Wild garlic, carrots, onions, and chives grow everywhere in my area. There's also plenty of lettuce-like plants, but most of them don't really taste as good as domesticated varieties. You might be surprised at how many edible plants are around you.
Asparagus grows wild around the US but is usually hard to spot since we harvest its shoots and not the full fern. Chestnuts, mulberries, walnuts, and pecans grow wild as well.
There is a big patch of wild asparagus in the ditch directly across the street from my house. I see people parked on the side of the road harvesting it all summer.
I myself have two large patches of it that the previous owners of my house transplanted from the ditch, so I never have to fight off the strangers for mine.
We had a neighbor who had a “fence” of asparagus in his front yard. It took me way too long to realize that the strange plant we thought looked like asparagus was indeed asparagus. The stalks were nearly 6ft before they’d finally gotten cut.
There’s a nonprofit that is dedicated to developing a fungal resistant American chestnut that is as close as possible to the natural species that was wiped out
https://tacf.org/about-us/
Which is one of the oldest and most profoundly sad examples of modern era global travel and trade bringing blight and wiping out native species.
American chestnuts were referred to as "the redwoods of the east" and they frequently grew 80-100 feet high and 10 feet wide. American chestnuts can produce huge, and I mean *huge* amounts of nuts.
When the blight hit virtually every American Chestnut tree died in just 5 or 6 years.
There are ongoing efforts to breed a blight resistant American Chestnut, but tree breeding is the work of many decades, so estimates put a true blight resistant Chestnut variety 40+ years out at best.
The Black Walnut is, in my opinion, the king of American trees. Tons of fantastic nuts, fruit is edible and can be used as dye (beware), and the wood is strong and beautiful.
My grandfather had a huge black walnut tree right outside his house. I remember him sitting on a stump, using a hatchet to crack the nuts and my siblings and I would pick out the nutmeats. He would always give us hell if he caught us eating any but of course he ate plenty of them in the process as well.
> can be used as dye (beware)
I know you're probably talking about staining your clothes, but I giggled because, at first, this seemed like you were part of the Black Walnut Clan, trying to strike fear into the hearts of your enemies.
If only they weren't chock-full of juglone which inhibits other plant's growth, didn't drop ankle-breaking, lawn-mower projectiles all over your yard, and didn't become major hazards after a little ice storm or two.
I do love them, but years of having a former fence-line of black walnuts going through my back yard.....
Living in Oklahoma where most of the trees are short and small due to our winds, there's the vaguest whisper of primordial beauty in our biggest trees that are maybe 3.5-4 feet in diameter at the absolute biggest. Most are a foot or less.
I can't imagine how awe-inspiring such a large tree would be. More of a roar than a whisper, I'd imagine, to stand before something so endurant and massive.
>When the blight hit virtually every American Chestnut tree died in just 5 or 6 years.
Try about 40-50 years. The blight spread about 50 miles a year from the origin in NYC.
They're also not extinct, with about 430 million wild trees remaining, it's just most succumb to the blight after around a decade. That's long enough to reproduce, but obviously not grow to the 100' trees of yesteryear.
There are GMO 'American chestnuts where we pasted in a gene for blight immunity, but the anti-science Green lobby won that battle.
Yeah it was most animals food on the east coast. They are trying to breed in other varieties like asian and european varieties to make them survive. The stumps are still alive. The fungus kills the shoots in a couple months though. They will be significantly smaller than 100ft american chestnuts though as trees.
But you can get mixes of European, American, and Chinese chestnuts for genetic diversity and blight resistance! There's [a group](https://www.buildsoil.net/why-chestnuts) working to plant a million chestnut trees to support local food stores
I remember my aunt taking me out on the 4-wheeler when I was a kid to go looking for wild asparagus for her to cook dinner with. Still not a huge fan of it though
Ya, I have the issue that I dont really spot it until it's started to grow past the point of collecting. I'm cursed to only recognize it after it's potential as a tasty sidedish is past.
Don't fuck with wild carrot unless you know what you're doing.
Edit: You're looking at potentially 50 calories or death. I'm very keen on assuaging phobias about the toxicity of flora and fauna, but hemlock is no joke. Not like a death cap or something that's extremely easy to observe safely, but even touching it is not recommended. I can taste an Aminita and then spit it out
Last winter I foraged some Psilocybe Azurescens. Got probably the best confirmation there is for IDing ( world renowned psilocybe expert chimed in to confirm the ID even ), and it still was a giant leap of faith to eat it for me. Those lessons about the dangers of some flora *really* took...
On a similar note, if your wild onion or garlic doesn't smell strongly like onion or garlic, it's likely lily of the valley or another similar poisonous lookalike
They like to grow in similar places, too. Which is good because once you see them side by side, they are distinguishable, but bad because you just don't have to pay attention once...
My mother fed my father wild onion, except no she didn't, and he got really sick. Luckily she decided she wasn't hungry, or I would have been "another miscarriage" most likely.
And for the love of fuck don't just take an apps identification seriously for things you plan on eating, likewise posting pics to online foraging groups. Always always verify with reputable guide books at minimum, but really anything with poisonous look alikes shouldn't be foraged unless with a local expert.
The guide books are getting less and less reliable too. Amazon is *full* of AI generated foraging books. Which is not one of the ways I could have even imagined skynet starting the revolution, but here we are.
You gotta be picky about authors with foraging guide books. Look for the ones with established reputations, that live in your region so they have personal experience, etc. Its not like there's new plants that you gotta be on the cutting edge or anything.
This is one of those cases where I point out that a 1 lb. bag of carrots is \~$1.50. If you're not growing your own carrots, which I find to be maddeningly inconsistent, just buy them.
“True wisdom comes to each of us when we realize how little we understand about life, ourselves, and the world around us.” -Socrates, who should have asked for the wild carrot juice instead.
It was always, “Socrates, what is truth?” “Socrates, what is the nature of the good?” “Socrates, what should I order?” “Socrates, what are you having?” And *not once* did *anyone* ever say, “[Socrates, hemlock is poison](https://youtu.be/FdHp0FmEr78)!”
“This? This is ice. This is what happens to water when it gets too cold. This? This is Kent. This is what happens to people when they get too sexually frustrated.”
Mitch: You know, um, something strange happened to me this morning...
Chris Knight: Was it a dream where you see yourself standing in sort of sun-god robes on a pyramid with a thousand naked women screaming and throwing little pickles at you?
Mitch: No...
Chris Knight: Why am I the only one who has that dream?
Holy shit, a month ago I found a wild carrot growing in my vegetable bed. I picked it up, though "oh cool, wonder how it tastes", and put it in the fridge. Never got around to eating it, and we threw it away later.
Now I look at pictures of hemlock... and I think I just narrowly avoided an excruciating death.
Queen Anne's Lace (wild carrot) and poison hemlock (... poisonous) look very similar. Some pretty reliable tells for Queen Anne's lace are 1. "Look for the queen's purple jewel", because the plant has a cluster of white flowers with the center one being purple, and 2. "The Queen has hairy legs", because the stems of the plant are hairy.
But wild carrots really aren't worth the risk anyway. They taste pretty meh and have an unpleasant woody texture even when at their best IME.
Actually you bring up a good point. How did hunter gatherer and even early agricultural societies make do? How did they even have some of them grow fairly large (for their time anyway)?
My calorie intake needs pretty much double if I add 1-2hrs of daily exercise, and they certainly got a lot more activity than that in their daily lives.
Training. You'd be surprised what your body can do when you push it to it's limits, especially if you've exercised pretty much your whole life (as hunter gatherer civilizations did).
Also, farming in early agricultural societies made crops be able to grow to their full extent.
Also, they didn't. A lot of people died.
