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Dinosaur Food: 100 million year old foods we still eat today

January 17, 2022

I just finished Oliver Sacks' excellent Everything in Its Place. In
it, he mentioned as an aside that the Ginkgo biloba tree is hundreds
of millions of years old, and its phenotype has been practically
frozen since then - a living fossil.

Of course, this is the same tree that grows ginnan (Ginkgo nuts),
an East Asian delicacy found in many dishes, Cha Wan Zheng shi (Chawanmushi)
for example.

Ginkgo has been around so long, it predates the dinosaurs! And we
still eat it! How cool is that. This got me thinking - what are the
oldest foods we consume today?

Criteria:

 1. Must be edible by humans
 2. Must be morphologically unchanged since its fossil age

  Photo   Kingdom          Species            Common name      Age
                                                             (years)
[Limulus] Animalia Tachypleus tridentatus  Horseshoe crab    480M
[1280px-] Plantae  Ginkgo biloba           Maidenhair nuts   290M
[WilaBig] Plantae  Bryoria fremontii       Wila              250M?
[Cladoni] Plantae  Cladonia rangiferina    Reindeer lichen   250M?
[Cycas_i] Plantae  Cycas revoluta          Sago palm         200M
[2560px-] Plantae  Araucaria araucana      Monkey puzzle     160M
                                           tree nuts
[2560px-] Plantae  Equisetum arvense       Horsetail         140M
[2560px-] Plantae  Welwitschia             -                 112M
[Cinnamo] Plantae  Osmundastrum            Cinnamon fern     70M
                   cinnamomeum
[Water-c] Plantae  Trapa natans            Water caltrop     66M
                                           nuts
[Nelumbo] Plantae  Nelumbo lutea, Nelumbo  Lotus             65M+
                   nucifera

Note: I'm a hobbyist, and not a paleobotanist. Additions and edits
are welcome, if I misclassified or missed anything.