Pointing you to an important paper on edible wild plants

"lacto-fermented hogweed soup (+eggs): the original borscht"

Nancy Turner and six co-authors wrote "Edible and Tended Wild Plants, Traditional Ecological Knowledge and Agroecology" a very readable look on the possible importance of weedy plants for food. It's hard to summarize the paper because there are no words wasted but if you are interested in the wider implications of foraging I advice you to read it. The crux of the matter is stated here:

Wild plant species, even for agrarian peoples or pastoralists who mainly used animal products, would have assumed a special importance during times of crop failure and famine. Some of these are the species that we know of today as “weeds”: species well adapted to disturbed conditions and often associatedwith human habitation. In turn, some of these weeds became the candidates for domestication: for example, mustards, wild carrot, chicory and lettuce. Altogether, widely used domesticated species comprise only a fraction of the 20,000 or so plant species known to have been used as food by humans. Canadian Indigenous peoples alone have used over 500 species of plants for food. In recent times, however, especially in urban areas of the world, most people have come to depend on fewer and fewer species to provide them with their daily nutrition. Today, only around 20 domesticated species supply up to 85% of the world’s food base.

What follows then is a ten page overview of selected edible wild plants from around the world as documented in scientific literature. That's an approximate 250 plants, way more than an average forage guidebooks will give you. The paper continues with various strategies for wild plant use and management before giving a very good definition of weeds, their downsides and upsides. It then continues by giving various examples of weeds used in local cuisines. I am quoting from the paragraph on Borsch:

Nowadays the Russian name borsh and Polish barszcz designate a kind of vegetable soup, specifically one made with beetroots (Beta vulgaris). However in the past this name applied mainly to a soup made from the young shoots of hogweed, or cow-parsnip (Heracleum sphondylium) which in Polish bears the name barszcz and in Russian barshchevnikh. How did it happen that this shift in the meaning of the name arose? This issue fascinated professor Jozef Rostafinski, a Polish botanist from Cracow, who in 1916 published a treatise on the history of the shift from eating Heracleum to eating beetroots. Hogweed is reported as an important food plant in Poland in the sixteenth century. In the herbal of Marcin z Urze¸dowa (1595) we can read: “Whoever eats hogweed, moistens his living.. . . When they make it sour in the Polish way, it is good to drink in fevers, thirst, as it alleviates thirst and cholera and it induces greed for food with its spice.. . . Garnished with egg and butter, it is good to eat on the days when they do not eat meat soup, as it works in the same way.”

Isn't that lovely? The paper ends with the observation that the traditional knowledge of gathering wild plants is mostly down to old women whose skills are not being handed down to a new generation. And this is a shame because with it we lose a local, practical, hands-on knowledge that appreciates diversity and gives independence and understanding of the environment to its practitioners.

The Comanche Empire

Nomads, the historical records show, can evade, resist, stop, sustain, exploit, destabilize, and destroy empires. They can also build enduring empires of their own, but only if they modify the essence of their being and became less nomadic. Nomadism appears fundamentally incompatible with empire-building. Empires thrive on structure and stability, whereas nomads - at least the nomads one finds in most scholarly studies - are shifting and factional. Their institutions, like their very way of life, tend to be fluid and ephemeral, and they lack such classic elements of empires as state structure and surplus-generating agriculture. Indeed, to preserve their might, nearly all nomadic empires develop over time more fixed institutions of governance and production that required at least seasonal sedentarism. 

Countless colonial officials failed to comprehend and contain the Comanches. Comanches deflected the controlling gaze of colonial agents through their traditional political culture in which power was dichotomized, leaders could be both strong and weak, and group membership was flexible. A vast collection of relatively autonomous bands and organized for multipolarity and fluidity, the Comanche nation appeared formidable and fragmented, structured and shapeless, incomprehensible and impregnable all at once. Seen from the outside, the Comanche nation was an amorphous entity that lacked a clear center to negotiate with - or obliterate - and an explicit internal structure that would have rendered its external actions predictable. The Comanches, it seems, were so dominant not in spite of their informal, almost atomistic social organization but because of it.

The Comanche Empire (Yale, 2008) by Pekka Hämäläinen has been my best read in months. It describes the emergence of an obscure band of Shoshone's on the great plains just before 1700. Here, equipped with horses and fired by unbounded energy these former hunter-gatherers created the wide-ranging semi-nomadic, trade-centred, raiding-dependant Comancheria empire that lasted for over a century. George Catlin, who painted the Comanche village above in 1834-35, estimated that principle Comanche village had six to eight hundred tipis organized in long parallel lines "which gave the settlement  a gridlike appearance of streets and rowhouses," according to Hämäläinen. On the outside this book is the story of the rise and fall of the Comanches, but it also incorporates anthropological and ecological views, explaining how ecological factors and social organization contributed to their success. The Comanches, I can't help myself comparing, were the Vikings of the great plains.