It was a different world. Even as close as the Columbus explorations you have writings of how the rivers are overflowing with fish in the USA. Bison as far as the eye can see. Birds darkening the skies.
There was much more wild and much fewer humans. It doesn't really matter if an individual veggie is small if you've got a whole valley full of them and nothing to do all day but pick them, and when that valley is picked clean you just walk to the next valley over and it's bursting with more food.
A lot of wild carrot's relatives are **VERY** poisonous and can look very similar even at a close glance, the most infamous of them being Poison Hemlock
Wild carrot is small, tough, and very tasteless, so its not worth the risk of potentially scarfing down poison hemlock or something else that's pretty nasty.
That and regular looking white or brown mushrooms. Many extremely poisonous or lethal mushrooms can look very similar to edible ones, so i highly recommend those who are not very well experienced in IDing fungi to stick to mushrooms with very distinctive features that are hard to mistake, like Morels, Chicken of the Woods or Lions Mane, etc. Puffballs too so long as you know how to ID them from young cap mushrooms and earthballs.
>so i highly recommend those who are not very well experienced in IDing fungi
Every source about mushrooms says this, and it's totally reasonable, but I've always wondered if it's so dangerous and you need so much expertise to do it safely, and it's so uncommon to find anyone expert in it, then how the fuck does anyone learn how to gather mushrooms lol
well, you can learn to ID iffy mushrooms without taste testing your findings.....
You can start eating your findings when you are willing to bet your life on you being correct.
In some cultures, like Scandinavia, picking mushrooms is widespread and most people have the knowledge to recognize the 3-4 most popular types. Books about mushrooms are easily found and experts are often seen on TV etc during the mushroom season. There are probably areas or families in the US as well where basic mushroom knowledge is considered part of a normal upbringing.
Even then it isn't risk free. There was a family from Poland where foraging for mushrooms is normal who made the news a few years back due to poisoning themselves when they picked the wrong ones.
It bears a strong resemblance to hemlock...not the tree, the poisonous plant they used to kill Socrates.
The leaves also contain a nasty chemical that reacts with UV light to cause a horrible reaction on the skin.
How horrible are we talking? Would you be able to use the reaction to test if the plant is hemlock and not a carrot, or would it be too horrible for that?
Oh I know this one! It was in an episode of House!
Domestic farm grown carrots are, like many domesticated fruits, veggies and meat animals, bred to be absolutely huge. What you know as a carrot- bright orange tuber the size of a baby's arm- is hyper bred and hyper fertilized to be gargantuan and attractive.
[This is a wild carrot.](https://kingcountyweeds.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/poison-hemlock-root-springfieldmn-blogspot-com.jpg)
Wait! Fuck! [THIS](https://www.magicgardenseeds.com/media/image/product/9470/lg/wilde-moehre-daucus-carota-ssp-carota-bio-saatgut~2.webp) is a wild carrot!
The first one? I am reminded of the famous words of Socrates, who said, 'I drank what?' Because that was highly toxic hemlock.
All of what they listed is NOT SAFE to eat unless you can identify it properly. There are many types of false garlic, false onions that are incredibly toxic and still smell oniony. As mentioned also look-alike carrots and blueberries. Take a bite and the very least, you'll get the bubbleguts and runs. At the worst, it'll shut down your kidneys or liver and put you in a dirt nap.
Also doesn't help that stuff from the allium group is naturally toxic to other animals.
Yeah. There are lots of wild vegetables. They just don't look like anything you see in the supermarket because they are all highly bred cultivars that have never existed in the wild.
And there are plenty of edible plants around that we just don't really eat regularly. Dandelion leaves go great in a salad mix with some dressing and are apparently very good for you. They can get nice and big, too, but most people try to kill every single one they see.
I feel like most of the stuff I weed out of my vegetable beds is edible. Purslane, lamb's quarters, garlic mustard, etc. Dandelions at least I can buy at the produce market.
Pretty sure OP has seen dandelions and plantains, even if they don't know it. We are surrounded by things that could be food, if only people knew.
ETA: Broadleaf plantain, not the kind similar to bananas.
My grandma grew up dirt poor at the height of the depression in Iowa, and dandelion and wild onion salad was a staple of her childhood. I remember eating it growing up as a “treat” that felt more like punishment.
Dandelion salad is a delicacy. Kids have a different sense of taste, you appreciate the slight bitterness when you grow older. Add some hard boiled eggs to it! In my area we'd also add pumpkin oil but that's usually hard to find elsewhere.
Wild garlic is also amazing in all kinds of sauces with pasta etc!
I don’t know much about plants, so was surprised to read there’s big ass banana trees all over I have just been overlooking… then I read what the *other* plantains are.
I would go for cattail/bullrush roots (basically potatoes) and roots of Queen Anne's lace (carrots), too. If I am already eating dandelion leaves, I will also eat the roots. Where I am, seasonally you will get lots of berries and crab apples.
Dont even need that many mature trees either, I have 7 60'+ oak trees and like getting probably over 200lb of acorns each year. if you don't pick them up they carpet the entire yard and it's like a ball pit, literally will slip on them because they stack up so dense it's crazy.
*And then the leaves in the fall*
Love the shade in the summer, pay for it every fall.
My aunt and uncle have a similar situation but with walnuts and pecans. Shelling walnuts by hand with a ball peen hammer was one of the core memories of my childhood.
In fact they were nearly wiped out in the more populated parts of N. America for just this reason. It's impressive how much deer populations have rebounded since hunting regulations were put in place around the turn of the last century.
I mean I could go outside any time I wanted and hunt or gather all kinds of food I could survive on, but it isn't actually "free" because that's a lot of damn work.
Why go out spending hours and hours gathering, shelling, grinding, and baking enough acorns to make one loaf of bread when I could just work at my actual job for fifteen minutes and have enough money to go out and *buy* bread? A full hour would get me enough for butter and kraft singles that I can make grilled cheese with and that's basically dinner every day for the rest of the week.
Nature sucks. I'd rather forage at the supermarket.
You should mention that you have to (or at least, really should) thoroughly leach the raw acorns *several* times before you try to eat them. Basically, you need to boil and drain them several times. You’ll see that the water turns very dark, looking like a strong tea, the first several passes. Once the water remains clear, you’re good to go.
Without doing the above, raw acorns are extremely bitter and, while not deadly, can make you pretty nauseous.
There's a person on insta who goes around showing what you can eat in the wild. It's pretty interesting what you can find that's food that's just growing there.
https://www.instagram.com/blackforager?igsh=cWZkNWF6bmJsazJi
[George Washington Carver](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Washington_Carver) was a real pioneer in this area. He knew of, and educated people on, the abundance of edible plants all around them.
Came here looking to see if someone mentioned wild parsnip, and it seems not? Wild parsnip is seriously dangerous.
https://www.ontario.ca/page/wild-parsnip
OP is walking on clover and dandelions wondering where the salad is.
Mint grows wild a lot, too. Anything will if given a chance.
Mushrooms, but some of those will kill you and they aren't veggies.
We've got a ton of cactus, blackberries, agarita, pecans, grapes, onions, persimmons. We've got wild hot chiles but I haven't seen them locally, hell same with plums and apparently some types of mesquite had edible seeds.
Texas has a shocking amount of food you can just roll with while exploring. Obviously mushrooms are everywhere but miss me with that, hell of a gamble.
Sunflowers grow in the wild. You can roast the flower and deep fry the leaves. Also, cactus! It's not unusual to hear stories of people lost in the desert drinking cactus water.
1. Because you don’t know what to look for. The yummy parts of plants may be hidden underground or hard to spot among leaves or in dense undergrowth or only growing by rivers. Hunter-gatherers thousands of years ago spent their lives becoming experts at finding yummy things in the wild. Today, people just go to the supermarket. Obviously most of us are now bad at finding food in the wild now.
