Pretty but not edible

I don’t care for Salvia coccinea. It’s not edible and it likes to crowd out my herbs. I’m forever removing it from flower pots. The other day I was about to rescue my tarragon from it when a bumble bee made a fueling stop. Bumble bees are native and solitary. They do the same pollenating job as honey bees, but think of them as independent contractors.

As the bee hovered from scarlet blossom to scarlet blossom I was struck by the thought that we need far more blossoms than bees, not only to keep the bumble bee flying but honey bees producing. Blossoms are important. So I let the Salvia be.  Here in Florida the third most common nectar plant is a despised weed, the Bidens Alba. But, without its blossoms bees would be worse off, and so would we.

Solitary Bumble Bee

The most common nectar plant in Florida is citrus, cultivated by man. Next is saw palmettos and third, the Bidens Alba.  The saw palmetto and the Bidens Alba got to their positions naturally, by offering something bees wants or needs and thus they succeed in reproducing more than other plants. Citrus is king only because humans intervened.

In our self-centered, brain-driven view we, of course, say citrus is serving us. But Mother Nature does not have to be conscious to succeed. It is also reasonable to say citrus is using us and we are serving it. Consider:

Key Limes

Citrus is a non-native that has managed in a very short time to take over a rather large land mass. That sure beats the old way of moving slowly over millennia. Clearly citrus won by giving man something he wanted, just as the Salvia coccinea gives the humble bumble what it wants. I’m sure if the bumble bee had an imagination it would think of itself as man does, in charge of the flower. But, the flower is clearly getting the bee to do what it wants. The tail is wagging the dog, so to speak. This view is not limited to plants.

There are, for example,  some 40 million dogs in the United States. However, there are only some 10,000 wolves. Dogs, as a species, are clearly doing something wolves are not. As a species dogs are wildly successful compared to their canine cousins.  So who is manipulating whom? Just as the bee thinks it is the prime agent with the blossom we think we are the prime agent involving dogs. But maybe its the dogs who’ve got it figured out, just as the citrus does, and yes, even the Salvia coccinea.

Because we are conscious we tend to put ourselves in the driver’s seat, the primacy position. But if you look around, non-humans seem to be winning…. citrus, lawn grass, dogs… We are taking care of them not them us.  And let’s not even get into the issue of cats…. Clearly they all are offering us something that makes us work just like the bee going flower to flower. So, who is manipulating whom?

Baked beans is about as traditional a New England meal as one can get… That and boiled dinners. Every Sunday for decades we had boiled dinner. Potatoes, onions, carrots, cabbage, some piece of meat, boiled in water until falling apart. It was health food before its time, and about as bland as possible. Then it came back to haunt you several days the following week as hash.

Baked beans were seasonal, usually made in the winter, in a wood cook stove in the basement.  They took several hours to cook and it was too hot in the summer to make them. But in winter they were perfect, usually accompanied by homemade bread baked in the same stove. Those were among the few foods my mother, an absolutely horrible cook, excelled at. Her cooking was so bad I learned to cook in self-defense. I used to joke she thought I was a Greek god, every meal was either a burnt offering or a sacrifice… except boiled dinners and baked beans.

But consider, what if  you had no pot, or no water too cook these foods with? With the root vegetables that’s quickly answered. They can be roasted, near a fire or in sand in the ground under a fire. And what of beans? There is a good amount of evidence that raw beans are not that good for people. They are almost a famine food uncooked. So, how do you cook beans if you do not have water, or a pot?

If you have a cast iron pot, but no water, you can put sand in the pot and the beans in the sand. Put that next to a fire and the beans roast nicely. In fact, in some laboratory work that is how the beans are cooked to reduce the amount of nutritional loss when measuring said. It must be sand, however, not earth. Sand is usually pulverized quartz, granite, or the like with no organic material in it. It distributes heat evenly. The beans roast nicely.

If you don’t have a pot you can put the beans in sand and then build a fire over the sand. This was often done to roast hazelnuts. The sand shuts out oxygen keeping the nuts or beans from charring. Like in the pot with sand, the beans get roasted and lose little or no nutrients in the process. Long before ancient man had pots or pans but was collecting or growing beans roasting them was the standard way to make them edible.

Lastly, while I will admit to growing up in the Dark Ages at least we had pots and pans and B&M Baked beans, or more specifically one of their cookeries near by. I can remember driving by them often in Portland, Maine, and the aroma of baking beans could be detected for miles. In some form or another it’s an aroma that man has enjoyed for thousands of years.

In police work there is the chain of possession. When evidence is collected, who has it, and where it’s kept is recorded constantly. With food we might call it the Chain of Contamination.

First it might be a genetically modified plant, one that has not been proven safe by being eaten over centuries. Then there is the soil and water. They could be polluted by a variety of means.  The ground might also have real old fashion manure on it, dog to human — think ebola — or it might be artificial manure called fertilizer. As for water, is there any fresh, wholesome water any more? If you are not on your own well, someone is putting something into your water somewhere.

