Here’s how to learn about this fascinating subject correctly:

1. Identify anything you’re going to eat with 100% certainty. Some wild plants are poisonous, and they may resemble edible species.
2. Start by learning a few species that lack poisonous look-alikes well. Follow them through the seasons before expanding your repertoire.
3. Watch what you’re picking so nearby poisonous plants don’t inadvertently wind up in your bag.
4. Eat small amounts the first time, in case of allergies or other adverse reactions.
5. Collect only a small fraction of very common wild species where they’re abundant. This is more efficient and leaves no ecological footprint.
6. Avoid contaminated or sprayed areas such as regions within 50 feet of heavy traffic (where heavy metals settle), or railroad rights-of-way, which are sprayed.
7. Rinse off your harvest before preparing it.

Here’s one example of a common edible species, below. You’ll change your connection to our local ecosystems, and your food choices, forever:
Sassafras (Sassafras albidum)

This common edible tree with a history, and the original source of root beer. It’s easy to recognize because it has 3 kinds of fragrant leaves, all smooth-edged: one is oval, one is 3-lobed, and one is mitten-shaped. This medium-sized tree bears loose clusters of small, yellow, 5-petaled flowers in mid-spring, followed by ovoid, blue-black berries. It grows in great abundance in the woods and thickets, along roadsides, and at the edges of woods. To find restaurants using local food, click here. To learn more about local foraging in the New York area, click here.

Intolerant of shade, any saplings that don’t come up in full sunlight can’t survive, so you can pull them up, and they’re in season all year. Wash off the roots and simmer them, covered, 20 minutes. Native Americans used this tasty tea as a spring tonic, and Europeans in the 1500s profited by exporting and selling this native herb with claims for its health benefits growing in lock step with their greed. Eventually, it was supposed to cure everything. Unfortunately, everything includes sexually transmitted diseases, and soon anyone holding a cup of sassafras tea was suspected of having syphilis or gonorrhea. The bottom dropped out of the sassafras market, and the merchants were ruined.

Today, you can chill the tea and stir in chilled sparkling water and a sweetener to make root beer. Or peel the root’s soft cambium, the thin, white layer surrounding the wood, and use it in place of cinnamon to make very exotic-tasting drinks and desserts.

Beware! The Food and Drug Administration removed sassafras from the market when an experiment showed that if you have only the equivalent of 200 cups of sassafras tea, made from artificial concentrate, every day for only 2 years, and you happen to be a rat, you’ll have an increased chance of developing liver cancer. Rats change safrole, the active constituent, into a carcinogen. Humans don’t, and no one ever got sick from drinking sassafras tea. Also, heat destroys safrole. Furthermore, beer, due to its alcohol content, is 14 times a carcinogenic to humans as sassafras is to rodents, and beer’s still available for sale.

Steve Brill is a full-time, freelance, seasonal naturalist and environmental educator, as well as an author, who teaches people about the abundant, renewable wild foods that most of us don’t recognize or notice, hidden anywhere there’s greenery.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Steve_Brill

In Europe, at least, the Second World War marked a watershed in culinary tastes. Foraging for wild foods became an essential part of survival. Wild-sourced foods often became essential dietary staples for those who could access those foods. It was inevitable, after the shortages of the war cam to an end that people would shie away from such subsistence foods and that commercial agricultural produce and processed foods became the be-all and end-all of daily sustenance. Two generations lost the knowledge of which wild foods were edible and which wern’t (with the notable exception of fruit such as blackberries and certain mushrooms). Consumers became more distant from the land than ever before.

But the wheel is turning. Concern for the planet has led to increased awareness and interest in the possibilities of foraging and the finding of wild food sources. This is partly a matter of curiosity and partly an increased interest in the recipes of the past and their ingredients. There is also an increased interest in growing a larger range of herbs and flowers in the garden to attract insects (and many of these insect-attracting plants happen to be edible).

This has resulted in increased knowledge and curiosity about ancient food sources and how wild and different foodstuffs can be used. This the ancient Elizabethan trade in marsh samphire has been renewed and samphire is now on the menu. But it doesn’t stop there. Those people who would look for blackberries in summer are now collecting elder flowers in May, elderberries in August, wild plums and hazelnuts in September, and sloes in October — and these are just the common fruit.

Once you start down this road of discovery you find that common garden weeds such a bedstraw, fat hen and chickweed are not only edible but make good vegetables. Rather than grubbing these up and adding them to your compost heap, you can wash them and add them to your dinner plate! Then there are the wild herbs, the wild greens such as ramsons (wild garlic) in spring and Field Mustard which can be found year round. There are even greens such as coltsfoot, and common wintercress that can be found and consumed even in the depths of Winter.

