Maple syrup is tree blood. Kind like tree vampirism.
I don’t think wood smells like food. But I wonder… apparently termites have a bunch of gut bacteria to digest wood. Maybe if you eat raw termites and bark beetles, you can then eat some sawdust. If you continue the process eventually you may be able to eat wood or paper with your own gut biome. Maybe start with a termite, sawdust, and banana smoothie and move up from there. Best of luck.
For the majority of human history, we've eaten around wood (around a campfire, a hearth, etc), it makes sense it would become intertwined with our food palette
We can, and do, eat wood. It's listed as "cellulose" in the ingredients, and it's in everything. Your ice cream, your bread, probably up in yo closet doin your Mamma right now
It might interest you to know that we do eat wood when we eat that sprinkled parmesan or romano cheese in the plastic containers: It contains wood to prevent the cheese from clumping (and it counts as fiber)
Wood is notoriously hard to digest. After wood evolved, it took millions of years before funghi and bacteria evolved the ability to decompose it. And that's why we have oil now.
You can. I know a guy who eats a birch log every year. He literally sits on the couch pulling splinters from the log and chews on them while watching tv. He also grinds his egg shells and mixes with oatmeal.
There's many aromatic compounds in organic chemistry that are among the most toxic we know. Basically I learned that a sweet teasing smell in the lab means you better get out there, just to be on the safe side...