It’s not smart or nice to lie about plants. It can get someone hurt. But the truth can sometimes be elusive, even with plants.

This week’s featured video is about the sassafras. And of course when you mention the sassafras as among the edibles there is always someone who hopes to throw a bucket of informed reality on that notion by saying it will cause cancer. Oh really?  The sassafras is a prime example that the truth can often be an excuse to do something else.

The oil in sassafras in high amounts can induce abortions. The oil in sassafras can be used to make a popular illegal drug. Now, could those be reasons to ban sassafras oil? Certainly, but those truths were not useable in the ’50s and ’60s. Abortion and dangerous drugs weren’t talked about much. So the powers that be fell back on the old stand by: Cancer. They fed rats sassafras oil that was like us drinking water from a blasting fire hose. And guess what? The lab rats — who have to be the most cancer susceptible creatures alive — got liver cancer. The next step was easy: Assume people can get liver cancer from drinking root beer (If you drank some 9,000 gallons of it in a year.)  The sassafras oil had to go.

The truth is the sassafras oil in the original root beer was 1/13 as cancer-causing as the alcohol in a can of regular beer.  One thirteenth. That’s not too life threatening… not exactly a significant carcinogen. Alcohol-filled chocolate cherries are more dangerous than that, but they ain’t banned.  Heck, the sugar in the root beer is more life threatening than the sassafras oil. However taken to its extreme limits sassafras oil might cause cancer in humans. That skinny truth was the excuse to get it banned. It was also the sole source of the cancer scare over sassafras.

That distortion has become medical dogma and most now sites sternly warn you to avoid “cancer-causing” sassafras. I’m sure that’s good news for the Sassafras but it shouldn’t dissuade us foragers now and then from enjoying  one of the tasty trees of the forest.

Can you live off the land? Can anyone these days? I suppose the answer depends on what land, what you know, and whose else is also trying to live off it.

When foraging is a hobby, the issue of calories in or out takes second place to the fun and the learning. But in a survival situation the caloric compensation has to be taken into consideration. Too much out and not enough in means illness and starvation. I took a five mile walk today in upland scrub (read no ponds) to see how I would do, food wise.

Dioscorea alata, the winged yam

Two choice finds would have left me in good stead for the day, or more. First I found a patch of winged yams. While under cultivation they can grow to well over 100 pounds, locally in the wild they range from a half a pound to eight pounds, still that’s a lot of potato-like starch and food for more than one meal and one day.  It requires cooking so I’d also have to have a camp fire and boiling is the preferred method of preparation, though they can also be carefully roasted.

Acorns have to be leached

My second good find was an acorn-dropping oak tree. Better still, it was a Live Oak and one with sweet acorns. I could nibble some on the spot. They barely need leaching, so not too many calories will be involved in bringing that food to the table. And a good thing: Acorns are high in carbs and fats, two things you need to keep going. Still, they require some wholesome water for leaching but there was one brook along the trail. I didn’t venture off to see what I could find there. I also saw a hickory tree but its nuts are not ready yet.

Wild Persommons

As for fruits there were two, beautyberries and persimmons, the former about to go out of season and the latter not quite in season, but I managed to find a lot of beauty berries and a few sweet persimmons.  There were also some elder blows and arils of the ripe bitter gourd, no calories in the latter but a good source of lycopene.

In terms of greenery, there was a lot of choice… some wood sorrel, smilax, pennywort, young maple leaves, and young summer grape leaves. On the “edible but…” side were  Caesar Weed and Spanish needles. Other items included saw palmetto berries, nutritious but extremely intense in taste, green bitter gourds and leaves, lichen, and panic grass seeds.

Elderblow for tea and fritters

For tea I had the choice of sumac berries, blackberry leaves, pine needles, spotted bee balm or the elder blows. The persimmon seeds can be used to make a black coffee-like drink as can blackened acorns.  Spices were bay leafs, wax myrtle leaves, smart grass and possibly Hercules Club seeds ground as pepper… sparingly… ditto some Brazilian Pepper seeds.

Part of the original Brunswick Stew

Normally on such forays I see a land turtle, which of course, is a huge boon of protein in one spot for several meals. Today I did not see one. However, I did run into a two-foot copperhead right in the middle of the trail. If it had been more aggressive and I more hungry it, too, would have been dinner. (Peel the skin back like a sock, clean, then fill will wild greens, roll the skin back, and roast it in the dirt by the fire.) If I had a .22 with me and was living off the land at least one of the squirrels would not have gotten away. They are far more tasty than the copperhead. In fact, authentic Brunswick Stew is made with squirrel.

Ray Mears

All in all…. I would have had to have cooked some things twice to make them palatable, but on the second boil it would have been quite a soup/stew. The only problem is unless you go to a different terrain your next meal is going to taste the same, and the meal after that as well. Variety in the wild is seasonal. Here in Florida the Indians used to winter in the middle of the state and summer on the shore. No doubt there were climatic and insect reasons for that. But another is a welcome change of diet, so welcome they left behind sea shell piles over 50 feet high.

Copperhead

Bushcrafter Ray Mears summarized it best when he said that survival includes taking advantage of every food opportunity, no matter how meager.  He is absolutely right. Not one can be passed up. Fortunately we’re just having a good time outside. But, it is good to train your eye to find the food should you need to. And sometimes, like the copperhead, the food finds you.

