Video - Why Don't We Eat Chestnuts If They're Everywhere?

Billions of glossy brown nuts lie crushed on city sidewalks. The nuts you see are actually toxic horse chestnuts, not the sweet American chestnuts that once fed a continent.

Before 1904, American chestnuts made up a quarter of eastern hardwood forests, dropping tons of sweet, edible nuts every autumn. Native peoples and settlers harvested them as a staple food and fed pigs on the forest floor. But a fungal blight introduced on imported Asian trees wiped out four billion trees in forty years, collapsing entire ecosystems.

City planners replaced the lost food trees with fast-growing, fungus-immune horse chestnuts, whose seeds contain aesculin—a toxin that ruptures human red blood cells. Meanwhile, efforts to breed blight-resistant American chestnuts continue, alongside secret groves of survivors guarded deep in the Appalachians

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CHAPTERS
00:00 Browns Everywhere
00:09 City Carpets
00:26 Shopper Leaving
00:41 Free Pile Ignored
01:07 Famine and Forest
01:38 Horse Chestnuts
02:34 Toxic Twins Everywhere
03:22 Vast Appalachian Forest
05:04 Appalachian Economy
08:01 Chestnut Civilization
10:46 Invading Fungus
13:19 New Sprouts
15:00 Backcross Breeding
16:44 Secret Trees Alive
17:06 Poison Cells Burst
18:24 Bread on Tree
19:26 Orange Cankers
20:12 Horse Chestnuts
20:51 Edible vs Asphalt
21:40 Extinction Begins

The blight really is one of the more depressing chapters in American forest history. There are breeding programmes now trying to bring back the American chestnut by crossing with blight-resistant Chinese chestnuts. Not quite the same tree but apparently getting closer with each generation.

I was one of those little kids who liked carrying around the horse chestnuts once they were taken out of their spines haha.

So I did try roasted chestnuts once, at the Portland Nursery at the apple festival they used to have each year.  I always went, but one year when I was in college they had roasted chestnuts to sample.  I didn't prefer it.  I think it might be an acquired taste, I'd love to try again someday.

Another song the video didn't mention which has roasting chestnuts in it is Sleigh Ride, at the fireplace where we watch the chestnuts pop, pop pop pop.