Caloric heroes rise from data, not guessing

The preliminary research I did to sanity check my basic premise contained several surprises. First: All the sources I could find about high calorie crops seem to have completely missed the seaweed option. Second: They all cited Jerusalem artichokes as one of the champion crops, even though it didn't make my top ten, once I'd factored in field area and time to harvest. And those surprises have taught me a useful lesson...

Finding the seaweed option was a bit of a fluke, to be honest. I remember reading long ago about seaweed being a nutritional marvel, and I was looking for information about that when I saw the calorie data, quite by accident. If not for that bit of serendipity, I might have continued blithely along without ever discovering the current rock star of my potential crop list.

But after a couple of days of patting myself on the back for my brilliance, I realized that there are still hundreds of crops I've never looked at. Maybe I should actually consult a database of crop info? Ya think?

And while I'm doing that, I'm sure one of the reasons seaweed wasn't on any of those other lists is that it isn't really considered a crop here, in North America. Wanna bet there are a few other crops out there that pack an even bigger punch? Maybe a fruit in Bangladesh? Or a tuber in Brazil?

Rather than trust rumors, guesses, and luck, I need to get a crop yield database and run these numbers again, looking for all the hidden gems. And to do it right, I've got to look at crop reports from every continent, not just the ones near my house.

This sounds obvious, now that I've said it out loud, but it's easy to let an early win trick you into thinking you've won the entire war. (In computer science, we call this getting stuck at a local minima.)

So, going forward, I'll be christening two new governing principles: 1. Let Data Reign — Whenever possible, pull decisions from hard data rather than “common knowledge.” 2. Go Wide — When basing decisions on data, be sure you've got all the data and not just some of it.

If you catch me violating either of those, do me a solid and call me out in the comments, would ya?