Whether you are new to wild foods or are well versed in the topic, my intent is that you should find this book personal, practical, and fun to use. I write from personal experience and present information in a way intended to help you learn what you really need to know to be successful. By successful I mean that with time you will be able to identify the plants I cover, understand how to get the most out of them, and have satisfying culinary experiences as a result of your efforts. And that is the point, isn’t it? To go from the wild to something your taste buds recognize as good food.
I love wild foods, the whole idea of eating from the wild, the joy of being outdoors and being closer to the earth, and the adventure of the whole experience. Given all that, I do not sugarcoat what you need to know. When something I’ve read about wild foods is disingenuous or misleading, or doesn’t seem to work, I’ll let you know. If some taste or texture of something people might have eaten in the distant past is beyond what anyone would find acceptable today, I’ll let you know. So if you’ve been dissatisfied with books you may have read on this topic—those that have too few photographs or not enough information to be useful—then read on. My goal is to make wild foods user-friendly, rewarding, and fun.
This book is designed as a user manual. It is written from the perspective of a career professional in the area of wild foods. Not merely a field guide or a cookbook, it is intended to take you deeper into the secret world of plants. Each plant’s clear photographs are used to show you its development at all stages of growth. Captions with each photograph explain what you are looking at. Processing techniques are clearly illustrated. Foundational ways to prepare each food are given within a context that will allow you to improvise recipes. This manual is, in essence, a reverse field guide. It provides the means to learn identification directly from reading the chapters. Therefore, you do not struggle to identify plants when you are in the field; you recognize them and then verify your find by reviewing this book.
Wild greens, vegetables, and their seeds describe the foods offered by the plants in this book. For purposes of discussion, I am labeling leaves as greens (a particular kind of vegetable); three-dimensional parts like shoots, stems, leafy stems, roots, buds, and flowers as vegetables; and fruits with their seeds. I divide the selected plants into the following categories: foundation, tart, pungent, and bitter. In my view, combining elements from these different categories makes the best salads and cooked dishes, and provides a wider array of nutrients and potentially beneficial phytochemicals than eating from any single category alone.
Categorizing plants in distinct groups is difficult. Since the greens and vegetables provided by these plants can have many food applications (eaten raw, boiled, sautéed, creamed, etc.), they may fall under more than one category. So I’ve tried to place them in groups that make the most overall sense. For example, the pungent greens listed in this book are primarily mustards. So mustards earn their own grouping, even though some of them are also bitter, a different flavor category.
Gourmet quality, of course, depends on gathering the edible parts at their prime stage of growth and using those parts to their best advantage. Likeability depends on your unique array of taste buds and personal preference. For the most part, however, I believe what I call the foundation greens have flavors even the most finicky eaters will enjoy raw or cooked. To be fully enjoyed, the tart, pungent, and bitter greens may require you to pay more attention to detail regarding gathering, preparation, and use.
Newly disturbed soils, where most of the plants in this book grow, are found in gardens, yards, neighborhood lots, and land overturned by construction sites and tilling equipment.
This book is divided into Parts that have Sections and Chapters:
Part I Understanding Wild Foods is filled with practical information you need to know to help you understand and use wild foods and to give context, understanding, and foster success in ways that apply to all edible plants. If you skip this part of the book because you think that going directly to the plant chapters is more efficient, you’ll be holding yourself back. Reading Part I will make you a more successful forager.
Part II The Plants covers the plants featured in this book. Those plants are separated into the four flavor categories mentioned above. Each plant has its own chapter that follows the plant from emerging seedling to end-of-life seed production, from foraging to food, from preparation to dining.
Part III The Potential of Wild Foods takes you beyond the basics, addressing topics like the rationale for eating wild foods, nutrition, and explanations of some additional concepts.
There are no official certifications or professional degrees that qualify anyone to be a wild foods expert. And there are no expert panels that systematically look at the content of this book to verify its accuracy. As far as I know, the lack of oversight has been true for every book ever written about edible wild plants.
I make great attempts to faithfully report what I have found from my own experiences over the last thirty-eight years. Those experiences are biased/shaped by personal perceptions, previous education and beliefs, food preferences, and my personal complement of taste buds.
Personal experience is further complicated by nature, which is not here for our convenience. Unlike domesticated plants, wild plants are free to mate and mutate and change locally or regionally without consulting us humans. Every plant within a species can have a different genetic makeup. Genetic uniqueness can affect a plant’s taste, texture, and chemical composition. Plants are further affected by climatic differences. For example, in order to survive colder winters, a species growing in the north may become hardier than that same species in the south. Hardiness may affect chewability and, hence, the eating experience.
I am one person who is sharing his experiences with you based on the plants I have found and worked with. And while I may be able to provide some guidance, the more you have your own experiences, the more a general understanding develops within you. Your own experience is priceless. The test of the value of any user manual will be on how much the experience the author has facilitates the experiences you have.
The problem with most wild foods books is that authors merely repeat information they’ve read rather than actually trying things themselves. So when misinformation exists, it gets repeated over and over again by author after author until everyone believes it. Only testing long-held beliefs results in confirming or correcting the record. The more people test and report the results of their personal experiences, the better the picture we have of the real situation for any plant.
Researching and teaching about wild foods has been my life’s work. I do it because I’m passionate about the topic, it helps me improve the wild food knowledge base and provides some clear guidance for those that follow. Again, I am but one link in a chain of people who help to keep this knowledge alive.
This book is designed to help you successfully identify, understand, manage, and enjoy the wild foods covered. It is a user manual and a reverse field guide whose development is based on experience. It is filled with purposeful photographs and the kind of information designed to genuinely serves your learning needs. The plants included are divided into flavor categories to help guide your use.
I take full responsibility for the content of this book. Any mistakes are mine and mine alone. Should you discover a mistake, have an experience fundamentally different from mine, or notice an important omission, please contact me through my Web site at www.wildfoodadventures.com. I will seriously consider any advice and make corrections and/or additions in any future editions of this book and on my Web site.