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So I gathered ~2 lbs of acorns from my local trees. There were just too many to not finally experiment with processing and eating them. First step is drying. I'm doing some sun drying, because my dang oven won't go below 175 (150F will permanently alter the starches).

Had to check, and yes Claude was able to CAD model a crushing machine as I described it verbally.

In his posthumous book "The Dawn of Everything", David Graeber wrote that the Ohlone people seem to have chosen acorn foraging as an alternative to agriculture, to avoid the need to slave like tribes further north chose to.

Most attempts to automate the processing of acorns to flour have been stopped by the very slow process of cold water tannin extraction. There are some strains of oak (especially in Portugal) that seem to have little or no tannins, but they haven't caught on broadly yet.

One reason oaks are perhaps not considered often as a target for genetic engineering food supply is the slowness of the feedback loop. A mature oak can take 50 years to grow. So it might create an extremely stable and draught tolerant food source, but it's slow to experiment.