It seem like a little thing that grew into a big problem, just like the edible I was writing about.

I had several requests to do something about acorns. Though a well-covered edible on the Internet and in nearly every foraging book most people think they are poisonous, a rather surprising idea. They are not, unless you’re a horse. After writing my article I had a quandary: Do I index it under oak or acorns? It would seem oaks and acorns are in rare company, a nut that is not the same name as the tree.

Cashews come from a ….cashew tree. Pecans from a pecan tree. Walnuts from a walnut tree. Acorns from an Acorn Tree…wrong…

I started a list in my mind… apples, apple tree; oranges, orange tree; mulberries, mulberry tree… persimmons, almonds, cherries, plums, loquats, grapes..well, grape vine. but still grape. One even gets ‘ears” from the Ear Tree, but acorns….

Now hazelnuts do come from the Hazelnut tree, but so do “filberts” because the hazelnut ripens around St. Filbert’s day….Aug. 20…no, I really didn’t know there was a St. Philibert …built a lot of churches in the early 800’s, one with his name still standing….so we get both filberts and hazelnuts from the hazelnut tree.  I could try to add that whiffles come from the whiffle tree but they come from the Ash tree, and they aren’t even edible (it’s a part of carriage or cart that transfers the pulling of the horse to the vehicle.)

So I decided to index acorns under acorn, not oak. No one goes looking for an oak recipe, and acorn looks good at the top of an edible index. And I think I’ll start calling oaks “acorn trees.”

I am not a survivalist per se, though every day I do break my personal best record of consecutive days alive.

That said, I know many survivalists. They tend to be men and fall into two camps, responsible older men determined to survive in what they see are difficult times ahead that they hope never comes. The other camp is young men who think along Rambo lines, a gun and a mountain top is all they need plus are few sex salves. They are anxious for society to fall apart. With the responsible group inevitably the issue of edible wild plants comes up.  I have a lot of folks who say they plan to come to my place should there ever be a shortage of food. I think, however, there are some misnomers about living off the foraged land.

Often I walk 15 miles or leisurely bike 30 or so. And when I do I take note of the edible plants I see along the trip and what kind of meal or meals I could make by day’s end. Doing that inventory often makes three things apparent. One is that every single opportunity for food would have to be exploited, no matter how meager. Two, it would take most of ones time to collected and prepare the food. And, lastly, that capturing some creatures makes the entire endeavor far more nutritious.

Let’s take those backwards. Usually every time I am out walking or biking this time of year I see a tortoise. In real hard times that would be dinner, and breakfast and the next supper as well. More so, it is easy to get — pick it up — and a huge concentrations of the stuff our bodies want and need. All life lives off the living, even vegetarians (who seem to discriminate against vegetables by eating only them.) That tortoise I see every time would keep me living for another day or two. (That one, by the way,  is protected.)

Next is time. It would take a lot of time to find enough food to survive each day. Occasionally there would be a bonanza of something, like a grape harvest, but most of the time it would take a lot of time to find enough to live off. And then one has to collect  fire wood, find clean water, prepare the food and cook it. There are only so many hours in a day. It is difficult for one person to do all the things that need to be done to survive let alone thrive.

Then there is the variety, or specifically lack there of.  Here in Florida I can always count on some Biden alba leaves to eat, some acorns that need leaching, cattails, lichen, spurge nettle roots, seasonal fruits, seasonal leaves, and other seasonal nuts. Sustainable, perhaps, but there are going to be lean days, weeks, months and seasons. Worse the menu is going to be the same and change only by season.

Compare that to someone who knows how to fish. One medium size fish and you won’t starve that day.  While it takes some skill to fish it is not difficult to learn. (Personally, I have five cast nets and almost never come home with an empty creel.) The hunter, more controversial, gets even more food than the fisherman, but that requires far more skill, and of course, a weapon, which is much harder to come by than making a pole, line and hooks. (Though trapping can also be included in hunting, but that too takes more skill than fishing, and takes longer to learn.)

And then there is foraging, what we started out with. While foraging is near and dear to my stomach it is the skill that takes the longest to learn and produces the least amount of calories, typically 34% of a hunter/gatherer’s caloric needs. It also takes up the most time. That would all seem to argue, especially to my survival friends, that learning to fish would be a priority, hunt next and down the road foraging.  In fact fishing and traping can be very efficient in that they can be done while you are doing something else that needs to be done, like setting up camp. Oddly, foraging may still have greater value than fishing or hunting in the long term.

If we were ever in a true survival mode where we had to gather our food (by hand, hook or Colt 45)  fish would be the first depleted food. Animals next. Plants last, and by that time there just might be less people around.  So even to the survivalist foraging can have value, even to the Rambos. Many survivalists, who like to think they are a breed apart, share this in common with most people: They don’t know much about plants, and like many folks, just ignore them. They think all they need is a good foraging book with pictures. That mentality also extends to gardening, as in all it takes is putting the seeds in the ground. Gardening is humbling and it takes about 10 years of study to be able to produce what you want to produce when you want it.

I like to forage because it makes me part of the world I am in, whether society is together or falling apart.  I will forage for fun and flavor whether society is tact or not. And while I do not expect society to disintegrate, I like the idea that I can always find something to eat nearly everywhere.