Eating while Hiking!

[Larue]

I have been high raw for several weeks now...most days 100% raw. Today a funny thing happened while hiking. I started seeing the plants around me as snacks. LOL This has never happened before. I was afraid to try anything, because I don't have any experience or books about wild food. I guess I was struck by what is available in Nature that I have always passed by. I'm curious to know if anyone has tried wild food while hiking?!!

[rawpriestess]

My hubby Dragggon wild forages every day on his bike ride, he brings home usually our dinner and often our entire day's food from the wild.

He bike rides some very remote trails with his buddy and they both know all the good places to stop.

He is very good at identifying plants and finding them using his intuition.

He also finds nuts and berries, herbs, greens roots and medicinals.

Often he brings home some plants and he plants them in our gardens, we now have just about everything we could ever want, but he still brings home wild edibles and flowers and such for food.

he says a good small book is "From Earth to Herbalist", great color pics of the wild plants.

He also has many other books too.

[SparklePlenty]

poke leaves, baby cattails, daylily blossoms...but you're going to need a book to be able to identify...how great to be connecting to your environment that way! Have fun hiking!

Jan

[RowanC]

Peterson puts out a very good guide called Edible Wild Plants. Another is Edible and Useful Plants of California by Clarke. Another is Why Wild Edibles by Russ Mohney. Then there are all the books by Euell Gibbons. For mushrooms I highly suggest MUSHROOMS DEMYSTIFIED by David Arora or All That Rain Promises and ore by the same author. There are a LOT of great books. Please buy one and the more scientific the better.

There is also a LOT of great information online to get you started. Do a search and read forever!

Although there is an abundance in wild plant food, there are also one or two plants that can kill you, like hemlock, which resembles wild carrots to the UNtrained eye. One difference is if you put both plants in a jar with a lid for an hour, wild carrots SMELL like carrots and hemlock smells like a mouse.

All the plants people listed in earlier posts are good food along with many others. There are actually people who go hiking and don't even TAKE food along, depending on the wild stuff for sustenance. How far you'd get depends on where you're hiking, but you can at least supplement your home=bought food.

For example, where I'm going camping this weekend, we find wild asparagus and lots of morels, fiddleheads, the usual weeds and flowers, wild onions, and later in the season lots of berries.

Buy a book and use it. And check around. Sometimes there are hands on workshops on wild foods!

Just be careful... although there are MANY more safe foods than dangerous ones there are a couple that are NOT safe. And those are the ones I'd learn to identify first.

There is a "rule of thumb" when you're eating new or wild foods. I can't promise it is ALWAYS safe, because in the case of a death angel mushroom or wild hemlock (which grows everywhere here!) you might kill yourself. The rule of thumb is to first try a piece the size of your thumbnail. Put it in your mouth and do not chew. Let it sit there a minute. DO NOT SWALLOW. Does your mouth get numb? Throat? Then give it a chew or two and wait again for 5 minutes but DO NOT SWALLOW. Any reaction? If not, swallow it and wait an hour.

Now, personally I would not do this unless I was in a situation where I was going to starve. But usually, if there's no reaction, you can try a larger piece and a larger piece until you determine if it is safe to eat.

Wild foods can be a fascinating adventure. If you're interested, go for it!
Good luck!

[juliebove]

I've eaten berries, but not much else. I came close to eating what I thought was parsley in my strawberry patch last year. Good thing I didn't! It turned out to be buttercups and they are poisonous!

[Joyful Mary]

Anyone know of a good book on wild edibles for central Florida?