D e s e r t E x p o s u r e
August 2010
Gifts from the Land
Foraging for edible wild plants is a healthy way to reconnect with the world around you — and delicious.
Story and photos by Mary Syrett
Since my teens, I have been fascinated with wild food foraging. Teaching members of my family about wild edibles, whether on the coast, the plains, the mountains or the desert, has developed into a fascinating hobby that has allowed us to experience, to some degree, how our ancestors lived off the land.
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The bulb of the Desert Poppy is edible. (Photo by Mary Syrett) |
Foraging for wild plants and hunting wild animals is the most ancient of human subsistence patterns. Prior to 10,000 years ago, most humans supported themselves this way. Hunting and gathering continued to be the subsistence pattern of some societies well into the 20th century, especially in environmentally marginal areas that were unsuited for farming or herding, such as subarctic tundra, deserts and dense tropical forests.
To survive, wild plants must cope with herbivores (plant-eating animals), competing plants, weather and changing climate. As a result, they've evolved to become very fit species and contain concentrations of high-quality carbohydrates, fats and proteins, as well as vitamins, minerals and fiber. Wild plants are endowed with high concentrations of the vitamins, minerals and fiber that they (and we) need to survive — not to mention more flavor than their water-bloated commercial counterparts.
Many of the tastes we recognize and enjoy, such as sourness, pungency, saltiness and bitterness, as well as the flavors of onions, garlic, wintergreen, licorice and mint, are adaptations plants have adopted to discourage herbivores. Many renewable herbs, greens, fruits, berries, nuts and seeds thrive in our backyards, fields and trails. Although we can easily incorporate these tasty resources into meals the way our ancestors did, many people either disregard them or try to destroy them as "weeds."
"Until World War II, people ate weeds regularly," notes Peter Gail, author of The Dandelion Celebration: A Guide to Unexpected Cuisine. "Dandelions, lambs-quarters — all sort of wild plants — were part of their diet. The bias against wild edibles came only after World War II, in part because of pesticide company advertising." Gail continues: "The pesticide industry convinced consumers to value uniformly green lawns, and the way to get a lawn green was by killing weeds."
Today, concerns over the long-term and short-term health risks of pesticides, preservatives, additives and foodborne illnesses (such as E. Coli and salmonella) in commercially produced foods make wild edibles especially appealing. As an added bonus for consumers concerned about the environment, wild edibles are naturally renewable food resources that often thrive under desert conditions.
It is amazing how good meals taste when you begin incorporating wild ingredients into them. Foraging also provides a refreshing way to exercise and increases understanding of (and, hopefully, commitment to protecting) local ecosystems.
Native desert foods encompass many different cultures. There is now developing a more pan-Indian sense of what native food is. This is a cuisine from a people whose food has been whatever they could find.
Native desert foods include seeds, which are a rich store of energy, some having high protein levels, vitamins (especially vitamin E) and minerals. Living in the wild for the last million years or so, man ate every seed that was worth collecting.
Most nuts are seeds. They are seasonal, but have the advantage of being able to be stored for long periods. The great advantage of nut trees is that, unlike animals, they don't run away. The energy expended in gathering nuts is much less than the time and energy spent obtaining the same caloric value from hunting.
Fruits are full of cancer-suppressing chemicals. They are a valuable energy source, and contain fibers whose health-promoting qualities are only just beginning to be discovered.
Lamb's quarter, mesquite beans, stinging nettle, saguaro fruit, cholla buds, pion nuts, wild perennial bushmint and tepary beans, which grow in southwestern New Mexico, are among my favorite wild foods. Stinging nettle, steamed or sauted (you can pick the new whorls of leaves throughout the year), taste delicious, despite the plant's somewhat vicious reputation.
Tepary beans resemble flattened black-eyed peas. The black ones cook up creamy. The brown ones are best simmered like pinto beans. Home cooks pay as much as $10 a pound for teparies online. Creative big-city chefs love the little beans, too, turning them into cassoulet (a bean stew of French origin), salads or beds for braised pork.
Dandelions, stinging nettle, miner's lettuce and prickly pear are among my favorite wild foods. Desert dandelions, whose range extends from southwestern Idaho and eastern Oregon to southern California, much of Arizona and northwestern Mexico, are excellent in salads or brewed as tea. They are high in calcium and vitamin A, with good-size amounts of folic acid, vitamin C and health-enhancing bioflavonoids.
Miner's lettuce, whose range extends from British Columbia to Baja California and east to Arizona and New Mexico, has a circular stem leaf that is actually two leaves, paired side by side and grown together. As the name suggests, the leaves are edible.
The prickly pear cactus, opuntia, has traditionally been an important part of desert culture. The fruit of opuntia can be eaten fresh, as well as made into jam, syrup or marmalade. A Mexican beverage known as "horchata," made with ground rice, almonds, milk and the pulp of the opuntia fruit, has gained popularity through the television program "Martha Stewart Living."
The pads of opuntia, known as cladophylls, are also edible and sold, with their spines removed, in grocery stores and southwestern marketplaces. The cladophylls can be boiled for several minutes, cut into smaller pieces, and then eaten as a salad or vegetable side dish.
The best way to begin desert foraging is to go with an experienced forager who can show you, not only which plants are edible, but what parts of plants are safe to eat. Experienced foragers can also point out the best times of the year to harvest various parts of the plant. If you are going it alone, start with just one plant, preferably an easily recognizable one. Of course, you must identify any plant you plan to eat with 100% certainty. Avoid species with poisonous look-alikes until you have become an expert forager. Follow a few safe species through the seasons and learn them well, gradually adding new ones to your list.
Other rules for safe food foraging apply: Use guidebooks to double- and triple-check the identity of the plants you are about to eat. Do not forage for foods near heavily traveled roads, since they may contain high levels of toxins from exhaust. Always rinse your edibles in a vegetable wash before eating them.
Here are other foraging safety tips from Robert K. Henderson, author of The Neighborhood Forager: A Guide for the Wild Food Gourmet:
- Do not eat any plant until you've positively identified it by the correct botanical name.
- Know which parts of edible plants are edible and under what conditions. If you don't know for sure, leave it alone.
- Spit the pits. Many fruit pits enclose a poisonous seed (think cyanide), so it's best to spit them out.
- Remember: Any plant is poisonous to people who are allergic to it.
- Always observe the first-try protocol. When you have positively identified a plant and its edible parts, take a small taste and wait to see how your body reacts before diving in. Also, be aware that some plants, which are perfectly fine to consume in reasonable amounts, can cause problems in large quantities.
- Eat wild foods only when they are in season. Know which time of year a plant is edible and eat it only then.
- Be a responsible forager. Be kind to the trees and plants you harvest, leaving behind enough for them to regenerate, as well as enough for the birds and animals that depend on them for survival.
Finding, identifying, collecting and consuming wild foods around southwest New Mexico is an exciting way to add delicious variety to your meals, boost your health, get some exercise and better appreciate your environment. I will never again view land the way I did before I started foraging. As a forager, I have become more deeply connected to nature and have developed a better understanding of where and how my food grows. Enjoy foraging, but do so prudently.
Mary Syrett is a freelance writer and photographer who has written about many subjects over the past 30 years, including foraging from the land. She presently lives in the Research Triangle Park area of North Carolina, where her spouse is a visiting professor.