'Molongo' is the new buzz word

In a paper called "Long-Term Foraging Expeditions (Molongo) among the Baka Hunter-Gatherers in the Northwestern Congo Basin, with Special Reference to the 'Wild Yam Question'" Hirokazu Yasuoka "describe[s] and analyze[s] a long-term foraging expedition (molongo) among the Baka of the northwestern Congo Basin as an example Long-Term Foraging Expeditions of foraging life in tropical rainforests. On the basis of these data, I then discuss the potential of tropical rainforests as a human habitat." 

There is lot of energy intake calculating going on in this paper but for our purpose it is enough to give you a few of the images and that part of the text that explain the daily proceedings of the Baka life during the vacations expedition. What amazes me is how slow the trek proceeds. The final camp is roughly 50 kilometres away but it takes 16 days to get there while it only takes 6 days to get back. On the molongo people take it slow. 

An important sociocultural aspect of molongo is the value placed on a nomadic life in the forest. When on the move, the group would usually decamp at about eight o’clock in the morning, often breaking into several sections to variously hunt such animals as they encountered or gather plants and honey. In the early afternoon when they decided on the location of the new camp, the women began to build huts of saplings and large Marantaceae leaves, while the men again went hunting with spears or to look for honey. When fresh tracks of a large animal were found, the hunter and his assistants perused it with the gun. The Baka moved the campsite every few days before arriving at the final camp of Mongungu, where they continued to use the forest intensively for their 43 night stay. 

Once at the Mongungu camp the men set cable snares along seven routes of 2–4 km stretching in a radial pattern from the camp. Hunters visited their snares every three days, because trapped animals spoiled within two days of dying. Men searched for honey or hunted with spears on the other days. The women went out digging for wild yams every two or three days, sometimes accompanied by their husbands. The wild yam species harvested most frequently was Dioscorea praehensilis, which can be found in large quantities in one place. Almost all of the cable snares and the major gathering sites for wild yams were within 3 km of the camp, so the most intensively used area was approximately ∼30km2.

The article is behind the academic firewall, with many tanks to a reader for the PDF.

The primitive savage as a class-A naturalist

Columbian Desana constructing a trap.

The following quote is taken from 'Cosmology as Ecological Analysis' (PDF-link) by Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff (earlier, earlier). It reiterates a point that has been made before and before and before: to be successful as a hunter-gatherer you need to be a keen naturalist. Reichel-Dolmatoff's unique contribution is in the how he shows that the stories and superstitions of 'primitive' people make-up a well-argued and consciously operated ecological strategy. 

Among the Indians there is usually little interest in new knowledge that might be used for exploiting the environment more effectively and there is little concern for maximising short-term gains for obtaining more food or raw materials than are actually needed. But there is always a great deal of interest in accumulating more factual knowledge about biological reality and, above all, about what the physical world requires from man. This knowledge, the Indians believe, is essential for survival because man must bring himself into conformity with nature if he wants to exist as part of nature's unity, and must fit his demands to nature's availabilities.

Animal behaviour is of the greatest interest to the Indians because it often constitutes a model for what is possible in terms of successful adaptation. On the one hand the Indians have a detailed knowledge of such aspects as seasonal variation and micro-distributions of the animal and plant species of their habitat. They have a good understanding of ecological communities, of the behaviour of social insects, bird flocks the organisation of fish schools, the patterns of fish runs, and other forms of collective behaviour. Such phenomena as parasitism, symbiosis, commensalis, and other relationships between co-occurring species have been well observed by them and are pointed out as possible models of adaptation. On the other hand, myths and tales abound with accounts of visits to the animal world, of people turning into animals in order to learn more about their habits, or of animals teaching men how to make use of certain resources.

Weeds, heresy and the great foraging revival

The greater plantain, but the Algonquin called it the White Man's Foot or the Englishman's foot because it appeared everywhere the Europeans went.

Alfred W.Crosby's 'Ecological Imperialism, the biological expansion of Europe, 900-1900 ' (Cambridge University Press, 1986) reads as if Jared Diamond's uncle Fester is on a roll. 

Crosby explains how weeds from the old world prepared the ground of the new world for European colonisers and were critical to the success of European expansion. 