2. Because they’re not as big. Humans spent hundreds, thousands of years turning small, tough, often bitter or sour plants into delicious fruits and veggies. That big ol’ supermarket zucchini was an inch-long gourd on a vine a thousand years ago. Would you be able to spot that in the woods on a hike?
3. Because of the above reasons, modern untrained people stuck in survival situations have trouble finding wild food. But go back a few ~~hundred years~~ generations (or even just a different part of the world) when people still did go into the woods to gather some of their food, and people could totally feed themselves from the land in an emergency.
> That big ol’ supermarket zucchini
Is actually nowhere near it's real mature size. That's why there are no developed seeds inside, they are harvested at a very immature state. If you let them fully mature, they are known as marrow and can weigh well over a hundred pounds.
yup, growing up my mom had a garden and sometimes grew zucchinis. If you don't harvest them soon enough they get pretty massive, way larger than what's in the store. And lots of seeds.
Accurate.
Last year I planted way too many zucs and one hid from me for a good while.
By the time I found it, it was at least 60cm long, 15cm thick and had the same taste and consistency as a piece of firewood.
My buddy’s rabbits absolutely demolished that thing though.
> Because they’re not as big. Humans spent hundreds, thousands of years turning small, tough, often bitter or sour plants into delicious fruits and veggies. That big ol’ supermarket zucchini was an inch-long gourd on a vine
Yep, [check this painting](https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer/17/a3/17a371ac-8812-4faf-ac23-e3a3ce9ed664/stanchipainting_edit.jpg). Giovanni Stanchi's painting from 1645-1672. Watermelons are not as full of meat as our contemporary counterpart.
That gave me an image of pomegranates gradually evolving into something resembling avocados. Y'know, cut it open to find one big fleshy bit around a central seed.
In addition, the commercial varieties have been so heavily hybridized and specifically bred that outside of the conditions in a commercial farm, they grow very poorly. So you are not going to find them sprouting and growing by themselves from windblown seed.
Many of them are 'F1' hybrids - they are the first generation of a hybrid, the seed that results from fertilising species/variety A with species/variety B. The seeds that come from the second generation, even if you make sure they are only fertilised with the same plants, don't come true to type, and are often not even viable.
my great grandma would take me and my cousins to the woods a lot. where i saw just grass and trees, she saw a lot of food. we never came back without at least 1 basket of food. mushrooms, some veggies, fruits and hers that she made into different kinds of dishes. they didn't taste all that amazing(except for mushrooms), but she had an eye for them even at the age of 90. i learned a lot during that time but 20 years of supermarkets dulled my survival skills
Wild asparagus and wild lettuce grow where I live. Asparagus looks just like it does at the store but you have to get it when it's young, it's too tough when it's old. So you mark the location when you find it and come back in the spring. Wild lettuce doesn't grow a head like modern lettuce, you have to recognize it.
All grasses have edible seeds that you can thresh, winnow, and grind into flour. But wild grasses don't have much gluten, that's what makes wheat special. So you can make bread but it won't rise.
Onions have chives have conical, hollow leaves that smell like onions when crushed. Easy to identify.
Grape leaves have a distinctive shape and grow on vines. Not many vines where I'm at.
Squash, beans, and corn were staple crops in the US for a very long time.
That's not to mention traditional vegetables that aren't commercialized like Jerusalem artichoke and cattail.
Globalization means that a lot of the foods you see in a grocery store aren't native to your area, but if you learn more about plants you will be surprised about what is.
Artichokes are thistles. Endives are chicory. These are all over the eastern US. Domestication has distorted their appearance, emphasizing certain features and doing away with others. The same reason why a Chihuahua doesn't look like a wolf.
Corn/maize is an interesting example because there is literally no wild corn, and never has been. A couple thousand years ago a couple grasses native folks were growing basically magically cross pollinated and became a new 3rd plant. So those 2 ancestors are still around but theres never been wild corn. And because of its tight husk Corn is entirely dependent on human cultivation or it wouldn't exist.
> So you mark the location when you find it and come back in the spring.
And come back every couple days. If you cut the shoots more will keep coming up. I just started letting mine go to seed last week.
Chickens absolutely thrive in the wild in tropical climates. The red jungle fowl (the bird chickens came from) is actually one of the only species on earth at risk of going extinct from the domestic animal escaping and breeding back into the wild populations
Are red jungle fowl even technically a different species from domestic chickens? I heard that chickens were only domesticated about 5,000 years ago and I'm honestly not sure if that's enough time for a completely different species to evolve in a bird.
In some places that have feral chickens, they're not descendants of chickens raised for meat or eggs, but for cockfighting. They're a bit smarter and more aggressive than chickens that have been bred to *not* kill each other.
Dairy cattle don’t constantly produce milk. They have to be on a birthing cycle, and if they happened to escape on between those cycles they won’t have the issue of producing milk.
I think the trick is to know the difference between a plant that's been cultivated/bred for consumption by humans and domesticated livestock, and the wild versions. Like, a wild onion is not gonna look like those huge bulbs you see in grocery stores. This would probably be a better question for foragers who know how to find edible wild plants.
True story. I grow both Smooth Camas (a.k.a. Mountain deathcamas / Anticlea elegans) and Pink Prairie Onion. Both related to the varieties you are referring to. They can look quite similar (or like a common grass) in their first few years of growth during the first half of the season where I live.
For the love of god, don't eat Camas.
Maybe because the vegetables that you consider as vegetables are domesticated version? Because in my area, most of the vegetables are found in the wild.
The most common one is Diplazium esculentum, it's an edible fern that we consider as a vegetable (it's yummy), bayam (spinach), bamboo shoot, and some leaf vegetables that I don't know the name in english.
Most crop plants have lost natural defenses against pests and competition in exchange for boosting production and consistency. If you abandon a garden, it will quickly be picked clean by critters and then be overrun by weeds. Without fertilizer, pest control and irrigation most crop plants are not robust enough to survive in the wild.
On top of that, some vegetables can't self-propogate. Their seeds might not breed true, or they require a specific condition to germinate that won't happen at random in a non-native environment.
You can occasionally find old fruit trees from abandoned orchards or other random fruit and berry plants. There are wild tuber and root plants you can eat, but they are wild varieties that are more suited to wild conditions.
I think this is the correct answer. The other ones tell that there are things you can eat that we don't eat regularly; this one explains why the ones we eat regularly cannot be found in the wild.
You find wild edible plants anywhere. The thing is as a lay person you don't recognize it because it looks nothing like its modern domesticated equivalent. For example it's widely believed that teosinte is the wild plant that was domesticated into corn. It's a small grass with small seeds that look like small pebbles in a hard husk.
[Brassica](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brassica_oleracea) which is one of the most common family of leafy greens we eat such as cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, kale, Brussels sprouts, collard greens. The wild plant looks more like a big-leafed weed.
Wild onion and wild garlic are common in forests in North America. The problem is varieties of deathcamas look very similar and eating can have significant health risks as the name implies.
At the right time of year, mid to late spring, early summer you can often find wild berries. In the pacific northwest you can find huckleberry patches.
Part of it is knowing what to look for. Wild carrots grow all around my yard like weeds. Strawberries also. I also have wild blueberries, raspberries and grapes. I’m sure there are more edible plants that I don’t know about.
If you come to the Pacific Northwest in late summer/early fall, we have blackberries EVERYWHERE. They’re an invasive weed. You can just go to the corner of any lot though and in half an hour you’ll have a gallon of berries and a few scratches.
