Euell Gibbons: Author of Stalking the Wild Asparagus

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I got up and walked right downtown and three drugstores in a row sold that medicine to me. All three recommended that I take it. So I wrote back to Mr. Kingsbury and told him, "You're completely misinformed if you think everybody has to have a sensitivity test to get these pills. They're sold over the counter, no questions asked. I'll bet what's bothering you isn't the danger of what I'm doing. You're bothered because I'm going out and getting a wild plant for nothing, putting it in my mouth and eating it. You somehow feel protected if somebody is processing it, packaging it and selling it at a huge profit. Because you're brainwashed." And that's exactly where I stand.

PLOWBOY: What does does Kingsbury say about some of the other of the other things you eat?

GIBBONS: Well, poisonous plants are his specialty but he in cludes anything. . . even if all it does is make milk taste bad. Wild onions are included in his book. I've seen one-fourth of the plants he mentions used regularly and in large quantities.

You should see some of the things this guy has written. After I did an article for NATIONAL WILDLIFE they got a lot of letters about poisonous plants so they had Kingsbury do a piece and he included acorns on his danger list. He said acorn contain some kind of poison that can cause bloody stools and four or five other horrible symptoms if they're eaten in large quantities over a long period of time.

Well, I wouldn't argue with him about that. If you ate raw acorns in large quantities—maybe a bushel a day for ten years—you'd probably get something like that. But then Kingsbury ended up by saying something like, "The effect of even the smallest amount one time on a very young child is simply not known."

You see what he's done? He's thrown a hell of a scare in there for every mother in the country. I could say exactly the same thing another way: "There is no evidence whatever that a small quantity of acorns taken only one time ever had any effect on a child." That's all he really said but he said it in a way to make every woman grab her baby and run every time she sees an oak tree. I know 80-year-old Indians out west who've eaten acorns all their lives. Every year. Whole cultures depended on them. And for him to make such a ridiculous statement as that!

As far as I'm concerned, you don't have to know the poisonous plants in order to gather the edible ones. Know the ones you eat, not the ones you don't.

PLOWBOY: What about foraging in polluted streams? Are such water plants safe to eat?

GIBBONS: Plants themselves do not take up pollution in the form of disease germs—there are no disease germs in the sap of a plant—but greens can be contaminated on the outside by polluted air or water. Such contamination can usually be washed off—some people suggest putting chlorine in the water—but I try to avoid that for aesthetic reasons. For instance, I know a stream about a mile from here that's overloaded with watercress. I don't eat that cress. Instead, I gather the plant from a spring down here in the brush. It's harder to get the water cress from this spring but I know it's not polluted and I feel better about eating it.

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