eli5 : Why can’t we (humans) eat wood? It contains glucose, and termites can eat it for example! (Even if raw wood would be pretty hard to chew, we could mix it down into some kind of paste or powder, so idk)
In: Biology
To be a little more specific about it, think of a body of an animal like you would a budget. Every body has a set amount of energy resources that it can use for certain functions. Think D&D skill points or a fallout/skyrim character generator.
Animals that can eat wood and cellulose plant fibers, like cattle and other herbivores have spec’ed a majority of their points into their gut, they spend most of their time chewing and digesting food. Their gastrointestinal tract is massive compared to their body size. Cows have a 4 chambered stomach, and a long intestine to squeeze literally every last bit of nutrient out of grass(grass is very low calorie) This leaves fewer points to put into other energy dependent things like a large brain.
Humans have one of the largest brain to body ratio’s in the animal kingdom. We’re totally playing life as an INT main playthrough. The trade off to that is our gut tract is a pretty simple tube that is pretty bad at digesting complex starches like cellulose so most of it just passes straight through (corn). Luckily we’ve figured out how to cook our food to get more nutrients out of it, and have figured out how to find and grow the most nutrient rich plants on the planet.
TLDR If we had a gut system to eat grass and wood, we wouldn’t have the metabolic energy left to have as large a brain as we do.
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