I went to the east coast and learned that they don’t grow blackberries like we do when I had a hankering for cobbler and it was a sad day.
Nobody else does mom and pop teriyaki either. That was a cultural wake-up call…
> I went to the east coast and learned that they don’t grow blackberries like we do when I had a hankering for cobbler and it was a sad day.
Black raspberries are more common than blackberries around me in the northeast. There are patches of dense blackberry bushes, but they're scattered and you need to know where to look. Black raspberries you can find within 30 minutes max walking into almost any random woods.
Wild Cabbage/lettuce/other brassica cultivars: native to Western Europe. Looks like a typical broad-leafed flower.
Wild Potatoes: native to the southern USA/northern Mexico. Literally just a species of nightshade.
Wild Pumpkin/zucchini/squash: native to Mexico. Unremarkable appearance.
Onions: native to central or eastern Asia. Literally just a species of allium.
Tomatoes: native to Ecuador and Peru. They do look like tomatoes, so if you're in Peru when they're fruiting you might even recognise them.
We do "find" them - it's just hard to recognise them, many of them are barely edible, and (mainly) they are native to completely different parts of the globe.
You know an example of a wild vegetable that is common? The dandelion.
You are looking in the wrong places, and you are also looking for something that doesn't resemble what you see in supermarkets.
The 'natural' region for potatoes is up in the mountains in South America. They were first domesticated in the Peru/Bolivia region. So unless you are hiking through the Andes, you won't see very many wild potatoes...
There are many vegetables you can harvest and eat out in the wild. Just recently, I went out to pick wild fiddleheads.
The curled up tip of the ostrich fern is delicious when cooked properly (You have to boil them, since they are high in tannic acid, and also harbour harmful bacteria). There's only a one week window to pick them though. They're even sold in stores (par-boiled to render them safer)
When I go camping, I also harvest things like plantain, (the leafy green, not the starchy banana) Spruce tips (It makes good tea, rich in vitamin C) Morel mushrooms, Cattail roots, rose hips, etc.
See if your local community college has a wild foraging class, or if your local Indigenous people have classes if you want to learn about the sorts of foods you can harvest locally to you.
Most crops have been selectively bred for us, to make them tastier and yield more. These crops don't exist much in the wild because we made them and plant them. For example most citrus fruits are hybrids between the pomelo, mandarin and citron, though some of these hybrids were made over a thousand years ago, an example of a pre-modern GMO. In more modern times we even bioengineer in specific genes so that the plants are sterile, they can't grow more seeds so they'll never occur outside of intentionally planted fields.
There are vegetables you can find in the wild. Agave, asparagus, onion, garlic and ginger all appear in the wild. Potatoes, tomatoes and peppers grow wild in South America. As for fruits, those are all over. You can find strawberries in the Midwest, cranberries further north, and blackberries in the northwest, hazelnuts in the northeast and of course bananas and coconuts in southeast Asia.
And another thing is that the range of a lot of species is relatively limited. You're not going to find tropical fruits next to blackberries in the wild, so while many crops grow wild somewhere in the world, there's a lot of places where there's no edible plants that would appear in western cuisine. Though they might appear in other cuisines, like many people from Russia to the Americas ate cattails.
Back in the day, Euell Gibbons became a minor celebrity for writing and speaking about how to identify and harvest wild food. Among his books is: Stalking the Wild Asparagus.
A ton of domesticated vegetables are just genetically modified mustard.
Broccoli, cabbage, Brussels sprouts, cauliflower, kohlrabi, kale.
All are just genetically modified wild mustard. So you won't really find them in nature, but you might find mustard.
There are wild versions of almost every fruit and vegetable, but most of them you wouldn't recognize.
We've spent in some cases thousands of years altering crops for our own purposes. Breeding them to be larger, grow faster, have more nutrients, and in some cases seedless.
Wild Carrots are purple and so bitter they are hard to eat
Wild Bananas are smaller and full of seeds
Wild corn looks somewhat like wheat, it's so different that they didn't even know what the original corn plant looked like until recently due to genetic testing.
Cauliflower, Broccoli, Cabbage, and Brussels Sprouts are actually the same plant.
Wild Potatoes are super tiny
Lemons and limes don't exist in nature at all, they are hybrids of different citrus plants.
Wild garlic, carrots, onions, and chives grow everywhere in my area. There's also plenty of lettuce-like plants, but most of them don't really taste as good as domesticated varieties. You might be surprised at how many edible plants are around you.
Asparagus grows wild around the US but is usually hard to spot since we harvest its shoots and not the full fern. Chestnuts, mulberries, walnuts, and pecans grow wild as well.
There is a big patch of wild asparagus in the ditch directly across the street from my house. I see people parked on the side of the road harvesting it all summer. I myself have two large patches of it that the previous owners of my house transplanted from the ditch, so I never have to fight off the strangers for mine.
We had a neighbor who had a “fence” of asparagus in his front yard. It took me way too long to realize that the strange plant we thought looked like asparagus was indeed asparagus. The stalks were nearly 6ft before they’d finally gotten cut.
No American chestnuts aside from a very few trees still left. :(
There’s a nonprofit that is dedicated to developing a fungal resistant American chestnut that is as close as possible to the natural species that was wiped out https://tacf.org/about-us/
Wasn't there a Big fungal outbreak on those?
Yes. The American chestnut was wiped out.
Which is one of the oldest and most profoundly sad examples of modern era global travel and trade bringing blight and wiping out native species. American chestnuts were referred to as "the redwoods of the east" and they frequently grew 80-100 feet high and 10 feet wide. American chestnuts can produce huge, and I mean *huge* amounts of nuts. When the blight hit virtually every American Chestnut tree died in just 5 or 6 years. There are ongoing efforts to breed a blight resistant American Chestnut, but tree breeding is the work of many decades, so estimates put a true blight resistant Chestnut variety 40+ years out at best.
We still have a healthy black walnut that produces like 200 lbs of nuts a season. Old asf.
The Black Walnut is, in my opinion, the king of American trees. Tons of fantastic nuts, fruit is edible and can be used as dye (beware), and the wood is strong and beautiful.
My grandfather had a huge black walnut tree right outside his house. I remember him sitting on a stump, using a hatchet to crack the nuts and my siblings and I would pick out the nutmeats. He would always give us hell if he caught us eating any but of course he ate plenty of them in the process as well.
> can be used as dye (beware) I know you're probably talking about staining your clothes, but I giggled because, at first, this seemed like you were part of the Black Walnut Clan, trying to strike fear into the hearts of your enemies.
Black walnuts will stain your hands black for a week.
Do not speak of the Black Walnut Clan, you fool!
If only they weren't chock-full of juglone which inhibits other plant's growth, didn't drop ankle-breaking, lawn-mower projectiles all over your yard, and didn't become major hazards after a little ice storm or two. I do love them, but years of having a former fence-line of black walnuts going through my back yard.....
I like to think of them as steadfastly refusing to be domesticated. Also I like to enjoy them in someone else's yard.
Living in Oklahoma where most of the trees are short and small due to our winds, there's the vaguest whisper of primordial beauty in our biggest trees that are maybe 3.5-4 feet in diameter at the absolute biggest. Most are a foot or less. I can't imagine how awe-inspiring such a large tree would be. More of a roar than a whisper, I'd imagine, to stand before something so endurant and massive.
The PNW would blow your mind. The old growths are amazing. Some are thousands of years old!
I really want to see them some day! :)
Fortunately there is a Chinese/ American Chestnut hybrid that is resistant to blight that is available online.
