Leaf curd- protein alternative

[vegimator]

http://eattheweeds.com/forum/index.php?topic=656.0

Leaf concentrate (l/c) is a nutritious food made by mechanically separating indigestible fiber and soluble anti-nutrients from the protein, vitamins, and minerals in fresh green leaves...The nutritional breakdown from the original work was that 20 grams of powder would provide 12 grams of protein. The amounts of vitamins and minerals (such as 440 mgs of calcium and 49 mg of iron) are impressive.

Sounds like a pain in the ass to make unless you have a juicer. You take your leaf juice, squirt it into boiling water and then skim off the resulting curd and dry it.

Still, it's probably a hell of a lot cheaper than vega or what have you and it contains plenty of high quality protein and loads of vitamins and minerals.

[Catt Queen]

Think I'll stick with spirulina and pea protein.

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[JP]

I think that is a great example of innovative approaches though, and these are needed for veganism to go forwards. Might be experimental now, but who knows after few years...

[Hiking Fox]

I tried this at a festival about 10 years ago and it was lovely. Tasted like thick broccoli and pea soup.

[Herbsman]

Think I'll stick with spirulina and pea protein.

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You know, that's really annoying. Can't you turn it off?

Leaf curd sounds like a great idea to me. I wonder if it will be available commercially, and cheap?

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[Hiking Fox]

I got mine from these people:

http://leafcycle.co.uk/leafu.htm

I love the way they use nettles to make quality plant protein. Feeding the world with nettles really rocks as an idea.

Posted on TRACTOR BEAST Desktop PC running Suse Linux, with Mozilla Firefox.

[thestoatyone]

Sounds a touch hippy-ish, but feeding the world from leftovers has some real-world appeal. Proper sci-fi stuff. Anyone know how much it costs?

[Catt Queen]

Think I'll stick with spirulina and pea protein.

Sent from my BlackBerry 9360 using Tapatalk

You know, that's really annoying. Can't you turn it off?

Leaf curd sounds like a great idea to me. I wonder if it will be available commercially, and cheap?

Sent from my Microsoft® Windows XP PRO™ (MCE 2005) Edition Desktop PC using Opera 11.51

I could, but considering how rarely I post from it, I really can't be bothered.

[Fallen_Horse]

LEAF CURD!

[Big Foot Marty]

do the same, with similar protein content and make green smoothies, nettles, purslane, collards, and other weeds and harvest

of course not that useful where powder is useful...but most other uses work.

nettles are an amazing weed

[veganoo]

I got mine from these people:
http://leafcycle.co.uk/leafu.htm

Leafcycle don't really promote their leafu sales very well...the link to buy it is hidden away at the bottom of this page:
http://www.leafcycle.co.uk/eatgreens.htm
It costs 7 GBP for 100g (4oz) of dried leafu for mail order
They have a great nutrition table for leafu on that page though.

If you want to make your own, we have published a "how to make leafu" guide here:
http://www.plantfoods.org/demos/leafu/index.html

and if you want some leafu recipes / ideas for how to eat leafu, have a look at our "10 things to do with leafu" page:
http://www.veganoo.net/2012/06/10-things-you-can-do-with-leafu-leaf.html

[beforewisdom]

This is very interesting from a "look what they/we can do" perspective ( thanks for post vegimator! ), but I don't see the practical point of it. Twelve grams of protein isn't that much. A cup of cooked beans will give you more. A calcium citrate supplement or one of the many vegan fortified foods would also give you about as much calcium.

I thought of the overpopulated world aspect to it like someone else mentioned. I'm guessing many sci-fi authors were never into eating things other than standard western diets. Why would an overpopulated world eat texturized yeast, texturized mushrooms, soylent green ( the processed seaweed variety ) when they could just grow beans and grains.

Processing leaves that people can't eat ( tree leaves ) or can't significant amounts of ( spinach, etc ) seems like it would be a solution for a very desperate world with loads of people and a lot of agricultural land destroyed.

Who knows, we may get there 7 billion people and growing, global climate change, soil erosion and pollution.

Ugh! Sorry. It is Friday, have a good weekend everyone.

Thanks for the interesting heads up vegimator!

[beforewisdom]

I think that is a great example of innovative approaches though, and these are needed for veganism to go forwards. Might be experimental now, but who knows after few years...

I have a number of vegan friends who would say the opposite, that convincing more people to go vegan is made harder by the mistaken notion people have that vegans have to eat leaves and twigs.

[veganoo]

convincing more people to go vegan is made harder by the mistaken notion people have that vegans have to eat leaves and twigs.

Vegans don't need to eat leafu any more than they need to eat spirulina, but it's just another food option that happens to have a good nutritional profile. If you bought it as a stock cube you wouldn't perceive it as a crank food any more. By the time your friends see it on sale, that's probably how they'll see it.

[thestoatyone]

convincing more people to go vegan is made harder by the mistaken notion people have that vegans have to eat leaves and twigs.

Vegans don't need to eat leafu any more than they need to eat spirulina, but it's just another food option that happens to have a good nutritional profile. If you bought it as a stock cube you wouldn't perceive it as a crank food any more. By the time your friends see it on sale, that's probably how they'll see it.

I can easily see both sides of this; on the one hand I do my bit to reassure people that veganism is easy by stuffing my face with biscuits, homemade cake, decent packed lunches etc. On the other hand, this stuff can be made from nettles; Those things grow in enormous quantities on some of the worst and most marginal land. If anything is a sustainable foodstuff it's them. (p.s. £7 per 100 grams, bit pricey innit? Maybe that'll come own in time...)