page is that they are saying "kcal" when I think they mean "cal".

Paul they are just being precise.  Food kcal is shortened to cal in the US.  It's just lazy American speak, same thing.  Tom

paul wheaton wrote:I asked google about the three sisters

According to research by Dr. Jane Mt. Pleasant of Cornell University, the Three Sisters yields 12.25 x 106 kcal/ha. This is more energy than other crop monocultures or mixtures.

That's 1.3 million calories per hectare.  So half a million calories per acre.  That doesn't sound super amazing.

Maybe these were dry land crop experiments?

I think everyone is having trouble with powers of ten...

And I sincerely hope I can type this whole thing out before my brain goes into total overload and I just end up adding to the confusion.

I found the article in question - Food Yields and Nutrient Analyses of the Three Sisters: A Haudenosaunee Cropping System ­

In it the author states that

on a yearly basis, each adult would require 912,500 kcal and 22 kg of protein.

ie, a bit under a million per person.

And also that

The Three Sisters provides energy for 13.42 people/ha and protein for 15.86 people/ha, more than any of the monocultures or monoculture mixtures

ie around 13 million per hectare.

So something somewhere isn't adding up...

The first thing I noticed was this quote, which you used and is taken from the article.

12.25 x 106 kcal/ha

That is an exceedingly silly way to write a number and does not fit with the way a scientific paper should be written, therefore I suspected a typo. I think it should be 12.25 x 10^6 kcal/ha. And the fact that I struggled and ultimately failed to write 'ten-to-the-six' the way I wanted it to show up on screen probably illustrates the cause of the first part of the problem.

And then lo and behold if you scroll down to the bar chart she provided, there it is black and white - Three Sisters give 12.25ish x ten-to-the-six kcal per hectare.



Then the next problem is that she's a scientist and uses kcal, which is the correct scientific name for what everyone else calls calories. So the powers of ten are again all over the place if you don't realise that.

Which means you ended up with 1.3 million calories per hectare (because you multiplied by 106 and then 1000) when it should have been 12.25 million just by reading it straight off.

And then if you convert that to acres instead of hectares you get over 5.5 million calories per acre. Ten times what you thought it was.

I think I need a break and big mug of cocoa...

He didn't appear to be using permaculture techniques in his gardening, either. And he still outproduced the prevalent factory-in-the-field system. This is just a guy tilling his garden, basically killing the soil, planting his seeds, and harvesting and eating the produce. And he's showing the disparity. Imagine what WE'RE going to do with the GAMCOD lazy gardening video! I'm even more excited, now.

j

Kim Goodwin wrote:This video might help people who are interested in GAMCOD:

It shows how efficient gardening is.  It's beyond what most people imagine.

This man grew a year's worth of food on 1400 sq ft.  To round out the diet nutritionally, he had his "ghost acre"  - chickens that were raised off site for eggs.

GAMCOD is sort of like this project, except with the focus on calories.  Calories are what will make the GAMCOD results apply more directly to the "Feed the World" agricultural views.  I think that no matter how anyone does it, if it's in accordance with the proposed GAMCOD rules, it looks like it will be vastly more nutritionally fulfilling than the typical US diet.  So I think we are on a great track here!

When I was picturing in my head my garden space for GAMCOD I was thinking like a dozen species stacked on top of each other. This is why counting the calories per acre was confusing to me.

I wanted to do this for a number of reasons:
- I have no idea what my dirt will support and throwing a dozens species at it seemed a safer call
- Stacking species in vertical space to get more bang for your square footage and companion planting benifits
- Actually eating the things that come out of the garden. I'd like to not just eat peas for a month
- A beautiful example of permaculture aka pretty factor
- Being able to harvest and replant continuously

This is why I was visualizing calories per weight. For my vision it would be documenting and weighing things as I eat them.  

My 2 cents :)

Ashley Cottonwood wrote:When I was picturing in my head my garden space for GAMCOD I was thinking like a dozen species stacked on top of each other. This is why counting the calories per acre was confusing to me.

This kind of setup was in my head too, and comparing the actual calories grown on the 200 square feet by the different gardeners.

So how does the math go with the counting calories per acre?

Let's forget the "messy polyculture" way of planting for a second and imagine that I planted 40 square feet of flat area with just potatoes.

Is this how the math goes:

I measure the space that the plants take, then weight the harvest, and look up how many calories there is in potatoes.
Count the calories I grew per the 40 square feet, then count how big of a part it is from my 200 square feet..
And then scale it up as if I had an acre instead of the 200 square feet, to get to the calories per acre?