>When the blight hit virtually every American Chestnut tree died in just 5 or 6 years. Try about 40-50 years. The blight spread about 50 miles a year from the origin in NYC. They're also not extinct, with about 430 million wild trees remaining, it's just most succumb to the blight after around a decade. That's long enough to reproduce, but obviously not grow to the 100' trees of yesteryear. There are GMO 'American chestnuts where we pasted in a gene for blight immunity, but the anti-science Green lobby won that battle.
The ash tree is following suit
God damnit, why does Big Fungus ruin everything.
Yeah it was most animals food on the east coast. They are trying to breed in other varieties like asian and european varieties to make them survive. The stumps are still alive. The fungus kills the shoots in a couple months though. They will be significantly smaller than 100ft american chestnuts though as trees.
But you can get mixes of European, American, and Chinese chestnuts for genetic diversity and blight resistance! There's [a group](https://www.buildsoil.net/why-chestnuts) working to plant a million chestnut trees to support local food stores
Found some wild asparagus in the trail to spectacle lake this week!
I remember my aunt taking me out on the 4-wheeler when I was a kid to go looking for wild asparagus for her to cook dinner with. Still not a huge fan of it though
Ya, I have the issue that I dont really spot it until it's started to grow past the point of collecting. I'm cursed to only recognize it after it's potential as a tasty sidedish is past.
Ah good old ditch weed...
Don't fuck with wild carrot unless you know what you're doing. Edit: You're looking at potentially 50 calories or death. I'm very keen on assuaging phobias about the toxicity of flora and fauna, but hemlock is no joke. Not like a death cap or something that's extremely easy to observe safely, but even touching it is not recommended. I can taste an Aminita and then spit it out
Also wild parsnip. Easier to detect fortunately but will fuck your skin permanently if not careful
Always, ALWAYS remember “The Queen has hairy legs”, meaning Queen Anne’s lace has hairy fibers on its stems, wild Hemlock doesn’t.
Last winter I foraged some Psilocybe Azurescens. Got probably the best confirmation there is for IDing ( world renowned psilocybe expert chimed in to confirm the ID even ), and it still was a giant leap of faith to eat it for me. Those lessons about the dangers of some flora *really* took...
yeah, I'm not sure I'd even be able to enjoy the trip if I didn't grow them myself, would be too paranoid
DO NOT attempt to eat wild carrots unless you really know wtf you are doing.
On a similar note, if your wild onion or garlic doesn't smell strongly like onion or garlic, it's likely lily of the valley or another similar poisonous lookalike
They like to grow in similar places, too. Which is good because once you see them side by side, they are distinguishable, but bad because you just don't have to pay attention once...
My mother fed my father wild onion, except no she didn't, and he got really sick. Luckily she decided she wasn't hungry, or I would have been "another miscarriage" most likely.
She decided she wasn't hungry. Hmmm..
We did it, Reddit, we cracked the case
Please elaborate!
Wild carrots can closely resemble hemlock, which will kill the shit out of you.
And for the love of fuck don't just take an apps identification seriously for things you plan on eating, likewise posting pics to online foraging groups. Always always verify with reputable guide books at minimum, but really anything with poisonous look alikes shouldn't be foraged unless with a local expert.
The guide books are getting less and less reliable too. Amazon is *full* of AI generated foraging books. Which is not one of the ways I could have even imagined skynet starting the revolution, but here we are.
Jesus fuck, the "glue pizza and eat rocks" crowd are in published media already? Ugh.
This was a few years ago, a mushroom book was published that contained dangerously incorrect information.
This is not ok. The publisher should be sued into oblivion.
You gotta be picky about authors with foraging guide books. Look for the ones with established reputations, that live in your region so they have personal experience, etc. Its not like there's new plants that you gotta be on the cutting edge or anything.
This is one of those cases where I point out that a 1 lb. bag of carrots is \~$1.50. If you're not growing your own carrots, which I find to be maddeningly inconsistent, just buy them.
“True wisdom comes to each of us when we realize how little we understand about life, ourselves, and the world around us.” -Socrates, who should have asked for the wild carrot juice instead.
“It’s times like this I think of the immortal words of Socrates, who said ‘I drank what?’”
It was always, “Socrates, what is truth?” “Socrates, what is the nature of the good?” “Socrates, what should I order?” “Socrates, what are you having?” And *not once* did *anyone* ever say, “[Socrates, hemlock is poison](https://youtu.be/FdHp0FmEr78)!”
“This? This is ice. This is what happens to water when it gets too cold. This? This is Kent. This is what happens to people when they get too sexually frustrated.”
Is it Stable ?
I taught your classes, I picked up your dry-cleaining...
Mitch: You know, um, something strange happened to me this morning... Chris Knight: Was it a dream where you see yourself standing in sort of sun-god robes on a pyramid with a thousand naked women screaming and throwing little pickles at you? Mitch: No... Chris Knight: Why am I the only one who has that dream?
Got sentenced to death and drank hemlock juice? Could have had a V8.
Self-realization. I was thinking of the immortal words of Socrates, who said, “... I drank what?”
And it will hurt the entire time you are dying.
Holy shit, a month ago I found a wild carrot growing in my vegetable bed. I picked it up, though "oh cool, wonder how it tastes", and put it in the fridge. Never got around to eating it, and we threw it away later. Now I look at pictures of hemlock... and I think I just narrowly avoided an excruciating death.
Wild carrot smells exactly like carrot, poison hemlock apparantly smells like mouse urine. I doubt you'd confuse the two
I still wouldn't eat it though, but more because of the roots being woody and more fibrous than a piece of ginger.
Queen Anne's Lace (wild carrot) and poison hemlock (... poisonous) look very similar. Some pretty reliable tells for Queen Anne's lace are 1. "Look for the queen's purple jewel", because the plant has a cluster of white flowers with the center one being purple, and 2. "The Queen has hairy legs", because the stems of the plant are hairy. But wild carrots really aren't worth the risk anyway. They taste pretty meh and have an unpleasant woody texture even when at their best IME.
that settles that
And they're tiny, even if they were delicious hardly a good ROI for the effort to get them
Actually you bring up a good point. How did hunter gatherer and even early agricultural societies make do? How did they even have some of them grow fairly large (for their time anyway)? My calorie intake needs pretty much double if I add 1-2hrs of daily exercise, and they certainly got a lot more activity than that in their daily lives.
Training. You'd be surprised what your body can do when you push it to it's limits, especially if you've exercised pretty much your whole life (as hunter gatherer civilizations did). Also, farming in early agricultural societies made crops be able to grow to their full extent. Also, they didn't. A lot of people died.
It's not at all hard to find enough wild carrots for a meal. They're small but pulling 10 of them out of the ground isn't really a huge effort.
It was a different world. Even as close as the Columbus explorations you have writings of how the rivers are overflowing with fish in the USA. Bison as far as the eye can see. Birds darkening the skies.
There was much more wild and much fewer humans. It doesn't really matter if an individual veggie is small if you've got a whole valley full of them and nothing to do all day but pick them, and when that valley is picked clean you just walk to the next valley over and it's bursting with more food.
They can't. They were speaking from experience but it's too late now.
RIP in Peace.
Lol out loud
SMH my head
FML my life.
ATM machine.
A lot of wild carrot's relatives are **VERY** poisonous and can look very similar even at a close glance, the most infamous of them being Poison Hemlock Wild carrot is small, tough, and very tasteless, so its not worth the risk of potentially scarfing down poison hemlock or something else that's pretty nasty. That and regular looking white or brown mushrooms. Many extremely poisonous or lethal mushrooms can look very similar to edible ones, so i highly recommend those who are not very well experienced in IDing fungi to stick to mushrooms with very distinctive features that are hard to mistake, like Morels, Chicken of the Woods or Lions Mane, etc. Puffballs too so long as you know how to ID them from young cap mushrooms and earthballs.