Part of the attraction of these wild foods is that they bring out the ‘hunter-gatherer’ in all of us. It’s part of our ancestry, our heritage and once you get bitten by the foraging bug you will never quite be the same again. You will find that in spring you serve your dinner guests a hedgerow salad made of wild greens and wild flowers, in summer you will have summer puddings of wild fruit and in autumn you have the harvest of wild nuts and wild mushrooms to draw on. Even in the depths of winter there are stored fruit and wild greens that you can use.

Next time you pass a tangled hedgerow or an overgrown verge why not stop for a moment to look at the range of plant life that exists there. With a simple guide and some patience you will even be able to get yourself a tasty meal from those plants.

Trendy restaurants may be scraping the verges of wild foods to make a statement and make a name for themselves, but you as real cooks can truly appreciate the breadth and depth of the range of wild foodstuffs available to you. They will truly allow you to connect to your ancestors for these are the foods they collected and consumed. Keep the ancient traditions alive and try some wild foods for yourself.

To learn more about wild foods, how to recognize them and cook them take a look at the Wild Food Guide.

Dyfed Lloyd Evans is a cook and Internet author who is passionate about ancient foods and ancient cookery. He shares his knowlege on this subject in his Celtnet Recipes site. His reconstruction of ancient recipes can be found on his Ancient Recipes pages.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Dyfed_Lloyd_Evans

You are welcome to do this, if you so desire, but that’s definitely not the point of the wild food movement at all. It’s partly about increasing people’s views of nature and the natural world. After all, if you naturally add wild ingredients to your overall larder then you will appreciate nature and what it can do for your. Nature no longer becomes an enemy or something you have to fight with. Rather the wild world becomes an extension of your environment. Something useful that you can dip into to extend the types of food available to you.

You can build a meal based on nothing but wild foods. Or, you can go into the wild and source things like young linden (lime tree) leaves or wild herbs for use in a salad or recipe as a simple addition.

Here I present two wild food dishes. A salad that includes almost nothing but wild-sourced foods and a main course includes a few wild-sourced ingredients as additions to he list of overall ingredients.

Winter Salad

Ingredients:
1 large bunch wintercress
1 large bunch bittercress
1 large bunch chickweed
handful of gorse flowers (if available)
10 sheep’s sorrel leaves (or wood sorrel if it’s a mild winter)
4 tbsp melted clarified butter
2 tbsp cider vinegar
1/2 finely-chopped small onion

Method:
Wash the herbs thoroughly and place in a bowl. Finely-chop the sheep’s sorrel (or wood sorrel) and add to a lidded jar along with the onion, melted butter, vinegar and seasonings.

Shake to mix thoroughly then arrange the greens in a bowl, pour the dressing over them, toss and serve.

Spicy Chicken and Goosegrass

Ingredients:
600g chicken breasts, cubed
4 garlic cloves, minced
2 small onions, sliced
butter or oil for frying
1/2 tsp ground ginger
1/2 tsp ground cumin
1/2 tsp ground coriander seeds
1/2 tsp cayenne pepper(1/2 tsp freshly-milled black pepper
1/2 tsp garam masala
4 whole cloves
10 tomatoes, chopped
200g goosegrass leaves
salt, to taste

Method:
Add the chicken and a little oil to a pan and stir-fry until nicely browned. Remove the meat from the pan and set aside. Now add a little more oil to the pan and use this to gently fry the onion and garlic for a few minutes before adding the spices (except the garam masala). Fry for a few minutes more then return the chicken to the pan along with the tomatoes and about 400ml water.

Season with salt then bring the mixture to a boil. Reduce to a very low simmer, cover and continue cooking for about 40 minutes, stirring occasionally to prevent sticking. Raise the heat at the end of this time and stir-in the goosegrass.

Continue cooking until the sauce thickens and most of the liquid has evaporated. Remove from the heat, add the garam masala and serve on a bed of rice.

I hope that these recipes have shown that incorporating wild foods into your diet does not need to be complex or ‘worthy’ all you need to do is go out, find some ingredients and use them!

Dyfed Lloyd Evans has a love of food and cookery and a particular passion for incorporating more wild-sourced ingredients into modern cooking. He has created a Guide to Wild Foods which is free for all to browse and you can find many more recipes incorporating wild ingredients in his Wild Food Recipes pages.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Dyfed_Lloyd_Evans