We eat some thistles, which have basically the same issue - see artichokes. Gotta boil them to deactivate the needles, though I have no idea how the thistle and nettle needles compare biologically. Anyways, I guess my point is that it shouldn't be too hard to get Americans to eat these.
Every time I go out for hotpot, I get as many greens as possible; I love boiling them down in a tasty broth and chowing down on an entire football field of vegetables, sometimes wrapped around a piece of meat. I could see adding them in here easily.
There are also a lot of dishes you can add a big handful of chopped, frozen spinach to for some additional nutrition. These would be another incredible option in scenarios like that.
Blending it down to add a more herby flavor to a puree, or to bulk up a pesto, or something along those lines could work well.
It’s not uncommon to eat nettles in the PNW! I knew people who would fold the leaves a specific way to break the stingers off so you could eat the leaves raw even.
You can scrape the needles off artichoke hearts, and you can buy them canned with the needles already removed. This isn't practical with stinging nettles.
On nettles, they're trichomes[1]. Probably somewhat similar to a skin tag? So it deactivates them by weakening the cell wall, just like when you cook the rest of the plant down.
>Both trichomes and root hairs [...] are lateral outgrowths of a single cell of the epidermal layer.
The mineralization is just on the tips of the trichomes.
When dry they are irritating if rubbed against the skin but not stingy anymore and when boiled they have at most a sandy nature as the trichomes soften and can't penetrate as well.
Every time I go out for hotpot, I get as many greens as possible; I love boiling them down in a tasty broth and chowing down on an entire football field of vegetables, sometimes wrapped around a piece of meat. I could see adding them in here easily.
There are also a lot of dishes you can add a big handful of chopped, frozen spinach to for some additional nutrition. These would be another incredible option in scenarios like that.
Blending it down to add a more herby flavor to a puree, or to bulk up a pesto, or something along those lines could work well.