The field of wild foods, first popularized by Euell Gibbons in the 1960s, has been languishing from neglect. For a field with so much potential, wild foods remain a mystery after almost fifty years of books on the subject. People buy books and try to study the subject but come away with little real understanding or useful knowledge. In addition to lack of information, there is a disconnect between what is said about these plants and what reality seems to serve you, the reader. Pleasant dining experiences are few. Anyone can write a book on wild foods, and almost anyone has.
The effort to aid the reader in plant identification is almost as bad. Cryptic technical descriptions have little meaning for the layperson. Line drawings of plants typically are not useful unless the reader already knows the plant. Photograph-based identification guides are holdovers from wildflower guides. Wildflower guides are concerned with flowers at the neglect of other parts of the plant. Plants are complex organisms that change shape as they grow, often with variable leaves, stems, and overall form. Many species have more than one form, so a single photograph gives you only a fraction, a small clue, to identifying a plant.
Many wild food guides are nothing more than catalogs of plants with no real detail written by authors who have never experienced what they are writing about. The more plants covered in a book results in less useful information per plant. Most books have one to three sentences describing the edibility of a plant. A few rare books take a chapter to describe how a plant is edible and how to make the best use of that knowledge. The handful of great authors are the ones who write based on experience and provide the detail to guide you through all aspects of wild food knowledge—identifying, gathering, transporting, processing, preparing, and serving.
This book was written and designed in every way to serve you, the reader—to overcome directly all the limitations listed above. The goal is to take the mystery, not the romance, out of wild foods, to give you the tools to move forward with confidence, and to have lots of success actually using wild foods. Whole chapters are devoted to single plants. Designed as a pictorial manual, photographs are plentiful, showing you different growth stages from seedling to fully mature plant. All edible stages are shown as well as processing techniques and finished dishes.
To satisfy the need to supply detail, this book represents only the beginning of the plants I will cover over the years. This is the first in an intended series of themed books covering different topics in the area of wild edible plants and other foragables. As the first, I selected easy-to-identify common plants that everyone in North America will be able to find somewhere between their yard and the local neighborhood. Included are important wild greens and vegetables eaten by our European ancestors since the beginning of time. Many of them grow as weeds in the typical garden. The benefit of local plants is that you can have everyday access. If you can grab your salad from the backyard in a matter of minutes, you are more likely to eat these plants than if you have to drive two hours to reach more exotic habitats. That is how our European ancestors ate, from foraged plants growing around their homes.
Historically, people learned about wild foods from their elders. Kids would tag along as parents gathered wild foods. By direct observation and parental guidance, children learned the plants from seedling to seed production. They saw first-hand how to judge when the collectable parts were perfect for picking; how to handle and transfer the take; how to clean it, process it, and prepare it for eating. In lieu of learning from elders today, this book attempts to provide the same content in a different format. You are learning from a career professional who writes from experience.
Botanical names are based on the plants cataloged at the Integrated Taxonomic Information System offered through a partnership between the United States, Canadian, and Mexican federal agencies. Plant names were verified at http://www.itis.gov/index.html.
The maps were generated from several sources, including but not limited to the personal experience of the author, USDA Plants Database (http://plants.usda.gov/), NatureServe Explorer (http://www.natureserve.org/explorer/), Natural Resources Canada (http://www.planthardiness.gc.ca/), the Biology of Canadian Weeds book series—Reprints from the Canadian Journal of Plant Science, and plant distribution maps offered by Web sites of individual states.