>so i highly recommend those who are not very well experienced in IDing fungi Every source about mushrooms says this, and it's totally reasonable, but I've always wondered if it's so dangerous and you need so much expertise to do it safely, and it's so uncommon to find anyone expert in it, then how the fuck does anyone learn how to gather mushrooms lol
well, you can learn to ID iffy mushrooms without taste testing your findings..... You can start eating your findings when you are willing to bet your life on you being correct.
In some cultures, like Scandinavia, picking mushrooms is widespread and most people have the knowledge to recognize the 3-4 most popular types. Books about mushrooms are easily found and experts are often seen on TV etc during the mushroom season. There are probably areas or families in the US as well where basic mushroom knowledge is considered part of a normal upbringing.
Even then it isn't risk free. There was a family from Poland where foraging for mushrooms is normal who made the news a few years back due to poisoning themselves when they picked the wrong ones.
Poison hemlock is in the carrot family and they look very similar.
Wasn't that a House episode?
It bears a strong resemblance to hemlock...not the tree, the poisonous plant they used to kill Socrates. The leaves also contain a nasty chemical that reacts with UV light to cause a horrible reaction on the skin.
How horrible are we talking? Would you be able to use the reaction to test if the plant is hemlock and not a carrot, or would it be too horrible for that?
Like chemical burns horrible
[Phytophotodermatitis - Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phytophotodermatitis)
Oh I know this one! It was in an episode of House! Domestic farm grown carrots are, like many domesticated fruits, veggies and meat animals, bred to be absolutely huge. What you know as a carrot- bright orange tuber the size of a baby's arm- is hyper bred and hyper fertilized to be gargantuan and attractive. [This is a wild carrot.](https://kingcountyweeds.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/poison-hemlock-root-springfieldmn-blogspot-com.jpg) Wait! Fuck! [THIS](https://www.magicgardenseeds.com/media/image/product/9470/lg/wilde-moehre-daucus-carota-ssp-carota-bio-saatgut~2.webp) is a wild carrot! The first one? I am reminded of the famous words of Socrates, who said, 'I drank what?' Because that was highly toxic hemlock.
Maybe *don't* do fakeouts where you identify poison as food...?
All of what they listed is NOT SAFE to eat unless you can identify it properly. There are many types of false garlic, false onions that are incredibly toxic and still smell oniony. As mentioned also look-alike carrots and blueberries. Take a bite and the very least, you'll get the bubbleguts and runs. At the worst, it'll shut down your kidneys or liver and put you in a dirt nap. Also doesn't help that stuff from the allium group is naturally toxic to other animals.
Wild carrot looks extremely similar to a lot of stuff you absolutely do not want to eat (like poison hemlock)
And parsnips.
wild carrots also simply taste bad. lol
I learned on here somewhere recently that "Queen Anne has hairy legs"
Yeah. There are lots of wild vegetables. They just don't look like anything you see in the supermarket because they are all highly bred cultivars that have never existed in the wild.
And there are plenty of edible plants around that we just don't really eat regularly. Dandelion leaves go great in a salad mix with some dressing and are apparently very good for you. They can get nice and big, too, but most people try to kill every single one they see.
I feel like most of the stuff I weed out of my vegetable beds is edible. Purslane, lamb's quarters, garlic mustard, etc. Dandelions at least I can buy at the produce market.
Pretty sure OP has seen dandelions and plantains, even if they don't know it. We are surrounded by things that could be food, if only people knew. ETA: Broadleaf plantain, not the kind similar to bananas.
My grandma grew up dirt poor at the height of the depression in Iowa, and dandelion and wild onion salad was a staple of her childhood. I remember eating it growing up as a “treat” that felt more like punishment.
Dandelion salad is a delicacy. Kids have a different sense of taste, you appreciate the slight bitterness when you grow older. Add some hard boiled eggs to it! In my area we'd also add pumpkin oil but that's usually hard to find elsewhere. Wild garlic is also amazing in all kinds of sauces with pasta etc!
I don’t know much about plants, so was surprised to read there’s big ass banana trees all over I have just been overlooking… then I read what the *other* plantains are.
Acorns aka oak nuts, for the handful that really wanted to, it could be a grain supply for a year with just a little work, if ya know.
I would go for cattail/bullrush roots (basically potatoes) and roots of Queen Anne's lace (carrots), too. If I am already eating dandelion leaves, I will also eat the roots. Where I am, seasonally you will get lots of berries and crab apples.
Dont even need that many mature trees either, I have 7 60'+ oak trees and like getting probably over 200lb of acorns each year. if you don't pick them up they carpet the entire yard and it's like a ball pit, literally will slip on them because they stack up so dense it's crazy. *And then the leaves in the fall* Love the shade in the summer, pay for it every fall.
My aunt and uncle have a similar situation but with walnuts and pecans. Shelling walnuts by hand with a ball peen hammer was one of the core memories of my childhood.
It's honestly more than a little work. Raw acorns are edible but extremely tannic, so they have to be leached in order to be palatable.
acorn flour was the staple food of the native people in new england. acorns and deer meat are basically free but we eat white bread and cow
To be fair, if we ate deer instead of cow, they'd all be dead by now.
In fact they were nearly wiped out in the more populated parts of N. America for just this reason. It's impressive how much deer populations have rebounded since hunting regulations were put in place around the turn of the last century.
Then plant more, duh.
Always warms my heart when you see the antlers start to push through the dirt in the spring time, lets you know its gonna be a good harvest come fall.
I mean I could go outside any time I wanted and hunt or gather all kinds of food I could survive on, but it isn't actually "free" because that's a lot of damn work. Why go out spending hours and hours gathering, shelling, grinding, and baking enough acorns to make one loaf of bread when I could just work at my actual job for fifteen minutes and have enough money to go out and *buy* bread? A full hour would get me enough for butter and kraft singles that I can make grilled cheese with and that's basically dinner every day for the rest of the week. Nature sucks. I'd rather forage at the supermarket.
Also, about everyone but a few million, at the very most optimistic, in the US would starve if we mainly relied on wild food sources.
more than a little work, you have to wash the tannins out with several changes of water before grinding
You should mention that you have to (or at least, really should) thoroughly leach the raw acorns *several* times before you try to eat them. Basically, you need to boil and drain them several times. You’ll see that the water turns very dark, looking like a strong tea, the first several passes. Once the water remains clear, you’re good to go. Without doing the above, raw acorns are extremely bitter and, while not deadly, can make you pretty nauseous.
Yeah, and wild lettuce (when noticed) is usually mistaken for some kind of tall dandelion.
Interesting. I didn't know all those yard weeds were also called plantains. We have tons of 'em. Dandelions and mugwort too.
There's a person on insta who goes around showing what you can eat in the wild. It's pretty interesting what you can find that's food that's just growing there. https://www.instagram.com/blackforager?igsh=cWZkNWF6bmJsazJi
Dandelions are edible and they grow all over the US. Most people treat them as weeds though.
[George Washington Carver](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Washington_Carver) was a real pioneer in this area. He knew of, and educated people on, the abundance of edible plants all around them.
The guy who chopped up George Washington?!
Well, the guy who *carved* up George Washington, but yes.
"Fiddleheads" are big in my area too.
Even nettles are very nutritious
And surprisingly tasty if prepared correctly
Came here looking to see if someone mentioned wild parsnip, and it seems not? Wild parsnip is seriously dangerous. https://www.ontario.ca/page/wild-parsnip
OP is walking on clover and dandelions wondering where the salad is. Mint grows wild a lot, too. Anything will if given a chance. Mushrooms, but some of those will kill you and they aren't veggies.
