Do you need to process them to be edible? Some things, like poke-salad, are almost toxic without several steps (for those, its toxic levels of vit-A that you soak out). And some of it is desperation food... its edible, but nasty and only a great deal of poking can make it remotely tolerable. To be fair, I count turnips in that category too.

Saffron tastes exactly like dish soap. Bougies be crazy sometimes.

I think? all anybody commonly eats is the flower thing that sticks out the bud at the end. The pith and greens have to be cooked soft. The roots are small and the bulbs somehow aren't always there. So, not much trouble, not much reward, basically just lets you show off your AMAZING BUSHCRAFT!!!1

Acorns, on the other hand...

Originally posted by qwerm:

Originally posted by knighttemplar1960:

Edit: Cattail pollen would still have been gathered for use as a spice and the tubers would have been left alone for the next year's spice crop.

Spice? Now I wonder what they taste like...

Its tastes a lot like saffron. If you've never been able to afford saffron you can get kind of an idea by finding a flower in the very early spring called a crocus and eating unsalted roasted peanuts while smelling the crocus flowers.

You can get quite a bit of cat tail pollen from a single cat tail. If you catch the tail when its ripe but still green or just starting to turn brown you can get about a tablespoon of pollen per cat tail. When you harvest it you'll have to run it through a wire mesh sieve or a flour sifter to get rid of all the bits you don't want (like the fuzz and the bugs). Pollen season is only about a week long and the pollen doesn't keep long unless you freeze it.

To be honest most of the parts of a cat tail don't taste that good. The pollen and the youngest runners from the roots are the only parts that actually taste good. The tubers themselves are bland and boring and its hard to get the muddy flavor off of them. The green cat tails taste like something you would get from a 60's hippie health food store and the stalks would remind you of okra except slimier (boiled snot).

Originally posted by Thomas Riker:

Originally posted by knighttemplar1960:

Knows his ♥♥♥♥.

This guy knows his ♥♥♥♥.

Eh, I used to gather cat tails when I was fishing and they weren't biting. After the first couple times I stopped going after anything but the young shoots and the pollen.

Unripe corn dogs

The cat tails wouldn't make for suitably calory-rich food that a warrior must subsist on. We have your berries and mushrooms too, of course, but they are quickly demoted to ingredients of food rather than the meal itself. I don't know of any applications for cattails as ingredient but they would probably be inferior to other edibles we can forage for.

Originally posted by qwerm:

Spice? Now I wonder what they taste like...

Sawdust and cat fur.

Wait... you eat the other end? Huh. Today I learned.

Originally posted by vinyblaster:

In The Long Dark

I completely forgot that game existed. Played and loved the first EA build. I kinda feel like I just got a game for free.

Originally posted by qwerm:

Spice? Now I wonder what they taste like...

The "flour" tastes okay, just kinda like any slightly sweet grain with a little cooked spinach taste. Everything else tastes like cooked spinach. It's all good if you cook it with sausage grease, or at least some kind of grease and salt.

Originally posted by knighttemplar1960:

Knows his ♥♥♥♥.

This guy knows his ♥♥♥♥.

We don't eat the bugs in this game either... oh, wait, we do! :-)

Originally posted by Thomas Riker:

They're one of the very few things I regularly forage IRL. They're always present in this genre as decorations, but you can almost never eat them. Just seems odd.

In The Long Dark cattails are a very important resources.

Most games are not meant to simulate real life though. They are just mechanics meant to make for an engaging game.

Sure, cattails could be made edible, but we already have raspberries and mushrooms to do pretty much the same thing - it wouldn't introduce a new mechanic. Plus, you can create infinite cattails with the cultivator.

Originally posted by Thomas Riker:

By...whom? They're basic forage. And there is absolutely no way the old Norse weren't eating them. I'm sure everybody everywhere did up until widespread agriculture.

The discovery of South America and the potato pretty much made consuming cattail tubers obsolete. Potatoes grow in poorer soil, require less water, do better in both warmer and colder climates, produce far more tubers per plant, and do not degrade as quickly when stored.

Once a culture relies on agriculture instead of gathering, use of things like cattail tubers and acorn flour decrease since barley and wheat are more abundant, store more readily, and are easier to turn into flour. Since the Viking age was in the late iron age less flexible foods like cattail tubers would only have been gathered by poorer villages. The rich coastal settlements would have relied primarily on agriculture, fishing and animal husbandry and would have turned their noses up at cat tails as a poor person's food particularly since trying to use them to make alcohol is a tedious and messy project that requires the addition of barley for success. It would have been far easier to use the more abundant barley for the entire process.

Edit: Cattail pollen would still have been gathered for use as a spice and the tubers would have been left alone for the next year's spice crop.

Originally posted by knighttemplar1960:

Edit: Cattail pollen would still have been gathered for use as a spice and the tubers would have been left alone for the next year's spice crop.

Spice? Now I wonder what they taste like...

Generally they are not viewed as edible, and certainly not in Norse history

By...whom? They're basic forage. And there is absolutely no way the old Norse weren't eating them. I'm sure everybody everywhere did up until widespread agriculture.

Originally posted by Thomas Riker:

By...whom? They're basic forage. And there is absolutely no way the old Norse weren't eating them. I'm sure everybody everywhere did up until widespread agriculture.

Theyre generally viewed as not edible, usually by the same people who probably think dandelions are weeds instead of delicious salad ingredients.