Recently, I made a social media post asking why we eat some wood (almonds) and not other wood (teak, mahogany). This raised some questions, so I figured a slightly longer form medium would be appropriate to address some questions and concerns about what wood we can and cannot eat. What follows is my non-comprehensive list of things that is edible wood and things that is inedible wood.

Edible Wood

Anything hard and dry, tastes good

• Almonds
• Pine nuts (literally from pine trees but somehow okay??)
• Most nuts, actually. (The clear exception is, of course, Grape-Nuts.)
• Cinnamon
• Coconut
• A little bit of sawdust
• All beans (coffee, black, cocoa, vanilla, rice¹)
• Bay leaves (we don’t eat them but we let them swim in our soup?)
• Cloves (nature’s wooden nails we eat)
• Nutmeg (the grated cheese of the wood world but only for desserts)
• Maple syrup (tree juice we decided was fine)
• Cardamom (tiny wood pellets that make chai taste good²)
• Bamboo shoots (baby wood that’s somehow okay. Less ethical than eating veal because all baby cows go to hell anyway)

Inedible wood

Anything hard and dry, doesn’t taste good.

• Trees (too woody to eat)
• Cedar planks (forbidden, but decent gum feel)
• Mahogany (cannot eat, it is the inner-flesh of a nice Volvo)
• A lot of sawdust
• IKEA table (technically edible but frowned upon due to woke)
• Guitar (music wood that society has deemed “too important” to eat)
• Baseball bat (sport wood, would be a waste to eat)
• Pencil (wood we write with instead of eat, for some reason)
• Book (smart wood, possibly made of pencil (which makes it wood))

I hope this helps clarify my position. Thank you for your attention.

God bless America,

Sam