Human Grazing Park is a park that is filled only with edible plants that you can spend all day walking through and eating. They would be plants that don't have very much nutritian so that you have to keep walking all day to find enough food to sustain you. It would be very expensive unless we find a new planet that can sustain edible plants and can get there cheaply, or unless a lot of people die off here and the population is greatly reduced.
-- JesusHChrist, Nov 23 2014

Star Tribune, Minneapolis (2014) http://www.startrib...olis/269634761.html
"The rise in foraging has the Minneapolis Park Board taking a look at landscape changes." [jutta, Nov 24 2014]

New York Times (2011) http://www.nytimes....html?pagewanted=all
Favorite quote: “If people decide that they want to make their salads out of our plants, then we’re not going to have any chipmunks,” [jutta, Nov 24 2014]

Forest gardening http://en.wikipedia...ki/Forest_gardening
A system of plant clutivation that closely approximates this idea. [TomP, Nov 25 2014]

If the park has plants, then it has worms, grubs and insects and the circle grows. Concrete, glass and steel, are the parks that really slow down the healthy circles.
-- wjt, Nov 23 2014


Might as well just eat plants when concerns for obesity and overweight actually encourages the removal of food from food. Can't put too much food in food anymore, that's too foody. Incidentally I don't walk around with my shoes on because then the vacuum cleaner will get too full.
-- rcarty, Nov 23 2014


//a lot of people die off here and the population is greatly reduced //

You're on to someting good there.
-- 8th of 7, Nov 23 2014


So, not a fenced-in suburb for the use of tigers?
-- pocmloc, Nov 23 2014


Trays of celery, and onions, and radishes could left as rewards to those taking the long way round.
-- popbottle, Nov 23 2014


I think this is something people would pay to visit.

Throw in a campgrounds and call it "Paleo Park" or "The Paleo Experience". Stay for a week, loose some weight, get some hiking in.

Maybe have a secret McDonalds somewhere that everybody would try to find after a couple of days.

But seriously, very clever this.
-- doctorremulac3, Nov 24 2014


Where I live, "human grazing" also goes by the name of "foraging". Near big cities you can probably find:
- ways of attending dinners made from food others have foraged for you
- people who teach it
- debate over how to stop it (see the 2011 NYT article)
- discussion about how to make it easier!
-- jutta, Nov 24 2014


// Throw in a campgrounds and call it "Paleo Park" or "The Paleo Experience". Stay for a week, loose some weight, get some hiking in.

Burn calories fleeing from animatronic sabre-toothed tigers*.

*dinosaurs at bible belt locations

(Re original idea, it's great.)
-- the porpoise, Nov 24 2014


[+]

but //only// edible plants means quite a bit of maintenance. There is, I imagine, a raft of non-edibles that otherwise keep the biome balanced, mineral-wise (?) There's the constant watering in dry spells that would need to be done, etc.

I recently scanned an article claiming that the planet of hunter-gatherers would only support half a billion people.
-- FlyingToaster, Nov 24 2014


This idea isn't really hunting and gathering. It's casual curated farming.
-- the porpoise, Nov 24 2014


I thought this would be a park full of cacti and other prickly plants which would graze people as they walked through it.
-- hippo, Nov 25 2014


And don't forget to figure out which mushrooms are edible!
-- xandram, Nov 25 2014


The closest thing I know of this in existance is a forest garden. It's a very similar idea, though I suppose that some stuff in a forest garden might need cooking, or is planted for the benefit of other plants around it. [link]
-- TomP, Nov 25 2014


//middle management, hairdressers and office equipment sanitizers //

Don't forget the Security Guards.

<belated obligatory Soylent Green reference>
-- 8th of 7, Nov 25 2014


Sepp Holtzer is a genius in Permaculture and has a farm in Germany. At one point the town decided to stop him from selling directly off his farm, so passed a law to ban direct sales. Sepp then started farm tours where you would pay a rather high price to visit his farm under the unwritten understanding that you would then steal food and bring it home.

There is a guy in Canada at Miracle Farms who creates shopping aisles on his farm so that during a week, all the food in one aisle is ripe, so you just go down and pick what you want.

The only downside or for evolution an upside is that people are stupid, so if you have one of these areas, then people will try to eat anything they find, like they are in Willi Wonka's factory and will see an errant mushroom and just gobble it down and die.

Still, I will be making one of these over the next decade, so I have to give it a bun.
-- MisterQED, Dec 02 2014



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