"Weeds" is not a scientific word. It refers not to plants of any specific species or genus or any category recognized by scientific taxonomy, but to whatever plants spring up where humans do not want them. More often than not they are plants that evolved originally to fill the minor role of colonizing bare ground after fires, landslides, floods, and such and that found themselves wonderfully preadapted to spread across the expanses stripped clean by the Neolithic farmer's plow or sickle. Already tolerant of direct sunlight and disturbed soil, they added tolerance of sandal, boot, and hoof. Always ready to spring up fast in the wake of disasters, they easily evolved to survive and sprout again in the wake of the tug, tear, and chomp of grazing livestock. The farmer calls them the bane of his life, and they are, but they also provide livestock with feed and help combat erosion.

The Neolithic farmer simplified his ecosystem to produce quantities of plants that would grow rapidly on bare ground and would survive grazing animals, and he got exactly what he tried for, but some of them he cursed: tufted vetch, ryegrass, cleavers, thistles, coriander, and others.

Those plants with a talent for finding and settling on disturbed grounds rose to the challenge when agriculture first emerged. Evolving with agriculture these plants found better and better ways to use the opportunities provided by agriculture's annual cycle of soil disturbance (the decimation following the plough and the harvest). When seafaring began these plants had become especially well adapted to conquer other lands, easily outcompeting local plants that lacked previous experience with agricultures impact on the land.

In other words: agriculture not just created the possibility to think of a plant as a weed, it also created conditions for plants to acquire the persistent characteristics of weeds. Crosby goes on to cite from the Proverbs in the Old Testament:

I went by the field of the slothful, and by the vineyard of the man void of understanding;

And, lo, it was all grown over with thorns, and weeds had covered its face, and its stone wall was broken down.

Then I saw, and considered it well: I looked upon it, and received instruction.

Yet a little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to sleep:

So shall your poverty come like a robber; and your want like an armed man.

There you got the agricultural obsession with strive, purity and ecocide in the language of King James: the damnation of weed as a moral wrong.

No longer to be poisoned by civilization he flees... to become lost in the wild

“Two years he walks the Earth. No phone, no pool, no pets, no cigarettes. Ultimate freedom. An extremist. An aesthetic voyager whose home is the road. Escaped from Atlanta. Thou shalt not return, 'cause "the West is the best." And now after two rambling years comes the final and greatest adventure. The climactic battle to kill the false being within and victoriously conclude the spiritual revolution. Ten days and nights of freight trains and hitchhiking bring him to the great white north. No longer to be poisoned by civilization he flees, and walks alone upon the land to become lost in the wild.” - Christopher McCandless 

The thing that most annoyed me about Jon Krakauer's book 'Into the Wild' about Chris McCandless failed attempt to become a self-barbarized hunter-gatherer in the Alaska wild is that it is structured like a Discovery Documentary: small chapters, small episodes, dramatized reconstructions in mute colours, talking heads against dark backgrounds, everything in focus to catch a grimace or, even better, a tear. However McCandless is the Robinson Crusoe of our times, the Dharma Bum of contemporary romanticism: the lone genius returning to nature with a wild food plant guide in his backpack, willing to live off the landscape. Defoe portrays Crusoe as someone who conquers nature by strict discipline and hard work, McCandless seemed to worked from the premiss that nature would feed him if he behaved correct towards it. The thing that killed him (he famished) was that he relied on book learning instead of first going through the needed education of place: apprenticing with the people who live(d) out there in the wild: native American, Eskimo people, trappers, etc. It's the old thing: individualism versus communalism. 

Gary Snyer ate horse meat from the pet store

The 1967 Houseboat Summit (earlier) had Timothy Leary, Allen Watts, Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder discussing the future of the psychedelic revolution which at that time was about to merge with/into the Back to the Land movement. Much is about drugs, religion and conciousness but a curiously large segment of the discussion deals with the need to learn the practicalities of homesteading; how appropriate it again seems now the 40 year love-affair with the city is collapsing. According to Charles Perry's book on the Height Ashbury this was quite the event at the time and while he states that not everybody may have read it, the transcript was definitly a thing to have and to keep. Against self-styled guru Leary (who appears completely out of his depth) Gary Snyder comes across as the much-respected outdoors-man with a philosophy: the dark mountain mobster who is listened to. But I may be biased.

The following two quotes by Snyder are taken from the transcript. From the first quote we learn how to live and that Snyder himself got through college by dumpster diving. The second quote tells about the need to learn from the native people, the gist of this was included here earlier.

