Pioneer Living Survival Magazine

Foraging For Food

#1. Insects of all kinds are a very good food supply. From slugs, snails, ants, spiders, mill worms, Beatles, grubs and just plain earth worms being the best. An earth worm has almost as much protein as soy or meat.

Earth worms being plain and earthy tasting but are not as bad as you would think. Just wash them and hold in you hand and squeeze their waste out. Then you can just eat them or you can cook them.

If this sound gross then ok make a soup from all of the bugs, insects and small animals that you find and just drink the broth. Just remember, if it has more then eight legs then don't eat it!

If this still sounds bad to you then I challenge you to not eat for 3-4 days. I will then make you up a broth consisting of the above food sources above. I do believe you would drink this if your life depended on it. If I am wrong, you will starve to death.

Edible Wild Plants

Just some of the plants you may know of already, but did you know they were edible?

Modern science has analyzed dandelion greens. They are a good source of calcium, potassium, vitamin A, and vitamin C. They have twice as much vitamin A in a one-cup serving than most vitamin pills. They also have as much calcium as a children’s vitamin or half a glass of milk. That’s more than most other vegetables. Without vitamin A, people have eye problems and have trouble fighting infections. Vitamin A helps kids grow tall and keeps skin healthy. Calcium keeps bones strong and growing and nerves working right.

The first edible portion appears as a slightly reddish tangle of leaves. The greens grow from these. Dandelion greens are the leaves above the surface. They must be gathered before the plant blooms to be delicious. The best time to gather them is just when the bloom bud appears, before the stalk grows. If you wait too long, they will taste bitter. Eating the leaves after the yellow flowers bloom is like chewing yesterday’s gum.

To cook dandelion greens, wash them well with water, then place them in a pan and pour boiling water over them. Let them boil for five minutes, then season with salt and butter. Eat them hot. If the taste is too strong, gather the bloom buds and cook them with the leaves to smooth out the taste. This spring, cook up a batch of nutritious, delicious greens for dinner. And you may want to invite your grandma . . . it could bring back some memories for her. The roots can be roasted to make into coffee as well or you may just want to clean and boil them to eat.

#2. Nasturtiums

For tastiest nasturtium leaves, keep the plants well watered, which helps to moderate the spiciness of the leaves and flowers. I prefer to toss them among sweeter greens like butter head or crunchy Batavian lettuce, rather than with other bitter greens. They add a refreshing bite to a classic potato salad with hard-boiled eggs and a mayonnaise dressing, and pair well with seafood. A handful of the bright colored flower petals are delicious chopped into a shrimp or crab salad sandwich filling, and the whole flowers and leaves make a great garnish for a platter of grilled salmon.

After picking nasturtium flowers for eating, make sure to double check that you’ve washed out any insects that might be hiding within the spurs! I prefer breaking the petals into salads rather than using them whole to keep the flavor less overwhelming, but whole flowers make beautiful and festive decorations.

#3. Cattails

The cattail’s every part has uses. It’s easy to harvest, very tasty, and highly nutritious. It was a major staple for the American Indians, who found it in such great supply, they didn’t need to cultivate it. The settlers missed out when they ignored this great food and destroyed its habitats, instead of cultivating it.

Harvest cattail shoots after some dry weather, when the ground is solid, in the least muddy locations. Select the largest shoots that haven't begun to flower, and use both hands to separate the outer leaves from the core, all the way to the base of the plant. Now grab the inner core with both hands, as close to the base as possible, and pull it out. Peel and discard the outermost layers of leaves from the top down, until you reach the edible part, which is soft enough to pinch through with your thumbnail (the rule-of-thumb). There are more layers to discard toward the top, so you must do more peeling there. Cut off completely tough upper parts with a pocket knife or garden shears in the field, so you’ll have less to carry. Note: Collecting shoots will cover your hands with a sticky, mucilaginous jelly. Scrape it off the plant into a plastic bag, and use it to impart a slight okra-like thickening effect to soups. The shoot provide beta carotene, niacin, riboflavin, thiamin, potassium, phosphorus, and vitamin C.

The proportions of food to waste varies with the size of the shoot. You'll get the best yield just before the flowers begin to develop. A few huge, late-spring stalks provide enough delicious food for a meal. Some stalks grow tall, and become inedibly fibrous with developing flowers by late spring, although just before the summer solstice, you can often gather tender shoots, immature flower heads, and pollen at the same time.

You can clip off and eat the male portions of the immature, green, flower head. Steam or simmer it for ten minutes. It tastes vaguely like its distant relative, corn, and there’s even a central cob-like core. Because it's dry, serve it with a topping of sauce, seasoned oil, or butter. Sometimes I also gnaw on the cooked female portions, but there’s very little to them. It’s easier to remove the flesh from the woody core, if desired, after steaming. This adds a rich, filling element to any dish, and it's one of the best wild vegetarian sources of protein, unsaturated fat, and calories. It also provides beta-carotene and minerals.

