Everything You Need to Know About Tiger Nuts - Study says

Some call them a weed, some call them a superfood. Why not both?

What are tiger nuts?

Tiger nuts are the edible tubers—a thick part of the stem that grows underground—of a plant called yellow nutsedge. If you're unfamiliar with yellow nutsedge, congratulations: the grasslike plant (actually part of the sedge family) has been called "one of the absolute worst weeds in the world." In the U.S. the problem has been most severe in the southeast, where it's the oldest invasive-species story in the book: introduced for some innocent-seeming reason—in this case as a potential vegetable crop, in the 1850s—the yellow nutsedge commenced to spread and spread and spread, and nowadays inflicts millions of dollars yearly in agricultural damage. (It's native to the eastern Mediterranean and North Africa.)

You expect me to eat an invasive weed?

Well, we are on record in favor of weed consumption. So is Mother Earth News, which in a 1981 story hailed the foraged tiger nut as a delicacy—it's known to hippies as an "earth almond"—and counseled readers to seek it out "along the banks of streams and rivers, the edges of ponds, lakes, and marshes and right in your own well-watered garden, where you may have cursed it as a prolific weed."

But people have been eating tiger nuts, also known as chufa, for far, far longer. An Oxford University study published in 2014 found that early hominins—humanity's ancestors—survived in East Africa, between 2.4 and 1.4 million years ago, on a diet of tiger nuts; the authors calculated that the hominins could get about 80 percent of their daily caloric intake from the tubers. You see why it's a hit with the paleo crowd. Ancient Egypt relied on tiger nuts not just as a snack but medicinally and as an ointment, as an enema, and as an air freshener, according to a 2002 paper that dubbed the tiger nut the "snack food of the gods."

"After a long day of ruling over his earthly subjects, there is nothing a Pharaoh liked more than to curl up in his comfy temple, read a good scroll ... and munch on a bowl of delicious roasted and ground tiger nuts mixed with honey," wrote the paper's author, Michael S. Defelice.

How do tiger nuts taste?

Mild and sweet, sort of like coconut.

Who else eats them?

For centuries in the area of Valencia, Spain, the drink horchata has been made from tiger nuts—it's locally called horchata de chufa—and is still available in the region to this day. Chufa's eaten in West Africa, including ground into a tiger-nut milk. Fishermen use tiger nuts as bait in the U.K. (where the tubers were also eaten as a snack during World War II, when candy was rationed) and chufa, since it's rich in oils, has also been proposed as a source of biofuel.

And what's so great about them again?

They contain a type of prebiotic fiber called resistant starch, which doesn't break down until it reaches the large intestine, where it stimulates good bacteria. They also contain beneficial fatty acids, like those in olive oil or avocado oil, and are a source of potassium, vitamin E, and iron. Plus: low calories, low fat. Tiger nuts first gained popularity in the U.S. and U.K. among paleo and raw-foods enthusiast, who really took to that news about the ancient hominids, but now their profile is being raised more generally—as a snackable dried, raw version; as gluten-free tiger-nut flour; as dairy-free tiger-nut milk; etc—by a few companies including Organic Gemini and Na'vi Organics, plus a business that's just called Tiger Nuts.

Anything else?

Yellow nutsedge does have another devoted fan base in the U.S.: wild turkeys, for whom the sedge is recommended as a winter food crop. Waterfowl like it for the same reason. It's also used as hog pasture in the southeast; the hogs go after the tubers the same way they root for peanuts and, one assumes, truffles.