Well, this isn't news to anybody, but ten or fifteen years ago when we dropped out, there wasn't a community. There wasn't anybody who was going to take care of you at all. You were completely on your own. What it meant was, cutting down on your desires and cutting down on your needs to an absolute minimum; and it also meant, don't be a bit fussy about how you work or what you do for a living. That meant doing any kind of work. Strawberry picking, carpenter, laborer, longshore...Well, longshore is hard to get into. It paid very well. Shipping out...that also pays very well. But at least in my time, it meant being willing to do any goddam kind of labor that came your way, and not being fuzzy about it. And it meant cultivating the virtue of patience -- the patience of sticking with a shitty job long enough to win the bread that you needed to have some more leisure, which meant more freedom to do more things that you wanted to do. And mastering all kinds of techniques of living really cheap... Like getting free rice off the docks, because the loading trucks sometimes fork the rice sacks, and spill little piles of rice on the docks which are usually thrown away. But I had it worked out with some of the guards down on the docks that they would gather 15 or 25 pounds of rice for me, and also tea...I'd pick it up once a week off the docks, and then I'd take it around and give it to friends. This was rice that was going to be thrown away, otherwise. Techniques like that.

...we used to go around at one or two in the morning, around the Safeways and Piggly Wigglies in Berkeley, with a shopping bag, and hit the garbage can out in back. We'd get Chinese cabbage, lots of broccoli and artichokes that were thrown out because they didn't look sellable any more. So, I never bought any vegetables for the three years I was a graduate student at Berkeley. When I ate meat, it was usually horse meat from the pet store, because they don't have a law that permits them to sell horsemeat for human consumption in California like they do in Oregon.

* * * * * *

If you're going to talk this way you have to be able to specifically say to somebody in Wichita, Kansas who says, "I'm going to drop out. How do you advise me to stay living around here in this area which I like?"

All right, say I want to stay where I am. I say, okay, get in touch with the Indian culture here. Find out what was here before. Find out what the mythologies were. Find out what the local deities were. You can get all of this out of books. Go and look at your local archaeological sites. Pay a reverend [sic] visit to the local American Indian tombs, and also the tombs of the early American settlers. Find out what your original ecology was. Is it short grass prairie, or long grass prairie here? Go out and live on the land for a while. Set up a tent and camp out and watch the land and get a sense of what the climate here is. Because, since you've been living in a house all your life, you probably don't know what the climate is.

Then decide how you want to make your living here. Do you want to be a farmer, or do you want to be a hunter and food gatherer? You know, start from the ground up, and you can do it in any part of this country today...cities and all...For this continent I took it back to the Indians. Find out what the Indians were up to in your own area. Whether it's Utah, or Kansas, or New Jersey.

Material incompetence

Wonderful quote by Alan Watts, taken from the Houseboat Summit in 1967: 

Our educational system, in its entirety, does nothing to give us any kind of material competence. In other words, we don't learn how to cook, how to make clothes, how to build houses, how to make love, or to do any of the absolutely fundamental things of life. The whole education that we get for our children in school is entirely in terms of abstractions. It trains you to be an insurance salesman or a bureaucrat, or some kind of cerebral character.

Porcupines are great wanderers

The Koyukons are a non-Eskimo people from the Alaskan Arctic who live from hunting, trapping, fishing and gathering. Richard K.Nelson's 'Make Prayers to the Raven: A Koyukon View of the Northern Forest' is filled, chapter after chapter, with stuff about animals, species after species. Most of it is practical (say: is it eaten yes or no?), but Nelson has a brilliant way of giving asides that slowly accumulate into a throught-the-keyhole vision on what the landscape means to Koyukon. The following aside about the porcupine is a good example of this. Image source

Porcupines are great wanderers despite their labored gait, as anyone knows who has followed their tracks winding almost endlessly through the forest. They are given a special power to know the landscape, I was told that this is the Koyukon reason why people should never set traps for them (no further explanation was given). Beyond this, their familiarity with the geography of the terrain is really just a metaphor representing much greater.

Porcupines know all the country. Even though they're low to the ground they really know the land. They're powerful animals. My old man said, "The whole of Alaska is something like the palm of a porcupine's hand."

For the Koyukon, no animal is just that and nothing more. Even the least imposing of creatures, those that seem insignificant from the lofty perspective of humanity, have dimensions of being that extend for beyond the realm and power of the senses. It is not a world where humans may become too proud, for nothing that lives is truly humble, regardless of how it may appear.