Seasonal Fiddlehead Greens

There is little doubt that eating certain fiddlehead greens can significantly increase ones chances of cancer. In fact, science says they cause cancer. On the surface that would be a sobering thought but is it?

Eating? Toxic?

Toxicity can be a matter of degrees

This may sound a bit picky, but what is “eating?” And for this discussion, what is “toxic?” In broad terms there isn’t much issue: Eating is consuming food and toxic can make you sick or kill you. Eat water hemlock and you will die in a couple of hours. That’s fairly straight forward. What about eating a pound of onions a day? It may take a few weeks or months but they can kill you, too. So are they toxic? Are they deadly?

But, back to fiddleheads. Phrases like “fiddlehead greens can significantly increase ones chances of cancer” are surprisingly unqualified. That is because science, that wonderful tool, is reductionist. It does not and cannot have a Gestalt view.

What if I ate just a few fiddleheads in a few meals just in spring, when they are in season? Can I expect cancer from them 20 or 30 years down the road? What if I can them, and eat a whole lot of them throughout the year for 20 or 30 years? Might that be the cause of cancer in the time to come? Research has shown that you can get cancer by drinking the local water where fiddleheads grow. But the again, we drink water everyday, not just a few times every spring.

A Pack A Day

One cigarette does little damage

Perhaps some plants cause disease when they are eaten extra-seasonally, or to excess, or over a long period of time. A few fiddlehead every spring might actually be good for you, like a little wine, some greenery after a long winter. Preserving them and eating them all year might be akin to smoking, damage by excess or prolonged consumption. One cigarette a month is probably not going to kill you, but a pack a day can.

Simple Carbs

We used to call them “empty calories.”

It might be that man lives best when he eats seasonally, which brings me to carbohydrates. Simple carbs used to be a seasonal part of man’s diet, a fruit tree in the fall is a good example. He would eat until stuffed and the excess went to fat for winter use when the days were lean. Now most of us eat simple carbs every day, if not every meal. The

Almost as empty…

government even recommends it! But what if simple carbs are like fiddlehead greens or even cigarettes. Now and then, in season, no harm but daily deadly? Might that be what’s behind our obesity epidemic and our diabetes epidemic, the proliferation of simple carbs to the exclusion of other food?

Most of us no longer eat seasonally, and maybe that is catching up with us.

There is little doubt that man has been foraging for food for a long time. As one might guess, in different places he foraged for different plants. He also foraged before there were cities and suburbia. Foraging continued well into the 1900’s, and of course, selectively today.

Among the challenges of teaching foraging is finding suitable sites. In my classes I tend to visit the same areas, at least four times a year, usually more often. Almost all of these sites are in suburbia, not in the wild. This surprises people because they assume wild food is out in the wilderness.  When the famous Willie Sutton was asked why he robbed banks, he said because that’s where the money is. I teach foraging in suburbia because that’s where the plants are.

That said, I have to qualify that comment. There are edibles in the wilds, but they tend to be different than those found in population centers and represent more a subsistence living than variety.

Many edible weeds, perhaps the majority, are not native. They are from somewhere else. They come with humans and humans go to population centers.

In an old city park I can usually find 60 to 100 edible species and I usually have to walk only a mile or so. In a state park I can walk 10 miles and find perhaps two dozen edible species. This is not to say native food is inferior or rare. It is better to say the choice is limited. But when you combine native and imported plants (and edible ornamentals) then one has a large menu.

The other reason I use city parks is because most of the species we find there most folks can also find in their own yard or neighborhood. It’s good to learn what the natives ate to survive but most folks want to find food around their own home, not a distant park (where foraging is probably also illegal.)

Foraging in suburbia does raise the issue of pollution, and that has to be taken into consideration. Despite that complication foraging in suburbia is where more people forage today. It is where most people find their wild food, and it’s where I teach. Willie Sutton would understand.

I was asked to write a short piece for a survivalist blog on getting started in foraging:

How are a Musician and a Botanist Alike?

As a professional musician I often meet other musicians who teach at the college level. What you may not know is most of them cannot play something as simple as Happy Birthday without music. Yet there are thousands, perhaps millions of non-degreed musicians who play very well without music, and often at the highest level of performance.

I have read many times that the great Italian tenor Luciano Pavarotti could not read music, and that is quite reasonable. He wanted to be the best lyric tenor of Italian opera, which is a limited amount of music, perhaps just a few dozen well-known tunes. He did not need to play piano or read music to remember thirty or forty songs which were also popular where he grew up.