Is that it or am I just missing something?

I think ultimately, if the point is to show how easy it is to grow a million Calories on an acre of dirt, we'll figure the Calories we grow on our 200 sqft and multiply it by 217.8 to get the amount we would have grown if we had been tending an acre.

Christopher Weeks wrote:I think ultimately, if the point is to show how easy it is to grow a million Calories on an acre of dirt, we'll figure the Calories we grow on our 200 sqft and multiply it by 217.8 to get the amount we would have grown if we had been tending an acre.

Well that makes more sense. My brain was in the mode of "tracking the progress through the growing season" and counting it the whole time by the calories per acre!

There will probably be 40 harvests in one year.  

With each harvest, there will probably be five different things harvested.  Take a pic or vid of the harvest.  Then take one of the crops, say potatoes, weight them and look up the calories per pound.  

Harvest #17 ends up with 1432 calories.  

Probably good to maintain a "journal thread" here in this forum.  Complete with harvest counts.

I have a question about pumpkins.

The calories of pumpkin flesh are pretty weak, something like 30 - 33. Meanwhile, the seeds have calorie counts in the 100s.

To accurately measure our calorie count, is it suggested we process our pumpkins and measure the weight of the flesh and then the seeds, separately?

...Asking for a friend.

Stephen B. Thomas wrote:I have a question about pumpkins.

The calories of pumpkin flesh are pretty weak, something like 30 - 33. Meanwhile, the seeds have calorie counts in the 100s.

To accurately measure our calorie count, is it suggested we process our pumpkins and measure the weight of the flesh and then the seeds, separately?

...Asking for a friend.

What I did one year when I was tracking garden production was that for each variety of squash I 1. Weighed the raw whole squash
2. Processed into cooked flesh and seeds (without added water)
3. Weighed the processed flesh and seeds separately
4. Calculated the flesh calories and seed calories using usda tables.
5. Calculated calorie to raw weight based on the data for each variety.

I did this just a couple samples, then for rest of season just weighed the whole squash assuming that ratio of processed calories to raw weight would average out the same for all later squash of same variety.

For calculating squash meat/flesh calories, I am wondering for accuracy, the dry matter percentage is a better indication. For example,

summer squash is picked young with high water content, it's calories level is at 17 kcal/100g
Pumpkin is more matured and has a higher DM, it's calories level is at 26 kcal/100g
Winter squash: more dry and dense at 34 kcal/100g.

In the list above all winter squashes are the same. I grow a kind of Butternut squash and the fruits take two weeks to reach full size and another 6-8 weeks to have woody stems (aka carbohydrates transported from leaves stop). I would say dry matter wise, it is higher than other winter squashes that require less time to mature. It is also reflected in its storage longevity because there is more carbohydrates per weight to burn. Anyway, I am going to assign a higher number of 45 kcal/100g to fully matured butternut, I get the number online too.

To me, it is not about calories.  Instead it is about nutrition.

What is the most nutricious vegetables?

I vote for cabbage, beets and carrots with beans added for the protein ...

Anne Miller wrote:To me, it is not about calories.  Instead it is about nutrition.

Yes but this is for the GAMCOD experiment, which is all about growing calories.

Grow A Million Calories From Dirt is the whole point of the exercise, and this thread is all about choosing which vegetables to grow and how to figure out the calorie count.

May Lotito wrote:For calculating squash meat/flesh calories, I am wondering for accuracy, the dry matter percentage is a better indication. For example,

summer squash is picked young with high water content, it's calories level is at 17 kcal/100g
Pumpkin is more matured and has a higher DM, it's calories level is at 26 kcal/100g
Winter squash: more dry and dense at 34 kcal/100g.

In the list above all winter squashes are the same. I grow a kind of Butternut squash and the fruits take two weeks to reach full size and another 6-8 weeks to have woody stems (aka carbohydrates transported from leaves stop). I would say dry matter wise, it is higher than other winter squashes that require less time to mature. It is also reflected in its storage longevity because there is more carbohydrates per weight to burn. Anyway, I am going to assign a higher number of 45 kcal/100g to fully matured butternut, I get the number online too.

The seeds are really where the calories are at, though. Seeds come in at more than 500 kCal per 100 gm, compared to less than 50 kCal per 100 gm for the flesh:

https://fdc.nal.usda.gov/fdc-app.html#/food-details/2515380/nutrients