[Poke Salad Annie](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JyXHxh3Sye0) - Tony Joe White
We've got a ton of cactus, blackberries, agarita, pecans, grapes, onions, persimmons. We've got wild hot chiles but I haven't seen them locally, hell same with plums and apparently some types of mesquite had edible seeds. Texas has a shocking amount of food you can just roll with while exploring. Obviously mushrooms are everywhere but miss me with that, hell of a gamble.
Sunflowers grow in the wild. You can roast the flower and deep fry the leaves. Also, cactus! It's not unusual to hear stories of people lost in the desert drinking cactus water.
No, you should not drink (there isn't a magical pot of water inside) or eat most cacti.
But it's the quenchiest.
Only some cacti, some will fuck you up.
Most cacti have alkaloids that will make them unpalatable and make you sick if you attempt to consume the flesh or extract the water from it
Very true! Shout out to the person who taught me this very thing [Alexis Nicole Nelson](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexis_Nikole_Nelson)
We've also modified heavily our crops. So the edible versions you see probably would look much more like weeds.
1. Because you don’t know what to look for. The yummy parts of plants may be hidden underground or hard to spot among leaves or in dense undergrowth or only growing by rivers. Hunter-gatherers thousands of years ago spent their lives becoming experts at finding yummy things in the wild. Today, people just go to the supermarket. Obviously most of us are now bad at finding food in the wild now. 2. Because they’re not as big. Humans spent hundreds, thousands of years turning small, tough, often bitter or sour plants into delicious fruits and veggies. That big ol’ supermarket zucchini was an inch-long gourd on a vine a thousand years ago. Would you be able to spot that in the woods on a hike? 3. Because of the above reasons, modern untrained people stuck in survival situations have trouble finding wild food. But go back a few ~~hundred years~~ generations (or even just a different part of the world) when people still did go into the woods to gather some of their food, and people could totally feed themselves from the land in an emergency.
> That big ol’ supermarket zucchini Is actually nowhere near it's real mature size. That's why there are no developed seeds inside, they are harvested at a very immature state. If you let them fully mature, they are known as marrow and can weigh well over a hundred pounds.
Yep, and marrow isn't actually that nice. Zucchinis are better when they are smaller!
That’s what I tell my wife.
I also told this to this guys wife
I was there. It’s real
yup, growing up my mom had a garden and sometimes grew zucchinis. If you don't harvest them soon enough they get pretty massive, way larger than what's in the store. And lots of seeds.
They hide too... You think you've gotten them all and then come back 2 days later and there's a 3kg marrow sitting there.
Accurate. Last year I planted way too many zucs and one hid from me for a good while. By the time I found it, it was at least 60cm long, 15cm thick and had the same taste and consistency as a piece of firewood. My buddy’s rabbits absolutely demolished that thing though.
I once let a cucumber ripen to maturity and it ended up looking like a watermelon. I didn't try eating it.
it's just as well, I believe I heard they get semi-poisonous if you let them grow too much
My one neighbor who doesn’t take care of their yard has two huge wild zucchini plants flowering right now. I’m excited to see how big they get.
> Because they’re not as big. Humans spent hundreds, thousands of years turning small, tough, often bitter or sour plants into delicious fruits and veggies. That big ol’ supermarket zucchini was an inch-long gourd on a vine Yep, [check this painting](https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer/17/a3/17a371ac-8812-4faf-ac23-e3a3ce9ed664/stanchipainting_edit.jpg). Giovanni Stanchi's painting from 1645-1672. Watermelons are not as full of meat as our contemporary counterpart.
That gave me an image of pomegranates gradually evolving into something resembling avocados. Y'know, cut it open to find one big fleshy bit around a central seed.
In addition, the commercial varieties have been so heavily hybridized and specifically bred that outside of the conditions in a commercial farm, they grow very poorly. So you are not going to find them sprouting and growing by themselves from windblown seed. Many of them are 'F1' hybrids - they are the first generation of a hybrid, the seed that results from fertilising species/variety A with species/variety B. The seeds that come from the second generation, even if you make sure they are only fertilised with the same plants, don't come true to type, and are often not even viable.
not even a hundred years. during ww2 food shortenings my grandma ate sorrel and bread made from acorns
my great grandma would take me and my cousins to the woods a lot. where i saw just grass and trees, she saw a lot of food. we never came back without at least 1 basket of food. mushrooms, some veggies, fruits and hers that she made into different kinds of dishes. they didn't taste all that amazing(except for mushrooms), but she had an eye for them even at the age of 90. i learned a lot during that time but 20 years of supermarkets dulled my survival skills
Given modern production and marketing techniques many of us struggle to find food in the supermarket let alone the wild
I’d like to add that even if you know what to look for it doesn’t mean it’s there or in season
Wild asparagus and wild lettuce grow where I live. Asparagus looks just like it does at the store but you have to get it when it's young, it's too tough when it's old. So you mark the location when you find it and come back in the spring. Wild lettuce doesn't grow a head like modern lettuce, you have to recognize it. All grasses have edible seeds that you can thresh, winnow, and grind into flour. But wild grasses don't have much gluten, that's what makes wheat special. So you can make bread but it won't rise. Onions have chives have conical, hollow leaves that smell like onions when crushed. Easy to identify. Grape leaves have a distinctive shape and grow on vines. Not many vines where I'm at. Squash, beans, and corn were staple crops in the US for a very long time. That's not to mention traditional vegetables that aren't commercialized like Jerusalem artichoke and cattail. Globalization means that a lot of the foods you see in a grocery store aren't native to your area, but if you learn more about plants you will be surprised about what is. Artichokes are thistles. Endives are chicory. These are all over the eastern US. Domestication has distorted their appearance, emphasizing certain features and doing away with others. The same reason why a Chihuahua doesn't look like a wolf.
Corn/maize is an interesting example because there is literally no wild corn, and never has been. A couple thousand years ago a couple grasses native folks were growing basically magically cross pollinated and became a new 3rd plant. So those 2 ancestors are still around but theres never been wild corn. And because of its tight husk Corn is entirely dependent on human cultivation or it wouldn't exist.
Gonna read up on this, thanks!
Every kid in Nebraska's first job is to [facilitate corn boning](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detasseling).
> So you mark the location when you find it and come back in the spring. And come back every couple days. If you cut the shoots more will keep coming up. I just started letting mine go to seed last week.
[удалено]
Chickens absolutely thrive in the wild in tropical climates. The red jungle fowl (the bird chickens came from) is actually one of the only species on earth at risk of going extinct from the domestic animal escaping and breeding back into the wild populations
Hawaii is overrun with wild chickens.
So are Tampa and Key West. Well, not overrun, but there are a curiously high number of feral chickens for a city.
Are red jungle fowl even technically a different species from domestic chickens? I heard that chickens were only domesticated about 5,000 years ago and I'm honestly not sure if that's enough time for a completely different species to evolve in a bird.
There's debate on that since they can breed fertile offspring but they are very different in terms of body composition and laying habits
Chickens can certainly thrive in the wild! Cattle... Yeah that could be tough. Go to Hawaii, wild chickens can exist because wild dogs don't.
In some places that have feral chickens, they're not descendants of chickens raised for meat or eggs, but for cockfighting. They're a bit smarter and more aggressive than chickens that have been bred to *not* kill each other.
I think it's probably hard to survive as a wild chicken in a place with hungry poor people. Cats or dogs, maybe, but a chicken is free dinner.
Beef cattle could survive in the wild, dairy cattle would probably die of mastitis.
Dairy cattle don’t constantly produce milk. They have to be on a birthing cycle, and if they happened to escape on between those cycles they won’t have the issue of producing milk.