Like college pianists who can’t play by ear, most of the degreed botanists would starve tomorrow if the grocery stores closed. Most of the people who have foraged and who do forage are not botanists. And like Pavarotti, foragers really only need to learn a few prime edibles in their local area.

What Do I Need To Know?

While there are thousands of wild edibles, in most places there really are only a half a dozen or so species really worth knowing, from a survival point of view.

Indeed, if you can learn six prime food plants and say three medicinal plants you can survive quite well.

You don’t need a degree in botany.

You don’t need to know the Latin names.

You don’t need to know all the plants that are out there.

You only need to learn just a few edibles, a few medicinals, and it also wouldn’t hurt to know if you have any deadly plants nearby, which are usually just a few as well. That may total a dozen plants. You can learn a dozen plants.  With a teacher this can be done in a season. Without a teacher it can still be done, it just takes more time.

Cattails and Blackberries and Hemlocks, Oh My!

To get you started I will list an edible, a medicinal, and a poisonous pair that are found just about everywhere in North America. The edible is the cattail.

The cattail is nearly impossible to misidentify. Tall, strap-like with horizontal roots it grows in water or where it is very damp. It has the famous fuzzy “cattail” on top (you should always look for last year’s cattails to be sure.) Nothing grows more starch per acre than cattails, and you don’t have to tend it. While one can eat various green parts of the plant at different times of the year the root is always full of starch. Roast it to a crisp next to a fire, open, and then pull the starch off the fibers with your teeth, kind of like eating taffy.

The medicinal (and edible) is the blackberry. A cane or a vine with spines and five petaled white blossoms that turn into an aggregate, edible purple/black fruit. The leaves can be dried to make a tasty tea which is also good for various digestive disorders including  diarrhea. That tea can also be a marinade or the leaves used to stuff fish or fowl. Young shoots are edible if peeled and boiled. Indians whipped blackberries and fish eggs together to make a cream-like froth which they then froze and enjoyed.

The poisonous plant is the hemlock and its close relative the water hemlock. (Not the tree.) Large and leafy, they can grow to six feet or so on dry land or in water. The stem is smooth, often splotched with purple, often has vertical ridges. The flower looks like a fireworks explosion as does the seed head. But they both have one prime identifying characteristic: On the surface of the leaf, most of the veins clearly end in the notches between the teeth. In most plants the veins peter out or end at the tips of the teeth. Veins on the hemlocks clearly end between the teeth. They are a poison you should know because they can kill you in two hours. If you get to the hospital within 40 minutes of eating you might survive. The toxicity increases as you go down the plant, the seeds the least, the root the most. According to those who have consumed said, it is supposed to be very tasty raw or cooked (thus remember, taste does NOT indicate edibility.)

You Can Do It!

In every area there are a limited number of prime edibles, a limited number of really useful medicinals, and a limited number of deadly plants. You can learn to identify them, and ignore the rest. You can tell the difference between a horse and a cow, a cow and a buffalo, a dog and a fox, a fox and a cat. You can tell plants apart. You can do it. You don’ t need to learn the whole green world out there or be a botanist. You just need to learn a few “tunes.”

The name of my website is “Eat The Weeds (and other things too.)” If you wander around the long index — or click on the category “critter cuisine” — you will find other edibles, such as anoles, scorpions, grubs and snails and things like that. To expand choices I have been adding edible insects. No, I am not going to launch into a lecture on how if we ate more insects we could save the world. But…

Those who follow my writing know I do not care for lawns as residential features. They just aren’t green. They’re fine for golf courses and cemeteries, but I think a lawn with every home is a costly affectation. How costly? Let’s look at one little corner of it.

Lawn + Cricket = No Fun

Locally there are three mole crickets, ugly-looking burrowing insects. Two of them arrived here from South American about a century ago and are a disaster to lawns. In fact, we spend hundreds — hundreds — of millions of dollars to get rid of mole crickets, and yes they are edible. In some parts of the world they are close to a protein staple.

If we didn’t have lawns we wouldn’t have a mole cricket problem, we wouldn’t spend hundreds of millions of dollars, and I’d have a few less bugs to eat. In a goodwill gesture I will give up mole crickets if folks give up their lawns. I really just want to point out that the idea that we must have lawns leads to we must fight mole crickets. Getting rid of lawns just isn’t in that thought process, nor is eating mole crickets, nutritious as they are. (See Mole Cricket, Kamaro)

I have a difficult enough time getting people to eat weeds so I’m not even going to try to get folks to eat insects. They are either interested or they are not.  But it does seem to me the money spend on lawns and defending them could be better spent elsewhere.