“When the Elders dine upon the grass of the Earth,
they shall be full of fiber but empty of wisdom.”
— WLBOTT Abbey Digestive Codex, Vol. 2
Following up on yesterday’s blott about the diet of cows and elephants, WLBOTT wonders: can people eat grass?
WLBOTT:
Just for references purposes, what would happen to a human if they ate a large bowl of St. Augustine lawn clippings? Would it matter if the grass was boiled first?
Elder G:
Excellent question, Elder JZ. Let’s explore this from both the biological and culinary-cautionary perspectives:
1. Why Humans and Lawn Clippings Don’t Mix
Humans lack the enzyme cellulase, which is required to break down cellulose — the structural carbohydrate that makes up most of grass.
- Cellulose passes right through us like dietary fiber.
- The nutrients locked inside (sugars, amino acids) remain largely unavailable.
So eating raw grass is a bit like chewing on cardboard salad: you’ll get bulk, but not sustenance.
2. What Happens in the Stomach
- Mechanical irritation: Grass blades are fibrous and can cause stomach cramps or bloating.
- Digestive inefficiency: You might feel temporarily full, but the body can’t extract meaningful calories.
- Potential toxicity: Some grasses (including lawn varieties) contain trace pesticides, fertilizers, or mold spores — which can cause nausea, vomiting, or diarrhea if ingested in large amounts.
3. Does Boiling Help?
Boiling grass changes the chemistry a little, but not enough to make it digestible:
- It softens the fibers and leaches out some chlorophyll and sugars, producing a greenish “broth.”
- However, cellulose remains intact. Humans still can’t break it down.
- The resulting “grass soup” would taste like hot hay water — a faintly vegetal bitterness, and possibly a whiff of lawnmower exhaust if you’re nostalgic.
Boiling does have one real advantage:
- It reduces microbial load and pesticide residues, so it’s less likely to make you sick.
Still, it’s not food — more of a survival emergency experiment (or an avant-garde WLBOTT appetizer gone wrong).
4. Estimated Outcome of the Experiment
If Elder JimZim, in a moment of curiosity, consumed a large bowl of boiled St. Augustine lawn clippings:
- Likely effects: mild nausea, stomach ache, maybe some “green burps,” and an intimate afternoon with the nearest bathroom.
- Caloric gain: negligible — maybe 10–15 kcal total.
- Fiber intake: heroic.
5. Why Cows Can and We Can’t
Cows (and elephants) rely on microbial fermentation to digest cellulose into fatty acids. Humans lack this system; our gut microbes live in the colon, too far downstream to extract much energy.
So a cow could make butter from that grass; we’d just make regret.
Sally Does Market Research
Given our large pool of unpaid interns, Sally T. Intern invited her colleagues to the WLBOTT Intern Break Room, to enjoy the grass soup tasting menu.
Kitchen Prep
The Tasting Menu
Scenes from the Abby
A Literary Reference
Boiled grass is mentioned Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s incredible book One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.
Boiled grass (or thin grass soup) appears as part of the meager, almost symbolic “meals” in the Soviet labor camp. It’s not so much food as an emblem of deprivation – sustenance reduced to symbolism.
The rumor had it that it was the Chinese who had given the authorities the idea of serving boiled grass, instead of porridge. A bowl full of it weighed more than half a pound, but when you had eaten it you were still hungry. The good thing about it was that it had no taste – hot, or cold.
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Elder G nets it out for us:
Boiled Grass in the Gulag Context
In the novel’s grim realism, grass and fish-head soup represent:
- Starvation rations: barely enough calories to keep men alive while performing brutal labor in freezing conditions.
- The erosion of dignity: prisoners are reduced to creatures who must scrape bowls clean and value even a floating fish eye.
- Resilience through ritual: Shukhov, the protagonist, treats his portion of soup with near-religious care — blowing on it, savoring each spoonful, extracting meaning from a tasteless broth.
Solzhenitsyn, who experienced the camps firsthand, wasn’t exaggerating. Prisoners in the Gulag sometimes boiled weeds, straw, or pine needles to survive — anything to stave off hunger.
Symbolic Resonance
The boiled grass in that book has become shorthand for:
- The human will to endure.
- The transformation of humiliation into mindfulness.
- The thin line between civilization and survival.
It’s astonishing that Shukhov’s single day — bounded by cold, hunger, and work — feels so complete, even triumphant, precisely because he finds small victories in moments like eating that thin soup slowly.