When the male flowers ripen, just before the summer solstice, they produce considerable quantities of golden pollen. People pay outrageous prices in health stores for tiny capsules of the bee pollen—a source of minerals, enzymes, protein, and energy. Cattail pollen beats the commercial variety in flavor, energy content, freshness, nutrition, and price. To collect the pollen in its short season, wait for a few calm days, so your harvest isn't scattered by wind. Bend the flower heads into a large paper bag and shake it gently. Keep the bag’s opening as narrow as possible, so the pollen won't blow away. Sift out the trash, and use the pollen as golden flour in baking breads, muffins, pancakes, or waffles. It doesn't rise, and it's time-consuming to collect in quantity, so I generally mix it with at least three times as much whole-grain flour. You can also eat the pollen raw, sprinkled on yogurt, fruit shakes, oatmeal, and salads.

During fall, winter, and early spring, the cattail rhizomes store food. Digging up the thick, matted rhizomes from the muck, especially in cold weather, is not easy. After years of procrastination, I determined that, as a foraging teacher, the time had come to experiment with cattail rhizomes. Late one autumn, a friend and I went to gather cattail rhizomes from Central Park. It was so messy, I emerged from the park splattered with muck, looking more like a ?Wildman? than I had ever intended. We hauled two dripping shopping bags across Manhattan, into her apartment and onto her balcony. It took half an hour hosing down our harvest, and the mud clogged the drain.

We peeled off the rhizomes’ outer layers, still imbued with mud, then worked the starch from the fibers with our fingers, in a large bowl of water. The water became cloudy with the starch. We waited an hour to let the starch settle, and poured off the water, getting enough sweet, tasty starch to thicken a small pot of soup—hardly worth the effort.

Sometimes nettles grow near catnip, another similar-looking plant. Mints, of course, have no stinging hairs, and catnip is fragrant. Catnip and nettles are an excellent combination for herb tea.

Collect nettle leaves before they flower in spring. They may be bad for the kidneys after they flower. New nettles come up in the fall, and you can pick them before they're killed by frost.

People have been using nettles for food, medicine, fiber, and dyes since the Bronze Age. Collect them using work gloves, and wear a long-sleeved shirt. If you happen upon nettles when you have no gloves, put your hand inside a bag. The young leaves are the best part of the plant. They come off most easily if you strip them counter-intuitively, from the top down.

I have to travel quite a distance to find a place where they grow like "weeds." As you can imagine, I pick in quantity, steam them, freeze them, put them in soups, stews, and other dishes. I dry them, tincture them in alcohol, and sometimes get stung by them. They get used up quickly—everyone loves them—and I'm back at the nettle patch soon enough.

Clean and chop nettles wearing rubber gloves. Once you’ve cooked them a little, the stingers are deactivated, and the plant becomes wonderfully edible.

Nettles have a bad reputation as an unpleasant-tasting survival food in some circles. That's because people don't know how to prepare them. They often boil them, which is awful. Nettle leaves are good simmered in soups 5-10 minutes, but my favorite method is the waterless steaming method.

As food, this tonic is good for rebuilding the system of chronically ill people. Nineteenth century literature is full of so-called constitutionally weak people, who usually die on the last page. In Russia, they were given freshly squeezed nettle juice—a tonic loaded with iron and other nutrients—for iron-deficiency anemia. This often worked.

Many of the benefits are due to the plant's very high levels of minerals, especially, calcium, magnesium, iron, potassium, phosphorous, manganese, silica, iodine, silicon, sodium, and sulfur. They also provide chlorophyll and tannin, and they're a good source of vitamin C, beta-carotene, and B complex vitamins. Nettles also have high levels of easily absorbable amino acids. They're ten percent protein, more than any other vegetable.

Rose Hips are the fruits of rosebushes, all rosebushes wild and tame have the, and they ripen in the fall, and are used after the first frost. Few people know the great secret of rose fruits. Rose hips have a high vitamin C content, about forty times as much as oranges, which I take to mean that there is a full day's requirement in one large rose hip. Rose pedals are very tasty and rose water will help if the water is slightly smelly.  Rose Hip Jelly Recipe

#6. Marigolds

Medicinally, marigold is an anti-inflammatory, an antiseptic, and as such is used in soothing eye drops and for treatment of external ulcers on the skin. You can even make a tea with the flower heads and scalding water.

I hope you will do some research of the types of wild plants that are edible out in the wilderness. The knowledge you gain today could be the knowledge that one day saves your life.

Here's a list of some of the plants to look at. Again, this is by no means comprehensive, so feel free to add to the list if you know of anything I've forgotten. Also it's fascinating to find out what's about inn your neck of the woods :)

Dandelion
Nettle
Daisy leaf
Gorse flower
Greater Plantain
Ribwort Plantain
Buck's Horn Plantain (coastal)
Scurvy Grass
Hogweed
Chickweed
Sea beet
Sea Radish
Pennywort (particularly good at the moment)
hawkbit
Water cress
Alexanders (very good at the moment)
Chirvil (be very careful , as Hemlock Water-Dropwort is starting to sprout now and looks very similar, but is deadly poisonous!)
Cleavers
Sea Purslane
Rock Samphire (still usable, but a bit over now, coastal)
Yarrow
Rose Hips
Common Sorrel
Ivy-Leaved Toadflax
Wood sorrel
Three-cornered leek
seaweeds