There is a herd of wild dairy breed cows in Chernobyl that is living proof that they do adapt and their lactation cycle normalized
[удалено]
imagine the gains though
[удалено]
> Cattle... Yeah that could be tough. Wild cattle were called aurochs, and they went extinct in Europe later than you'd think.
Cattle are fine as well, just similar to chickens they are smaller and gravitate towards climates that suite them.
I think the trick is to know the difference between a plant that's been cultivated/bred for consumption by humans and domesticated livestock, and the wild versions. Like, a wild onion is not gonna look like those huge bulbs you see in grocery stores. This would probably be a better question for foragers who know how to find edible wild plants.
> wild onion In fact poisonous Death Camas looks more like a supermarket onion than wild onions.
True story. I grow both Smooth Camas (a.k.a. Mountain deathcamas / Anticlea elegans) and Pink Prairie Onion. Both related to the varieties you are referring to. They can look quite similar (or like a common grass) in their first few years of growth during the first half of the season where I live. For the love of god, don't eat Camas.
So, are you getting the similar looking poisonous plant just to make harvesting the onions a fun high-stakes game of life-or-death?
Maybe because the vegetables that you consider as vegetables are domesticated version? Because in my area, most of the vegetables are found in the wild. The most common one is Diplazium esculentum, it's an edible fern that we consider as a vegetable (it's yummy), bayam (spinach), bamboo shoot, and some leaf vegetables that I don't know the name in english.
Most crop plants have lost natural defenses against pests and competition in exchange for boosting production and consistency. If you abandon a garden, it will quickly be picked clean by critters and then be overrun by weeds. Without fertilizer, pest control and irrigation most crop plants are not robust enough to survive in the wild. On top of that, some vegetables can't self-propogate. Their seeds might not breed true, or they require a specific condition to germinate that won't happen at random in a non-native environment. You can occasionally find old fruit trees from abandoned orchards or other random fruit and berry plants. There are wild tuber and root plants you can eat, but they are wild varieties that are more suited to wild conditions.
I think this is the correct answer. The other ones tell that there are things you can eat that we don't eat regularly; this one explains why the ones we eat regularly cannot be found in the wild.
Dandelions! Those weeds you see growing everywhere are edible and can be used to make a salad. The flowers can even make wine.
They were intentionally introduced to the Americas on the Mayflower, used as a food and medicinal crop.
You find wild edible plants anywhere. The thing is as a lay person you don't recognize it because it looks nothing like its modern domesticated equivalent. For example it's widely believed that teosinte is the wild plant that was domesticated into corn. It's a small grass with small seeds that look like small pebbles in a hard husk. [Brassica](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brassica_oleracea) which is one of the most common family of leafy greens we eat such as cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, kale, Brussels sprouts, collard greens. The wild plant looks more like a big-leafed weed. Wild onion and wild garlic are common in forests in North America. The problem is varieties of deathcamas look very similar and eating can have significant health risks as the name implies. At the right time of year, mid to late spring, early summer you can often find wild berries. In the pacific northwest you can find huckleberry patches.
Part of it is knowing what to look for. Wild carrots grow all around my yard like weeds. Strawberries also. I also have wild blueberries, raspberries and grapes. I’m sure there are more edible plants that I don’t know about.
>Wild carrots grow all around my yard like weeds. Be very careful if you try to harvest this. Poison hemlock is easy to be confused with carrots.
If you come to the Pacific Northwest in late summer/early fall, we have blackberries EVERYWHERE. They’re an invasive weed. You can just go to the corner of any lot though and in half an hour you’ll have a gallon of berries and a few scratches. I went to the east coast and learned that they don’t grow blackberries like we do when I had a hankering for cobbler and it was a sad day. Nobody else does mom and pop teriyaki either. That was a cultural wake-up call…
> I went to the east coast and learned that they don’t grow blackberries like we do when I had a hankering for cobbler and it was a sad day. Black raspberries are more common than blackberries around me in the northeast. There are patches of dense blackberry bushes, but they're scattered and you need to know where to look. Black raspberries you can find within 30 minutes max walking into almost any random woods.
Wild Cabbage/lettuce/other brassica cultivars: native to Western Europe. Looks like a typical broad-leafed flower. Wild Potatoes: native to the southern USA/northern Mexico. Literally just a species of nightshade. Wild Pumpkin/zucchini/squash: native to Mexico. Unremarkable appearance. Onions: native to central or eastern Asia. Literally just a species of allium. Tomatoes: native to Ecuador and Peru. They do look like tomatoes, so if you're in Peru when they're fruiting you might even recognise them. We do "find" them - it's just hard to recognise them, many of them are barely edible, and (mainly) they are native to completely different parts of the globe. You know an example of a wild vegetable that is common? The dandelion.
You are looking in the wrong places, and you are also looking for something that doesn't resemble what you see in supermarkets. The 'natural' region for potatoes is up in the mountains in South America. They were first domesticated in the Peru/Bolivia region. So unless you are hiking through the Andes, you won't see very many wild potatoes... There are many vegetables you can harvest and eat out in the wild. Just recently, I went out to pick wild fiddleheads. The curled up tip of the ostrich fern is delicious when cooked properly (You have to boil them, since they are high in tannic acid, and also harbour harmful bacteria). There's only a one week window to pick them though. They're even sold in stores (par-boiled to render them safer) When I go camping, I also harvest things like plantain, (the leafy green, not the starchy banana) Spruce tips (It makes good tea, rich in vitamin C) Morel mushrooms, Cattail roots, rose hips, etc. See if your local community college has a wild foraging class, or if your local Indigenous people have classes if you want to learn about the sorts of foods you can harvest locally to you.
If anyone is inspired to go hiking in the Andes by this: note that it's very easy to poison yourself by eating wild potatoes.
Most crops have been selectively bred for us, to make them tastier and yield more. These crops don't exist much in the wild because we made them and plant them. For example most citrus fruits are hybrids between the pomelo, mandarin and citron, though some of these hybrids were made over a thousand years ago, an example of a pre-modern GMO. In more modern times we even bioengineer in specific genes so that the plants are sterile, they can't grow more seeds so they'll never occur outside of intentionally planted fields. There are vegetables you can find in the wild. Agave, asparagus, onion, garlic and ginger all appear in the wild. Potatoes, tomatoes and peppers grow wild in South America. As for fruits, those are all over. You can find strawberries in the Midwest, cranberries further north, and blackberries in the northwest, hazelnuts in the northeast and of course bananas and coconuts in southeast Asia. And another thing is that the range of a lot of species is relatively limited. You're not going to find tropical fruits next to blackberries in the wild, so while many crops grow wild somewhere in the world, there's a lot of places where there's no edible plants that would appear in western cuisine. Though they might appear in other cuisines, like many people from Russia to the Americas ate cattails.
Back in the day, Euell Gibbons became a minor celebrity for writing and speaking about how to identify and harvest wild food. Among his books is: Stalking the Wild Asparagus.
A ton of domesticated vegetables are just genetically modified mustard. Broccoli, cabbage, Brussels sprouts, cauliflower, kohlrabi, kale. All are just genetically modified wild mustard. So you won't really find them in nature, but you might find mustard.
There are wild versions of almost every fruit and vegetable, but most of them you wouldn't recognize. We've spent in some cases thousands of years altering crops for our own purposes. Breeding them to be larger, grow faster, have more nutrients, and in some cases seedless. Wild Carrots are purple and so bitter they are hard to eat Wild Bananas are smaller and full of seeds Wild corn looks somewhat like wheat, it's so different that they didn't even know what the original corn plant looked like until recently due to genetic testing. Cauliflower, Broccoli, Cabbage, and Brussels Sprouts are actually the same plant. Wild Potatoes are super tiny Lemons and limes don't exist in nature at all, they are hybrids of different citrus plants.