The plant could be raised in a second or third world country where sanitation is still centuries behind, or by a first-world businesses trying to cut corners. Then there are the pesticides, herbicides and growth hormones. Let’s not forget as well all the people who handle the plant from the ground to the store shelf. There’s a lot of opportunity there for the plant to not be wholesome by the time it gets to you.

What of the wild plant? I walk in the woods or field and harvest it, my hands being the only ones that touch it. Neither the soil nor have been treated with anything. The only water is rainwater. And the plant is genetically original and nutritionally superior to the store-bought equivalents. That is perhaps the best case scenario but not at all impossible.

I used to know an old Italian organic gardener in Deltona, Florida, named Rudy Picconi.  He was doing organic gardening decades before it was fashionable. I asked him back in the early 80’s about insects bothering his plants. He said he used a wide variety of natural ways to keep them at bay. But, he said, “you have to let the insects win some of the time.”  There is more wisdom in that than one first assumes.

Think of the person who will not eat the wild apple because it has a worm hole. The worm hole tells you the apple is wholesome, as do a few holes in spinach leaves, or a blemish here and there on a beet.  Do you really think chemicalized food that kills other creatures is more wholesome than natural food? If the insect can live off it so can you. If it kills the insect you might want to reconsider. Not only that but when our ancestors found a worm in an apple it was extra protein, not something to be tossed away.

I am not saying insects and humans are alike or affected by the same things. Clearly we are different creatures but we share being alive and that makes us vulnerable. Given the bad record of food chemicals it seems prudent to lessen the chemist in the kitchen and the environment.

As for irradiated food… it might just be another form of sterilization, but I prefer food that has retained its natural ability to rot. If it can’t support something as simple as a bacteria I’m not sure it is good for me. Like genetically modified crops, irradiated food has not been around for centuries to prove it is wholesome. Perhaps in a century or two there will be enough of such food consumed for a good decision to be made. But right now the safety and any possible effects, good or bad, is an educated guess.

Setting aside bad food advice from dogmatic doctors — read Good Calorie Bad Calorie by Gary Taubs, his new book is Why We Get Fat —  one of the main problems we have is a lot of our food really isn’t food. It is preprocessed stuff and additives. And the other problem is much of the real food is also cursed by the chemist. The only sustenance untouched is wIld food, and it looks better every day.

I’m not against progress or science but I have lived enough to know that empiricism and science are great but limited tools. Their ability to be descriptive of reality is often woefully exaggerated.  That’s when the guessing begins. And that’s when our health suffers.

While making my purslane video I was thinking back to a family friend who refused to eat purslane because it was a “weed.”

It had taken over about one third of her garden and was to date the best and most luxurious patch of purslane I’ve have ever seen. She was adamant, however. It was a weed and she wasn’t going to eat a weed. If I may bend definitions a little, she had become accustomed to “civilized food” and she wasn’t going to eat any wild food.

For most of human history “wild food” was all there was. Now days “civilized food” is about all there is. And civilized people eat civilized food. Said another way, I think the resistance to eating wild food is more than just approaching the unknown and what dangers in might hold. Foraging is not what civilized people do. Cavemen did it, Native Americans did it, primitives do it as do starving populations. Foraging is just not included in the things humans do in a functioning modern society. The prevailing view is that foraging is ancient, primitive, and or dysfunctional. Hmmmm…. I guess that describes me fairly well.

Foraging for food is like… making your own salt, far removed from modern life. We used to get or make things for ourselves. Now we simply go to some place and exchange money for things. Money is transferable time and energy. And in all fairness we have to exchange: There are too many of us to live off the land and not enough time to do all the things we would need to do to live the good life.  Billions would starve if it were not for civilized food, and life would be more tooth and claw if not for the grand division of labor producing all the things we need, or want.

In its own way foraging, while not a threat to modern man, is for most a reminder that life was crude. But that is a backward glance. Looking forward foraging is environmental awareness. It is nutritional advantages. Foraging is also empowering and with that comes piece of mind and confidence.

Foragers can use the past to educate people about the future. Foraging is about tomorrow, whether society holds itself together or not.  It’s about treating the environment right. It’s about nutritional awareness and how “civilized” foods keep us alive but not healthily so. It is also about being self-sufficient, the first rule of being an adult and a fully-enfranchised citizen. Depend upon yourself, not the government. The more responsible and competent we are in all aspects of our lives  the less government and governing we need. Self-sufficiency is more than physical, it is also mental. Anything you can learn that increases that broad idea of self-sufficiency is to the good, including how to put more wild foods into your diet. It is also very comforting in a deep way to be aligned with nature rather than viewing it as something wrong that needs to be fixed.

As for foraging…. Learning to forage to me is like learning to swim. I may not “need” it most of the time but when I end up in water it is a good thing to know.