Edible Wild Foods, Back to Basics
An appreciation of beauty and excellence, however, are required to appreciate the wild cousins of the flowering cultivars that many gardeners tend today, including the hybridized and modified varieties. When designing an exhibit for an art gallery in a college class, I developed an extreme appreciation for, of all things, wildflowers. I suppose this is for what they represent, wild, natural beauty. This appreciation shifted dynamically when I discovered a new movement in nutrition and health, the wild food movement.
The wild food movement, backed by studies of wild plants and their nutritional benefits, calls for people to get back to their wild selves, regaining what has always been a strong connection to the land and nature.
One philosophy on beginning this process is to simply add one wild food to something you are already eating every day, adding its nutritional benefits to your diet. Many studies have examined cultures that eat more wild foods in their diet, and notice many health benefits. This benefit is magnified by the fact that wild foods are not full of processed fats and sugars that can lead to all kinds of health problems, many of them being completely edible when raw, which will allow important enzymes to remain intact, aiding in digestion and other bodily processes. Not to mention that wild foods are completely and totally free and also readily available and in most cases, abundant.
So, how did I jump from appreciating the weeds, to eating them? Once I started devouring all the information on what wild plants were edible that I could find, I realized the overarching theme that this is not something new, that in many ways, the wild food movement is a renaissance. A return to knowledge that has seemingly been lost for generations, as living off wild plants was not only a skill, it was a necessity for early colonists and pioneers who did not know what would be available in the New World. In fact, many wild “weeds” were actually plants brought over by these early colonists and pioneers for their nutritional or medical uses, such as the common dandelion. Other wild foods have been here for hundreds of years, many being utilized by Native American peoples, such as acorns, gourds, maize, and cattails.
The point is that not only are these wild plants full of important vitamins and minerals, but the act of foraging itself is also good for the body and mind as not only exercise, but a therapeutic way of returning to our wild selves and regaining a critical link with the wildness all around us.
So, remember: Eat wild, Arkansas!