Euell Gibbons: Author of Stalking the Wild Asparagus

Article Tools

Image Gallery

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

Willows are one of the few trees that grow so far north. They go clear to the Arctic Sea—far beyond what's usually called the timber belt—though they may not grow more than knee-high there. In an hour or two you can gather a pound or so of bark scrapings. Despite what many explorers have written, the Eskimos have always been very good vegetable eaters . . . with a little help from the climate, they invented the first home freezer for fresh frozen foods (laughter).

When I was a boy we used to eat ponderosa pine for pleasure . . . called it "slivers". In the spring the bark is really gorged with starches and sugars and tastes quite sweet. It's also high in vitamins.

PLOWBOY: Are some areas of this country better for foraging than others?

GIBBONS: Oh, gosh yes. Some of the best places in the world are right here in this area. Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Virginia and Maryland are tremendous for wild foods because we have an overlapping of southern and northern flora. There's even a persimmon tree right across the road. But you know, if some kids get hold of one that's particularly puckery, they get turned off. This idea that every specimen has to be perfect comes from the supermarket.

A friend of mine was visiting people who had a greengage plum tree in their back yard. When he went out and started eating plums off the tree, someone stuck his head out the window and yelled, "Don't eat those. They haven't been sprayed." The reason we get all this perfect supermarket fruit is that the bugs have better sense than we do . . . they they won't eat fruit that has eat been sprayed!

PLOWBOY: Within a given region, where do you find the best foraging?

GIBBONS: It depends on what you're looking for, but in general , in you'll find a great many more wild foods along roadsides and streams, in old fields and homesteads and around farm ponds. Burned-over and cutover areas are excellent . . . some plants grow only in places like these that are open to light.

Many edible plants are pantropic weeds . . . they're plentiful in disturbed ground but don't grow out in the real wilderness Indians in northern Minnesota call plantain "the white man's track" because it's only found along the portage trails where canoes are carried from one lake to another. They say wherever the white man steps, it grows. I imagine a lot of people wear the same pair of pants on a canoe trip they wear at home, so their cuffs are full of plantain seed, which they scatter along the trails but not in the untraveled wilderness.

Trees, of course, compete with one another. All kinds of hickory trees grow in the forest here, but they don't bear many nuts because of the competition and the squirrels get what the trees do produce. But if a farmer leaves a hickory out in the middle of a field, he'll have nuts.

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print